Academic Perspectives of the Teaching and Development of Generic Employability Skills at Postgraduate Level

Abstract

This research investigates the process and acquisition of generic employability skills by university postgraduate learners. Evaluating the teaching-learning processes and the activities/strategies and approaches taken in skills development, 25 University teachers were interviewed through semi-structured interviews adopted as the research instrument in this qualitative study. The findings identified seven common teaching assignment strategies: lectures, assignments, quizzes, brainstorming, case-study analysis, debates, games, teams, sports and games. Therefore, the study focuses on the need to improve the quality of teaching methods that could effectively promote the achievement of employability skills. The participants were selected through convenient sampling, with the participants being teachers and students from three public and two private universities. The interviews that were conducted armed with Castillo-Montoya's (2016) sorts of interview questions offered an understanding of practices adopted by higher learning institutions to meet the employability challenge of the learners. More studies should be conducted on the extent and quality of the teaching methods associated with the approaches.