Students engage less with employability support when opportunities feel unclear, irrelevant, or badly timed

By Student Voice AI

Updated Mar 31, 2026

At Student Voice AI, we often see employability concerns surface in open comments long before they appear in graduate destination data. Students tell universities when careers support feels distant, when opportunities arrive at the wrong time, or when they do not feel ready to take part. That is why Nicola Fish, Santina Bertone and Bernadine van Gramberg's Studies in Higher Education paper, "Improving student engagement in employability development: recognising and reducing affective and behavioural barriers", is useful for UK institutions trying to understand how student experience, confidence, and opportunity connect.

Context and research question

Many universities offer careers workshops, networking events, work-integrated learning, mentoring, and other employability development opportunities outside the formal curriculum. The persistent problem is that participation is often lower than institutions expect, especially when support is framed as something students should seek out for themselves.

Fish, Bertone and van Gramberg investigate that problem through a single case study at a large Australian university. They interviewed 30 business students, 8 in their first year and 22 in their final year, to understand how students engaged with employability development opportunities outside their course, what blocked that engagement, and what consequences followed. For UK higher education teams, the transfer is clear: many institutions still rely on optional careers activity, central signposting, and late-stage support, so the same barriers can easily appear in local feedback.

Key findings

The paper identifies two intertwined forms of barrier: affective barriers and behavioural barriers. In practice, students did not simply choose not to engage. Many described feeling stressed, overwhelmed, uncertain, or intimidated. Those emotional states then fed into behaviour, such as postponing opportunities, ignoring communications, or deciding the extra activity could wait.

Institutional design mattered as much as individual motivation. The study points to recurring barriers around awareness of available opportunities, perceived relevance, timetabling, and the fact that many opportunities were not embedded in class time. When employability support sits outside the curriculum, students can read it as optional, peripheral, or simply too hard to fit around assessment, paid work, and everyday study pressures.

The consequences showed up in confidence about the future, not only in event attendance. Final-year students described feeling unsure about industry expectations, networking, CVs, interviews, and whether they had developed the right skills. As one student put it:

"I would feel completely unprepared for everything."

That is what makes the paper especially relevant for student voice work. A low turnout at a careers event can look like a participation problem. In student comments, though, it may be expressing something more serious: uncertainty, weak self-efficacy, and a sense that employability development is happening somewhere else, for someone else.

The authors' main argument is that employability development should not be left to student self-navigation alone. They conclude that student engagement, employability, and career development learning need to intersect more deliberately in learning and teaching practice. For UK universities, that means moving beyond a model where careers support is mostly central, optional, and detached from the curriculum.

Practical implications

First, universities should ask more precise student voice questions about employability. Instead of only asking whether careers support is good, teams should ask where students feel under-informed, which opportunities feel relevant, what timing problems they face, and whether workload or confidence is stopping participation. Those distinctions are much easier to spot in open-text comments than in a single satisfaction score.

Second, institutions should embed more employability development inside taught modules and programme structures. This paper suggests that relying on optional, extra-curricular activity leaves too much to student confidence and spare capacity. Embedding short reflective tasks, employer-facing projects, careers signposting, or protected time in class is more likely to reduce the gap between what is offered and what students actually use.

Third, employability should be analysed as a student experience issue, not only as a graduate outcomes issue. For Student Experience teams, this is exactly the sort of theme that qualitative feedback can surface early. Comment analysis can reveal whether students are describing confusion, poor timing, low relevance, or future anxiety, and whether those patterns are concentrated in particular years, subjects, or student groups. That is where Student Voice Analytics fits naturally: it helps teams group these signals at scale before they become a continuation, progression, or outcomes problem.

FAQ

Q: How can a university apply these findings without redesigning its whole curriculum?

A: Start by tightening the basics. Map where careers and employability opportunities currently sit, compare that with student comments and survey text, and identify where timing, signposting, or perceived relevance are breaking down. Then embed a small number of employability touchpoints inside modules, especially at transition points or before students are expected to act independently.

Q: What are the methodological limits of this study?

A: It is a qualitative single-case study based on interviews with 30 business students at one Australian university, so it is designed to explain mechanisms rather than measure prevalence across a whole sector. That means UK institutions should treat it as a framework for interpretation, then test whether the same barriers appear in their own student comments, focus groups, module evaluations, and careers surveys.

Q: What does this change about how universities should interpret student voice on employability?

A: It suggests that employability comments should not be treated as marginal or separate from the wider student experience. When students talk about feeling overwhelmed, missing opportunities, not seeing relevance, or lacking confidence about the future, they are giving institutions actionable evidence about engagement design. Analysed properly, that feedback can inform curriculum planning, careers support, and communication strategy at the same time.

References

[Paper Source]: Nicola Fish, Santina Bertone and Bernadine van Gramberg "Improving student engagement in employability development: recognising and reducing affective and behavioural barriers"
DOI: 10.1080/03075079.2025.2461271

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