Curriculum implications of service sector employers’ rating and perceptions of the employability of university graduates in Kenya

Abstract

This study was premised on a perceived mismatch between university education and the world of work that abounds in the literature. The purpose of the study was to interrogate this mismatch by investigating service sector employers’ rating and perceptions of employability of university graduates and determine the implications on university curricula. The objectives of this study were: to document service sector employers’ preferences when recruiting entry-level university graduates; to compute a statistical relationship between employers’ rating of the desirability of specific employability attributes and competencies in their organizations and the rating of the graduate employees’ actual employability attributes and competencies; to appraise the involvement of the service sector in university education; and to ascertain the implications of the employers’ rating and perceptions of the employability of university graduates on curricula. The study was conducted in Nairobi. It was guided by the needs assessment and the backward design theoretical frameworks in adopting an embedded mixed methods research design. A study population of 369 respondents, three interviewees, and 20 documents was arrived at through systematic and purposive sampling. A questionnaire, an interview guide and a document analysis guide were used to collect data from the respondents, interviewees, and documents respectively. Quantitative data were analyzed either descriptively using frequencies, percentages and means, or inferentially using the t-test, while qualitative data were subjected to thematic analysis. The findings from both the quantitative and qualitative data revealed that: the most preferred minimum entry-level qualification by service sector employers was a bachelor’s degree (40.5%) irrespective of the discipline; the commonly used recruitment procedure was advertisement-application-interview- recruitment process (55.4%); many employers (60.7%) did not have a particular preference of the university from which they recruited employees; employers desire a mix of ‘soft skills’ and ‘hard skills’ with a preference for soft skills; employers rated the hard skills higher than the soft skills; there was significant discrepancy (p-value .000 < alpha 0.05) between the expected employability attributes and the actual employability attributes; there was low involvement of the service sector in university education; and that employability skills are best developed through a holistic curriculum. It was concluded that there existed an employability skills deficit. The recommendations were that: universities should conceptualize and institutionalize their employability development frameworks through curricula; universities should initiate conversation on the roles of earlier stages of education in developing employability skills; and regulatory agencies should promote and enforce university- industry collaboration to make university education relevant to the world of work. This study’s novel contribution to knowledge is the Holistic Graduate Identity Curriculum (HoGIC) model.