Placements as instruments for employability

Placements are one of the instruments used by universities to promote students’ employability (Auburn, 2007; Bullock et al., 2009; Gracia, 2009) and have also become an important area of educational policy (Humburg et al., 2013). They are defined as short-term experiences in real workplaces, under real work settings, whose conditions vary across programmes and universities (Duignan, 2002).

Universities target placements as promoters of employability due to a belief that “supervised work experience produces highly positive outcomes” (Auburn, 2007, p. 118), namely for students’ employability by making the transition from school to work smoother (Anakwe and Greenhouse, 2000; Humburg et al., 2013). Other reported benefits included the reduction of a cultural shock (Jackson, 2014b), better access to work communities, the tools they use (Stanley, 2013), their language and the overall culture of the organisation (Anakwe and Greenhouse, 2000; Gracia, 2010). Reported benefits also include the development of generic skills and personal attributes (Wilton, 2012). This belief in the overall benefits of supervised work experiences has been backed up by some studies, such as Blackwell et al. (2001) that found higher employment rates and higher self-rating of skills in graduates that had some supervised work experience, compared to students that had no such experiences.

However, Auburn (2007, p.119) advised caution as these studies were “useful but limited”. For example, they failed to account for the developmental nature of higher education and how these experiences might be integrated in students’ wider experiences of university (Auburn, 2007). Departing from this criticism of the lack of understanding of the developmental process students undergo in higher education, it is important to remember that, during the work- placements, students might experience “role transitions” (Allen and Van de Villert, 1984), whose management may influence the breadth and depth of the achieved outcomes. Role transitions are moments in one’s life (unemployment, divorce, jail time, motherhood) that imply a change in the way individuals perceive themselves and are perceived by others regarding their identities, duties and rights (Allen and Van de Villert, 1984). Therefore, it is easy to understand why the way such role transitions are managed by the individuals, for example in the transition from student to a professional in a placement experience, might have a huge impact on graduates’ future work experiences.

Other criticisms pointed to the nature of the transition between university and the workplace as bidirectional, and argued that the return to university has been poorly managed by universities and is generally under-researched (Auburn, 2007). The author supports this criticism with several studies (Ryan et al., 1996; Blackwell et al., 2001; Fell and Kuit, 2003). Indeed, Fell and Kuit (2003) reported that when students returned to university, the focus was concentrated on reporting back what happened in the placement and there was a lack of support for the (re)integration of the students into the academic life. Another aspect that I would like to add to Fell and Kuit’s (2003) concerns regarding students’ returning to university after spending one year working in an organisation has to do with the transfer of the learning that occurred during that experience back into students’ experiences of university. For instance, Kettis et al. (2013) reported that supervised work experiences are connected with better academic performance, which is also an idea commonly divulged in the promotion of these types of experiences. Mansfield (2011) also focusing on the improvement of academic performance after placement experiences reported mixed data from previous studies. From her own data, however, Mansfield (2011) reported evidence of benefits in final year students, but, with

possible gender differences. So, the answer to the questions of how and why this performance improvement happened, or how to assure it for every student is still unknown. This might have been one possible reason why Kettis et al. (2013) reported a wider potential in supervised experiences that has not yet been systematically researched and implemented.

Adding to these criticisms there are some mixed findings regarding the overall perception of supervised work experiences being positive experiences for the students. For example, Blackwell et al. (2001) reported that some students also have negative experiences in the placement. For the authors (Blackwell et al, 2001) these could be related with features such as the lack of opportunity to integrate theory into practice, or lack of supervision (Ryan et al., 1996). Another possible explanation may be that students may experience a reality shock when they enter a new workplace and struggle to adapt to the unfamiliar setting (Louis, 1980). This view was also supported by Arnold (1985), who argued that how students deal with the unexpectedness of the workplace in comparison to university has important implications in their overall placement experiences. Regarding this ability to adapt to the unexpectedness and the surprises of the workplace, Van Maanen (1976) argued that the newcomers’ main task upon entering the workplace would be to develop the appropriate “mental maps” (p.80) that would allow them to act independently in the workplace.

These contributions to the study of the transition between university and the workplace become even more relevant in the context of understanding the university setting and the workplace setting as intrinsically different. For instance, Resnick (1987) provided a useful comparison between university and the workplace regarding learning and depicted almost two opposite worlds. For Resnick, university was focused on individual cognition, pure mentation, symbol manipulation and generalised learning while the workplace was focused on shared cognition, tools manipulation, contextualised reasoning and situated-specific competencies (Resnick, 1987). Such discontinuities between these two settings was also identified by other authors (Candy and Crebert, 1991; Tangaard, 2008), who argued that part of the difficulty the students experience in this transition is due to the dissimilarities presented by Resnick (1987) and others that the students in transition might

identify. For Tangaard (2008), managing successfully the transition between university and the workplace is, then, about “creating a familiarity with the objects, people and processes of that strange world of work” (p. 221).

However, the lack of research focusing on how students manage this transition and make sense of their experiences is another common criticism. According to Gracia (2010) most studies on the transition between university and the workplace and on supervised work experiences ignore the personal experiences of the students. According to Johnston (2003, p. 419) “the voices of other partners in the graduate recruitment process, the graduates, are deafening in their silence” and there is little research and information regarding possible negative experiences, which might skew the overall understanding of the actual implications of work-placements regarding the transition between university and the workplace (Brown, 2002; Duignam, 2003: Gracia, 2009).

To conclude, this study argues that the view of placements as instruments for employability development is a simplistic interpretative framework for understanding students’ placement experiences and sense making of the transition between university and the workplace. Regarding placements, literature claimed that there is a lack of understanding on how students experience and make sense of their placements in relation to their university experience and personal views on employability. The negative implication may be that their voices are being ignored by policy makers and current understandings of supervised work experiences are incomplete. Furthermore, for higher education and educational policy placements are an important instrument to investigate students’ transitions between university and the workplace and to assess the relevance of the widely advocated benefits of education for graduates’ employability.