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

By Student Voice AI

Updated Apr 05, 2026

At Student Voice AI, we often see employability concerns surface in open comments before they appear in graduate outcomes data. Students rarely say they do not care about their future. More often, they describe careers support that feels distant, opportunities that arrive at the wrong time, or activities they do not feel ready to join. 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 confidence, relevance, and timing shape engagement. It also complements our recent summary of a validated employability scale for student surveys and careers support, which focuses on how universities can measure those signals earlier.

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 find and pursue 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 followed. For UK higher education teams, the takeaway is straightforward: when careers support depends on students opting in at exactly the right moment, the same barriers are likely to appear in local feedback, including the patterns visible in business students' views on career guidance and support.

Key findings

The paper identifies two intertwined forms of barrier: affective and behavioural. In practice, students were not simply choosing not to engage. Many described feeling stressed, overwhelmed, uncertain, or intimidated. Those emotional states then shaped behaviour, leading students to postpone opportunities, ignore communications, or decide 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 reached beyond 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 matters because a low turnout at a careers event can look like a participation problem. In student comments, though, it may signal 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, the implication is practical: move 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 getting in the way. Open-text comments are especially useful here because they reveal the reason behind disengagement, not just the 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 turn good intentions into actual participation, which is close to the pattern described in what management studies students need from career guidance.

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 kind of pattern qualitative feedback can surface early. Comment analysis can show whether students are describing confusion, poor timing, low relevance, or future anxiety, and whether those patterns cluster in particular years, subjects, or student groups. Student Voice Analytics helps teams identify those signals at scale before they become continuation, progression, or outcomes problems.

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 map 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 just 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 better at explaining mechanisms than measuring 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 how engagement is designed. 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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