Teaching towards graduate attributes: how much does this approach help Australian graduates with employability

To enhance graduates’ employability, Australian universities have been strongly engaged in the graduate attributes agenda during the last two decades. However, the effectiveness of this agenda is contentious. This chapter conducts a systematic review of research on graduate attributes and expectations of employers and industries. The findings disclosed that graduate attributes selected by universities and academics, to a large extent, match the employability skills required by employers. However, employers still express their dissatisfaction towards the quality of graduates. To explain why this is the case, our discussion points out that graduate attributes are complicated concepts so stakeholders find it difficult to determine if they are doing the right thing and at a satisfactory level. In order to support graduates to develop better employability skills, employers’ expectations should be examined more closely and clearly and then used to inform the development and teaching of graduate attributes in Australian university courses and programmes.