Oven‐ready and Self‐basting: taking stock of employability skills

Abstract This article examines the current preoccupation with enhancing the employability of graduates through the adoption of generic key skills into the undergraduate curriculum. It looks at the evidence for seven assumptions commonly made by those who promote the ‘employability’ agenda, and raises questions about the security of these assumptions including the transferability of key skills to employment contexts, the cost effectiveness of developing key skills in Higher Education rather than in employment and the competitive market advantage that individual students are believed to obtain. It concludes that in the absence of major changes to the funding regime there is unlikely to be a radical change to the curriculum and that more attention should now be paid to the post‐graduation/induction period than to the pre‐graduation stages.