Employability: panacea or Pandora’s box?

Agreed wholeheartedly. For a start, how many people go into a position directly related to their degree subject (unless they're medics), let alone are working in that field several years later? However, if they have learned to think, and learned to learn, they can find success in virtually any subject. I should know. First degree & some research in botany... and now I'm in a Computer Science department at a university, via a spell in a software house, some consultancy, webmastering and teaching in FE. I don't often think about plants these days, but use the skill of finding things out on a daily basis.

I agree with your sentiments but we will never return to the Universities we had in the 1960s and before unless we massively reduce the size of the sector and the number of undergraduates. Universities today gobble up too much money for a relatively poor return on investment. We are still able to deliver the old style of education in Oxbridge, Durham and a few other, smaller Universities but it would be pointless to try and do the same for 300,000 new undergraduate students every year at over 130 sites and cost far too much. Most Universities are now degree factories and should be renamed.

Having tried twice to understand the message of this 'document' I've now given up on it's dense and pompous language. The strange thing is I THINK I agree with some sentiments lurking just below the surface. For the record, I've written on both employability and skills using this medium before, and I've made my position clear. It is my belief that the pursuit of any employability skills through any University curriculum is expensive, counter productive, fraudulent and fruitless. Universities DO NOT train undergraduates and they SHOULD NOT even try; leave that to employers. Employers are better equipped to recruit and to train their staff and they are better positioned to judge whether an employee can cut THEIR mustard. The verbiage associated with this subject introduces tensions we can do without and it introduces expenditure we can ill afford. The use of the word SKILL is now becoming offensive to me because I've yet to have anybody rise to the challenge of defining what one is. The challenge is still there. If a skill can't be defined how can we possibly pursue its various manifestations??