How employability teams can strengthen academic programmes

My job is simple to say, and hard to do: I bridge the gap between education and whatever comes next for graduates. That next step might be a job, a master’s degree or a role in a family business or start-up.

Why we stopped thinking like a careers office

Many universities do employability well by offering guidance: CV workshops, coaching, signposting. We do that too.

However, we also recognise that students follow multiple pathways after graduation – employment, postgraduate study, entrepreneurship, family business or further exploration. 

• Spotlight guide: get your students workplace-ready
• Social mobility via social media: opportunities for career services
• Show off students’ employability with e-portfolios

When a student chooses to pursue employment, we operate more like an on-campus matching and placement partner. We treat employers as long-term collaborators and students as emerging professionals, with clear performance targets to ensure accountability.

This shift changed our mindset from delivering advice to delivering outcomes.

Importantly, this approach builds directly on our university’s liberal arts foundation. Our students are trained to think critically, communicate across cultures and adapt quickly. We’re there to translate those interdisciplinary strengths into meaningful and well-aligned professional pathways.

We run like a small company 

Within my team, you’ll find roles you’d expect in industry. We have relationship managers, whose job is to hunt for new hiring partners and take care of existing ones, as well as people who organise projects and events. And we track key performance indicators just like a start-up would.

The key difference is we don’t just hope our students get jobs. We measure whether they do.

Last year, 88 per cent of our senior students who declared they were seeking a job reported that they were in employment. We count outcomes broadly, because real life is broad, so that includes graduates joining a company, launching a start-up or stepping into a family business.

Why you don’t need to run a traditional job fair

We don’t rely on the classic job fair model (with one exception in our business school). Instead, we run what I call speed job dating: a more targeted and qualitative recruitment process.

When a company comes to us, we don’t ask them to “come and meet students”. We ask for a job description and then dig into what they really need: skills, competencies and even company values. Then we match.

Again, we don’t send them 200 CVs. We might send 20, but they’re meticulously shortlisted. The employer saves time, the student feels they are being taken seriously and trust builds quickly on both sides.

And because we work closely with employers, we learn something universities often struggle to find out early enough: what the market is asking for now.

What academics need to know: we can’t do this without you

If I could say one thing to academic colleagues anywhere, it’s that employability can’t sit next to the curriculum. It has to live with it.

Our academic colleagues help us in two big ways. Firstly, through student engagement. We serve three schools and we need students to know what we do early – not in their final semester when panic starts. Academics are the trusted voices students already listen to, so when faculty members reinforce our messages, students arrive sooner and stronger.

Second, embedding career readiness into programmes. For example, we don’t present any student to a company unless they’ve completed a mock interview and demonstrated they can handle the basics. Some schools have made that mandatory, as a prerequisite tied to credits. 

It works. Not because students love being pushed but because many only realise how hard interviewing is when the real interview is already scheduled. Making preparation part of the programme removes that last-minute scramble and normalises professional practice.

What changed things was credibility and repetition. Credibility means using coaches who have actually recruited in industry, not people teaching employability as theory. In my case, I also come from the corporate world, with 17 years’ experience in international companies, leading teams across countries, hiring and developing people constantly.

Students feel that difference immediately and can tell when feedback is real. Repetition means creating multiple entry points to engagement, including challenges, site visits, networking sessions and of course hackathons. Each event acts as a bridge that brings students back to the fundamentals, including mock interviews and career coaching.

What other universities can take from this experience

If a university tells me: “We want to refresh our employability model”, I wouldn’t start with a single workshop or a new platform. I’d begin with a journey as follows:

1. Build a 360-degree student employability journey

Map what you want students to achieve by the end of each year (or semester). Include guidance, yes, but also experiences, exposure to industries and real opportunities. Treat employability like you would treat a customer journey in a business.

2. Treat employers like partners and learn their needs deeply

Go beyond “come to our careers fair”. Understand roles, skills and culture, then match deliberately. Quality beats volume every time.

3. Work with, not alongside faculty

Employability efforts fail when they’re viewed as optional extras. You need academic allies who will embed career thinking early and reinforce key steps, such as interview preparation, as part of the programme.

4. Measure what matters

Set KPIs and track outcomes. Not to pressure students but to build a strategy that improves year by year. Ambition without measurement is just hope.

5. Know and match your students’ strengths to the right market

Not every student profile fits every company. Our students are typically strong in English, multicultural, entrepreneurial and confident communicators. Many employers love that. Some find it challenging. Your job is to know both your talent and your market, then connect them intelligently.

My ultimate top tips for getting started

If you want to move toward an “on-campus employment agency” model, here are five further quick moves that don’t require a big budget:

• Assign someone to be responsible for employer relationships, not just events.
• Stop mass CV-sending – start shortlisting and matching.
• Require one “readiness gate” before employer introductions (mock interview, portfolio review or assessment).
• Use one high-energy format as your engagement engine: a hackathon, a challenge, a site visit.
• Publish and review a small set of KPIs every term so the whole institution learns what’s working.

Employability is often described as a shared responsibility. This phrase can sound vague but when you build a real system, with employer intimacy, student preparation, academic partnership and measurable outcomes, it becomes very concrete, very quickly. And students feel the difference long before graduation.

Hanene Duprat is executive director of employability and entrepreneurship at Al Akhawayn University.

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