The Myth of Job Readiness

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The myth of job readiness? Written

communication, employability, and the
‘skills gap’ in higher education
a b
Tim Moore & Janne Morton
a
Office of Pro-Vice Chancellor, Student Advancement, Swinburne
University of Technology, Hawthorn, VIC 3122, Australia
b
School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne,
Room 611, Babel Building, Parkville, VIC 3010, Australia
Published online: 30 Jul 2015.
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To cite this article: Tim Moore & Janne Morton (2015): The myth of job readiness? Written
communication, employability, and the ‘skills gap’ in higher education, Studies in Higher Education,
DOI: 10.1080/03075079.2015.1067602
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Studies in Higher Education, 2015
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2015.1067602
The myth of job readiness? Written communication,

employability, and the ‘skills gap’ in higher education
Tim Moorea* and Janne Mortonb
a
Office of Pro-Vice Chancellor, Student Advancement, Swinburne University of Technology,
Hawthorn, VIC 3122, Australia; bSchool of Languages and Linguistics, University of
Melbourne, Room 611, Babel Building, Parkville, VIC 3010, Australia
Recent developments in higher education have seen a strong emphasis placed on

making graduates ‘job ready’ for their work in the professions. A driver of this
agenda has been the many mass-scale surveys conducted with business and
industry about the abilities and general employability of graduates. This
Australian-based study is focused on perceptions and attitudes around one such
ability – professional writing skills. ‘Discourse-based interviews’ were conducted
with managers and supervisors from a range of professional areas. Their
responses were most interesting, and served, among other things, to challenge
some of the emerging ideas about ‘job readiness’ in current debates about the
directions of higher education.

Keywords: employability; job readiness; written communication; professional
practice; generic skills; higher education policy
1. Introduction
The last two decades have seen significant change in the university sector, characterised
by some as a period involving significant ‘interpenetration of economic capital into uni-
versity education’ (Marginson and Considine 2000, 3). This new phase, dating back to
the early 1980s, stands in contrast to an earlier period when institutions enjoyed a
greater degree of autonomy in their activities, and when their relations with industry
were more remote (Etzkowitz et al. 2000). One outcome of this closer engagement
has been the emergence of the generic skills agenda, described by early advocates
for the idea as the effort to develop in students ‘those qualities, skills and understand-
ings … that will shape the contribution they are able to make to their profession and as a
citizen’ (Bowden et al. 2000, 1). Such skills, also referred to as soft skills, or twenty-
first-century skills, include such abilities as communication, critical thinking, team-
work, creativity, and the like.
Accompanying these shifts has been an increasing monitoring of the outcomes of
higher education, especially to determine how effectively these putative generic and
employability skills are being acquired on programmes. On this score, the last
decade has seen a stream of surveys and studies conducted by industry and government
aimed at gauging satisfaction levels among employers regarding the abilities and dis-
positions of the graduates they employ. In such research, universities are often found
*Corresponding author. Email: tjmoore@swin.edu.au
© 2015 Society for Research into Higher Education

2 T. Moore and J. Morton
wanting. Many such studies typically record levels of skills acquisition thought to be
below the required industry standard. This situation, it is argued, not only holds gradu-
ates back from gaining satisfactory employment, but also has an inhibiting effect on the
performance of employing organisations, and ultimately the broader economy. The
response to such findings are calls for even greater renovations of higher education cur-
ricula, especially to ensure greater levels of ‘job readiness’ among graduates (Harvey
2000).
The present paper is concerned with investigating a skill type that features peren-
nially in these debates about generic skills and employability – this is the area of
written communication. In the types of surveys referred to above, written communi-
cation is typically identified as a highly requisite skill area in the professional work-
place, but one that graduates are often thought to be lacking in. Arguably, though,
the findings of such surveys (usually simple percentages about the relative importance
of the skill and the perceived level graduates present with) provide only a limited basis
by which to go forward on such matters. Behind rudimentary data of this kind lie a
number of questions: What are the specific concerns employers have about their gradu-
ates’ writing abilities? What expectations do they have of these abilities? How are per-
ceived problems dealt with in the workplace? Do graduates in fact improve their writing
over time, or do these abilities remain a permanent impediment both to their own
careers and to the performance of the employing organisation? And finally, what do
employers think can be done to best prepare graduates for the writing demands of
their professional work? The Australian-based study reported in this paper sought
answers to these questions through the conducting of interviews with a sample of
employers and supervisors working in a range of professional areas. Participants’
responses to these matters were found to be most interesting, serving, among other
things, to challenge some of the emerging ideas about ‘job readiness’ in current
debates about the directions of higher education.
2. Background: the employability agenda and the idea of job readiness

The origins of the employability agenda in Australian higher education can be traced to
two major studies published in the early 1990s: the Mayer (1992) report, which ushered
in the ‘competency’ movement within technical education; and the Achieving Quality
report (Australian Higher Education Council 1992) which first introduced universities
to the idea of generic skills and attributes. Clancy and Ballard (1995, 156) at the time
characterised the new paradigm as a shift in post-secondary education policy away from
a focus on ‘inputs and efficiency’ to one of ‘outcomes and quality’. Over time, the
measures that have come to be mainly relied upon to gauge these ‘outcomes and
quality’ are those relating to the experiences of graduates in the workforce (e.g.
ACNielsen Research Services 2000; Mourshed, Farrell, and Barton 2012).
It is from the numerous surveys and questionnaires conducted with employers to
this end that the less-than-sanguine views of graduates’ abilities and job preparedness
have emerged. The scene was first set about a decade and half ago with the Australian
Government sponsored ‘Employer satisfaction with graduate skills’ (ACNielsen
Research Services 2000, viii) which found only medium levels of satisfaction among
employers regarding newly recruited graduates, with particular concerns expressed
about the skill areas of creativity, problem-solving, and communication. Since that
time, the perceptions seem to have become progressively gloomier. A survey by the
Australian Industry Group (2006, 87), for example, reported many businesses facing
Studies in Higher Education 3
both skill shortages and skill gaps in both technical areas, and ‘soft’ skills such as com-
munication and problem-solving. The annual Consult Australia (2011) survey in the
engineering sector regularly reports ‘concerns about graduates’ skill levels’ as one of
the main obstacles to effective recruitment. A recent international survey sponsored
by McKinsey & Co. found that less than half of employers believed that new graduates
‘are adequately prepared for entry-level positions’ (Mourshed, Farrell, and Barton
2012, 18). The report’s authors note the contrasting perceptions held by educational
providers (72% imagined graduates to be work-ready), leading the authors to suggest
that the two sectors increasingly ‘live in parallel universes’ (18).
It is interesting to note that such concerns about the abilities and qualities of the
young are not new. ‘Literacy crises’, as Green, Hodgens, and Luke (1997, 15)
explain, are almost as ancient as the idea of education itself, and are inevitably ‘tied
up’, they suggest, ‘with larger political and moral debates about the directions of com-
munities and cultures, nation-states and economies’. What is interesting in the current
environment is the extent to which external, non-educational agencies such as business
and industry – who bring their own specific concerns and interests to such debates –
have come to influence the shaping of agendas in this area. Such interventions were
strongly evident, for example, in submissions made to the Bradley et al. Review of Aus-
tralian Higher Education (2008). The report’s summary of recommendations noted the
desire of business and industry to see a greater alignment between university curricula
and the needs of industry, and a ‘greater emphasis’ placed on the development of
specific employability skills such as communication skills in university programmes

(209). The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, for example, in its sub-
mission, called for ‘further investigation of course design processes’ in universities
and the instituting of ‘more formal structures … to ensure that students are able to
build industry-relevant skills’ (ACCI 2008, 2).
These kinds of extramural urgings have had a gathering effect on universities. As
Oliver (2011, 10) reports, ‘learning outcomes in Australian higher education courses
have become [increasingly] attuned to industry needs and graduate employability’.
Jackson (2013, 776) suggests that such have been the pressures emanating from
outside the academy that universities are now ‘consumed’ by the need to gear pro-
grammes towards enhancing employability. Among other things, this new paradigm
has seen the emergence of a strongly articulated higher education pedagogy aimed at
realising the type of learning outcomes suggested by Oliver (2011). Known as the
‘skills gap’, the approach is founded on the notion that university curriculum needs
to be conceived largely in terms of a bridging of ‘the disparity between industry
needs and higher education provision’ (Jackson 2013, 778). Thus, it is suggested
that there should be as much similarity as possible between tasks and content in the
‘learning setting’ (universities) and in the ‘application setting’ (workplace), and that
the ‘closer’ these two domains are aligned, the more effective will be the development
and transfer of relevant skills (Analoui 1993).
This principle has been a spur for a good deal of recent research to establish the
nature of such gaps, and to identify how the disparities identified might inform the
design of programmes. Significantly for the present study, ‘effective communication’
is often identified as one of the most important skills area, and also one that graduates
are thought to lack. Litchfield, Frawley, and Nettleton, for example, in a study invol-
ving representatives of professional societies, identified ‘communication capacity’ as
a ‘major problem’ for university graduates:
Being able to write clear, concise emails and formal letters in order to avoid misunder-
standing, ambiguities and mistakes is seen to be a necessity in almost every professional
position – and an attribute that graduates often lack. (2010, 522)
Grebennikov and Shah (2008), in a study of major employers, found similar percep-
tions of students communication abilities, suggesting that forms of ‘experiential learn-
ing’ (Boud and Solomon 2001, 7) are the most effective way to bridge such gaps and ‘to
meet employer demands for job ready graduates’.
The need to address these gaps has seen a major effort to bring writing and assess-
ment practices in disciplines more into line with those required in the professions. A
major initiative has been the Australian universities’ Learning and Teaching Academic
Standards Project (Office of Learning and Teaching 2010), which has sought, inter
alia, to specify threshold learning outcomes for the skill area of communication in a
range of disciplines. It is interesting to note how prescriptive are some of the writing
skills outlined in these documents. Thus, for example, in Accounting, it is suggested
that a graduate needs to be able to ‘effectively communicate’ in writing: ‘decisions
about asset impairment for clients operating a single entity; expensing versus capitalis-
ing a significant expenditure on maintenance; reasons for variances from budgets’ (15);
and in Engineering, graduates need to develop proficiency in a range of specific work-
place document types, including ‘progress and project reports, reports of investigations,
feasibility studies, proposals, specifications, design records, drawings, and technical
descriptions’ (20).
In these efforts to orient students’ writing practices to the demands of the workplace,
there is often an eschewing of the traditional genres of academic study – essays, reviews,
and research projects. On an Australian government-funded project, for example, that
investigated the embedding of relevant non-technical skills in accounting programmes,
a best practice approach identified was one that required all prescribed assignments to be
‘written in the format of business documents’ (Hancock et al. 2009, 66).
As we have seen, the employability agenda has been one of the more significant
developments in higher education over the last decade. It would be remiss, however,
in this brief survey not to draw attention to a number of dissenting voices. Some of
these concerns centre around the view that the worlds of study and work constitute dis-
tinctive domains of activity, and that it is essential as a result to insist on their distinctive
purposes and practices. Yorke and Knight (2006, 567), for example, note that many
within the university sector increasingly see the ‘skills agenda’ as ‘narrowly conceived,
relatively mechanical, and inimical to the purposes of higher education’. Yorke (2004,
11) argues further that dissatisfaction will continue in relation to the transition between
the two different cultures, ‘however much higher education is prevailed upon to address
the “employability agenda”’. Such concerns are sometimes acknowledged in official
university processes. One major Australian university, for example, in its framing of
its graduate attributes policy, recognises significant ‘tensions evident … between a
focus on purely vocational outcomes and the values inherent in a general education’
(RMIT 2008, 4). For some critics, though, the recent trends are nothing short of disas-
trous. One active commentator, Richard Hil (2012, 127) sees the new ‘career-focused’
agenda having its roots in the productivist demands of global capital, one that typically
precludes ‘anything approaching intelligent civic engagement’.
Clearly, these are contentious issues. Up until now, the main information feeding
into debates and policy has been of two kinds: either the findings of mass surveys or
the perceptions and views of certain key agencies – especially the representatives of
various industry peak bodies. While such research makes it clear that problems around
skill areas such as written communication do appear to exist, this work – we argue – pro-
vides only limited information on the nature of these problems, and how they might be
responded to by the sector. The intention of the present study was to gather an additional
type of data to bring to debates. This was the views of those who work in close proximity
to graduates in the professional workplace – that is their immediate supervisors and man-
agers. The focus of the research was on this group’s perceptions of the abilities and
experiences of their graduates in the area of written communication. Specifically, we
wanted to explore their sense of the types of writing issues faced by graduates as they
make the transition from university study to professional practice, and what might be
needed to make them ‘ready’ for the workplace demands expected of them.
3. The study
The study consisted of semi-structured interviews with 20 participants from a range of pro-
fessional areas (Table 1). Recruitment was via a larger online survey used in a separate
study to gauge employer attitudes towards a widely used test of written communication
(Moore et al. 2015). Initial selection, as mentioned, was based on informants having a
close supervisory relationship with newly employed graduates within their organisation.
Further selection was then made to cover a range of professional areas, and a range of
organisation types (including large companies; public institutions; and small- and
medium-sized businesses). The reason for this diversity – both in professional areas and
in organisation types – was to get a broad picture of issues around written communication,
one that could be applied to higher education policy and practice on a general basis.
Interviews were for approximately an hour and covered the following issues:
. The writing abilities of graduates

. The nature of written communication in these particular workplace settings
. Issues concerning academic and professional written communication
. Methods to deal with the writing issues of graduates
. Ways to better prepare graduates for communications in the professional
workplace.
The interview protocol sought to take into account the influence of interviewing
processes on the resulting discourse (e.g. Talmy and Richards 2011). Interviews, for
Table 1. List of professional areas.

Professional area No. of participants
Accounting/finance 3
Information technology 2
Education 2
Engineering 3
Law 1
Journalism 1
Management/administration 2
Health 3
Science 3
Total 20
example, were conducted in a location chosen by the interviewee, and draft questions
were sent prior to the interview. In the interviews, an effort was also made to focus the
discussion as much as possible on the actual texts graduates needed to produce in their
work, following the procedure known as the ‘discourse-based interview’ (Odell,
Goswami, and Herrington 1983). For this part of the interview, participants had been
asked to provide samples of documents graduates were typically required to produce
in their work. With reference to these documents, participants were then asked in the
interviews to elaborate on such matters as: the nature and purpose of the sample docu-
ment; how the task of preparing the document would be typically assigned and
explained to the graduate; by what processes it would be produced; what challenges
there would be for the graduate in producing it; how the quality of the written
product would be ensured. As Odell, Goswami, and Herrington (1983) explain, the
benefit of this type of approach – talk around a written artefact – is that it can bring
to an informant’s awareness certain practices and experiences that have otherwise
been ‘transformed silently into [unspoken] functional acts and routines’. All interviews
were digitally recorded and transcribed. A sample transcript of the discourse-based
segment from one of the interviews is provided in the appendix.
Data analysis followed the procedure outlined by Mason (2002). This involved
initial independent analysis of transcripts by the two researchers to generate provisional
themes and orientations around the issues outlined above (i.e. writing abilities of gradu-
ates, the nature of written communication, etc.). A consensual analysis was then arrived
at through processes of moderation. The main themes to emerge from the analysis are
described in the following section, with extensive use of interview extracts to illustrate
these themes. These extracts are generally verbatim transcriptions; however, extraneous
features, such as false starts, fillers, and hesitations, have been removed in the interests
of readability (cf. Swales 2013).
4. Interview findings
4.1. The writing abilities of graduates
The initial discussion in the interviews was concerned with the informants’ general
impressions of the writing abilities of the graduates they supervised. A variety of
responses were offered. Some of these, it should be noted, were consistent with the
less-than-sanguine assessments that have emerged from employer surveys, noted
above. The view here was that standards have shown some decline over the years:
[ACCOUNTING PRACTICE MANAGER] The written communication seems to be a

standard that is diminishing. I’m sure it’s not as good as when I was graduating 20
years ago.
[LABORATORY MANAGER] Maybe I’m old and craggy, but in general I’d say gradu-
ates cannot communicate in written form as well as they should be able to.
Complaints from these informants centred around certain writing basics, including sen-
tence structure, spelling, punctuation. For several, the perceived diminishing standard
was attributable to a general lack of ‘care and diligence’ in the way that graduates often
go about preparing documents. Another saw the source of the problem lying in the ever-
present influence of digital communications:
[ACCOUNTS MANAGER] I blame electronic communication. Young people are trans-

lating text talk to an e-mail to a written document. [Things like] ampersands coming in in
the middle of sentences. I think a lot of the basic rules of English are disappearing.
Other responses ranged from those who were mainly satisfied with the written abilities
of their graduates (‘The three new graduates I’ve had in the last few years, their writing
overall has been quite good’) to a third group who were unequivocal in their praise (‘I
think the people we get are quite fantastic’).
There were several caveats, however, to these broadly favourable impressions.
Some, such as the senior public servant, pointed out that their organisation was very
selective in their recruitment processes and so was aware that they were probably
‘getting the more capable and successful graduates’. Another caveat was that high-
level written communication skills were not always the main priority. One of the
Accountant informants, for example, spoke about distinct areas in his organisation
where there were differences in the written abilities expected of graduates:
[ACCOUNTANT] We have a processing area where the people are more technical boffin
types. Their work is more number crunching, so their writing skills aren’t that great, but
the demand for them to write is also not that great. It’s quite different in the advisory area
where communication is very important, and we have graduates with very good skills in
that area.
A final caveat concerned a distinction many informants drew between a perceived

generic writing competence and specific skills needed in particular professional
settings.
[IT MANAGER] I think students out of university come with very good written skills. But
it’s coming out of university into a corporate environment. Getting the right context, and
also structuring things so that [their] message is being delivered. That’s more on-the-job
learning.
[ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENTIST] I’ve been fortunate to have, clear thinkers who can
clearly communicate their thoughts. By and large, they write well, but don’t always
have the styles we’re looking for.
[SENIOR JOURNALIST] There have been some new graduates who have had some dif-
ficulty with grammar, but generally it’s been of a high standard. But we’d have to spend
time around the structuring of their news stories. So, it’s mainly about them adapting the
basic skills they have.
The preceding comments certainly do not suggest overwhelming satisfaction on the

part of employers and supervisors about the writing abilities of the graduates they
employ; however, neither do they lend support to the generally bleak accounts reported
in some sections of the research literature, or those advanced by the representatives of
industry peak bodies, cited earlier.
4.2. Perceived differences in academic and professional written communication

As some of the comments above suggest, informants were aware of differences
between writing at university and writing in professional contexts. These differences
were seen as an important underlying reason for the initial writing difficulties experi-
enced by new graduates. The most common feature of workplace writing commented
on was the need for brevity and concision. This feature was noted by informants from
virtually all the professional areas included in the survey.
[LAWYER] Some [graduates] come to us with a very discursive style. They think writing
a long answer equates with a valuable answer rather than being short and concise.
Some suggested that the need for brevity extended also to the structuring of sentences
and paragraphs.
[LABORATORY MANAGER] They’re used to writing long sentences. They’ll use con-
junctions … ‘ifs’, ‘ands’, ‘buts’ just to keep a sentence going. I say to them ‘End the
sentence’.
The tendency of graduates to be wordy was traced to assessment regimes at universities,

where students are typically required to write in an elaborated way on the content they
have learnt. In contrast, in the world of professional practice, the pressure of time and
the need for action require quite different communicative norms:
[LAWYER] At university, students are often rewarded for filling up ten pages or so, but
the commercial dictates are with writing that is concise, well organised, and clear. The
clients just don’t read anything much, so you have to give them their answer in a page.
Another feature, one related to the issue of brevity, was the structuring of information in
documents. A number of informants discussed the challenges of conveying the gist of a
message, and of making the intended purpose of any communication unambiguously
clear:
[SENIOR PUBLIC SERVANT] It’s a certain way of writing briefs. You have to set out
what the purpose, what the history of the matter is, what has to be worked out, and then be
very clear about your recommendations.
[ENGINEER] You may have to take ten different test results done over say, a week, and
then be able to concisely identify the key points of that work. And the customer [such as
the senior management of an automotive company] has to know what they do with that.
[The graduates] won’t have had that experience in their studies.
A third related area was the need to often avoid the use of academic and technical
language in one’s writing. It was pointed out that in the professions, the recipient of
any written communication – both within an organisation and outside – will typically
not share the same technical background and expertise as the writer, and so there is a
need to constantly monitor and adjust one’s language. The Laboratory and IT Sales
Managers, for example, spoke of the need to ‘put things in plain English’ and translate
into ‘simple language’.
Informants generally saw these textual differences relating to the distinctive nature
and purposes of communication in professional domains. One such parameter was the
action-oriented nature of writing in the professions, such that all messages are somehow
concerned with prescribing or responding to some form of action.
[ACCOUNTANT] I often get [the graduate] to put themselves in the shoes of the client
and make sure that if they were the client reading that advice, would they know exactly
what we’re suggesting they do.
[LAWYER] So in all that we write, you have to tell the client an answer that’s useful to
them … You know, there’s no point just regaling them with [information]. Everything has
to be about explaining to them how they’re going to … deal with their problem, or answer
their question.
4.3. The uniqueness and diversity of workplace writing

Informants were expansive about the broad differences they saw between written com-
munication in academic and professional contexts. Some, however, were also sure that
the writing characteristic of their own particular workplace was somehow unique. For
this reason, no assumptions they thought, could be made about graduates arriving with
the type of job-ready skills that would enable them to be immediately effective in their
work.
[MEDICAL RESEARCHER] In many respects this is a very foreign workplace, and a

foreign sort of project work that we’re doing. It’s not really that easy to come from
[outside] and feel comfortable with the work here. There is always going to be a lead
in time for anyone to develop the specific competencies needed for the type of work
we do, and this includes the type of writing we need to do.
Similar beliefs about the specialised nature of workplace writing were expressed by the
Laboratory Manager informant (‘we don’t have any expectations that graduates will
know anything about the type of documents we need to produce’). The distinctive
written genres of his particular laboratory setting (including ‘blood test reports’, ‘vali-
dation studies’, ‘technical evaluations’), he explained, had to be taught to graduates
along the way.
Some informants explained that not only did new graduates need to develop profi-
ciency in the specialised writing of their particular work settings, but that they also had
to be alert to variations in the forms they learnt. The Environmental Scientist, for
example, discussed important differences in the main types of communication expected
of graduates in her office. These ranged from ‘spatial and data analysis reports’ written
for scientific specialists, to ‘project reports’ aimed at a general departmental audience,
to ‘fact sheet material’ geared to a broader audience including fieldwork staff and the
general public. It was explained that while these document types were all concerned
with the same broad scientific field – in this case, the ecological impacts of bushfires
– each document had to be carefully tailored to its specific readership. It was suggested
that moving from a more technical to a more general audience constituted a major chal-
lenge for a lot of graduate writers:
[ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENTIST] The fact sheet material is the harder document to

write. This is where I say [to them] the language has got to be suitable for this broader
audience who are not necessarily very strongly scientific … So the style of writing
needs to be spot on. It takes a lot of refinement for them.
A similar kind of variety was discussed by the Allied Health informant. He spoke about
the need to manage different degrees of formality and technicality in one’s correspon-
dence with the different stakeholders who engage with the medical practice that he
managed.
[ALLIED HEALTH SPECIALIST] In the writing for a patient or client, the grammar is a
lot looser and the terminology more relaxed. We need to get across to a layperson, so we
really avoid any jargon. And then a referral letter to a GP, who we will usually know,
would be somewhere in between. We may include some of the jargon, but only if it’s
useful. But grammar in any of the letters to professionals and specialists [who we don’t
normally know], the grammar needs to be very strictly correct, and the writing will be
much more technical.
4.4. Workplace pedagogies

Informants were sure not only of the broad differences between writing in academic and
professional domains, but also that the literacy demands within their particular organ-
isation (or within specific sections of the organisation) were also quite distinctive, even
unique. The corollary of this situation was that supervisors did not expect graduates to
arrive in their organisations equipped with all the necessary communication skills to
perform in a designated role. It was interesting to discover how this particular exigency
was managed within workplaces. Arguably, the most interesting findings to emerge
from the research were informants’ accounts of the different methods employed
within organisations to prepare newly employed graduates for workplace writing.
Indeed these were found to be quite sophisticated in nature and, in many instances, con-
stituted what many literacy specialists would consider exemplary practice (e.g. Dias
et al. 1999; Barton and Hamilton 2000).
4.4.1. Training and mentoring

One type of instruction discussed was training of a formal kind. In these cases, the train-
ing revolved around the development of skills related to the writing of specific work-
place genres. The senior public servant informant, for example, mentioned courses
available to new graduates in her area focused on the writing of a key document
type – the ministerial brief.
[SENIOR PUBLIC SERVANT] For graduates or not graduates, there are courses in
brief writing for government employees. It’s similar in some respects to legal training.
[The focus is on the development] of logical and clear argument – being able to set it
all up.
Another example of formal writing training was mentioned by the secondary teacher
informant. Here, the training was focused on an all-important genre of secondary teach-
ing – the student report, including how certain sensitivities associated with this form of
communication are best handled:
[SENIOR SECONDARY TEACHER] You’re very much taught on the job. Information
sessions about writing reports are really important for new people. There certainly are
conventions about what you can say and what you can’t say, and how to say something
in a way that gets your point across without being too personal or insulting.
Examples of formal training were confined to larger organisations. In most instances,

however, the training was of a more informal kind, taking the form of mentoring or
‘buddying’ arrangements. The following are descriptions of the types of mentoring pro-
cesses used. As mentioned, such arrangements were founded on the assumption that
novice employees entering the organisation would have little notion of the communi-
cative norms and practices expected of them:
[ALLIED HEALTH SPECIALIST] We have a mentoring process. Basically over a three

to six month period [the new graduates] will learn from being there in the room with other
physios and their clients. And learn from examples of the other physios’ documents. …
They’ll have zero knowledge of what’s required to communicate effectively in a private
setting when they come to us.
[TRANSPORT ENGINEER] We use a buddy system. When somebody new starts, they’ll
be paired off with an experienced person and that person’s responsible for providing them
with day-to-day training. It’s very hands on, showing them how to find the documen-
tation, how to interpret it, and then they’re given the opportunity to do the job on their
own while somebody watches over them.
4.4.2. The use of scaffolding

A key activity in these mentoring processes was preparing novice staff for specific com-
municative tasks. Informants’ description of these activities fit very much with that
established method of literacy instruction known as ‘scaffolding’, where necessary
support is provided to a learner when being introduced to (or facing) a new concept
or task (Bruner, Wood, and Ross 1976). A number of informants discussed the ‘dialo-
gic’ way in which support was provided to graduates in the production of relevant
documents.
[LABORATORY MANAGER] For graduates who are doing the [lab] bench work, I
might write the bare bones of a report and then say, ‘Alright I’ve written this, tell me
where I’m wrong’, and get them to do it. Or alternatively I’ll get them to write the bare
bones, and then I’ll say, ‘Why don’t you do this?’ … it’s sort of a toing and froing.
Such examples of cooperative learning conform very much to modes of workplace

instruction identified in the literature. Lave and Wenger’s (1991) concept of ‘legitimate
peripheral participation’ is typically invoked here to characterise those workplace pro-
cesses where significant learning may be occurring, but where the principal activity is
one of getting a job done.
4.4.3. Monitoring and reviewing of documents

A method that was discussed by virtually all informants was reviewing processes.
Documents going out to any external stakeholders were seen as potentially reflective
of the organisation, and so for the issues of reputation and credibility, editing processes
were seen as necessary to ensure the quality of all outgoing communications.
[SENIOR PUBLIC SERVANT] For me personally, any brief that is written from one of
my staff always comes to me. I would check it, correct it, and then sign off on it when I’m
happy with it.
[ALLIED HEALTH SPECIALIST] Before any of that documentation goes out to a client
or to a referrer, I’ll be in between and correcting it to some extent, going through it with
them [the new graduate] one on one.
In many instances, the reviewing of documents was conceived by informants as a sig-

nificant learning activity for graduates. For some, part of the process was to resist over-
editing and correcting of work, but rather to seek to affirm new staff in their emerging
writing competence.
[LABORATORY MANAGER] I look upon my role very much as that of a reviewer,

though I’m not trying to rewrite their work. If that’s the way they want to express
things, as long as it’s accurate and grammatically correct, I’ll let it go through. You
can’t dishearten somebody by saying, ‘No, no, you don’t say it that way, you say it
this way’. As long as they’re getting their message across I’ll leave it as much as I can
the way they put it themselves. That’s how they learn.
4.4.4. The graduating of tasks

A final element of the literacy training noted in the study was the tendency for tasks
assigned to new staff (and the type of documentation associated with these tasks) to
be of a highly graduated nature; that is to say, there was an effort to start newcomers
off with quite elementary tasks and to gradually raise the complexity of these as the
employee settled into their role in the organisation. An example here was provided
by the Accountant informant – moving from a simple tax return document to a more
complex one. In their discussions of such practices, informants showed a keen aware-
ness of the relative difficulty of tasks, and also the readiness of their graduates to be able
to move on to more exacting repertoires.
[SENIOR JOURNALIST] [New graduates] might come in first as a ‘copy person’ which is
sort of just running basic tasks in the newsroom – not really writing anything. And they’ll
gradually start writing, sort of more minor stories, like a 50th anniversary of something. And
then it might be after about 6 months that we get them to write more long-form pieces.
A number of informants spoke about a progressive diminishing in the level of super-

vision as graduates slowly developed competence in their new professional roles.
[TRANSPORT ENGINEER] They’re given the opportunity to do the job on their own
while somebody watches over them, and then ultimately they’re doing the job on their
own [without supervision]. If there’s a problem then we go through what they’ve been
shown and what we’ve trained them to do.
4.5. Preparing students for workplace communications

In the final phase of the interviews, interviewees were asked about how they thought
students in their tertiary studies could be better prepared for the writing demands of
the professional workplace. The comments offered here were generally qualified
about such a prospect. While a number thought that it was important for students to
develop ‘basic skills of literacy’ in their studies, they were sceptical about there
being any systematic ways by which students could be prepared in advance for the
quite specific communicative demands of their particular organisation. The view of
some was that at best, an effort could be made to raise awareness of the need to
‘adapt’ one’s disciplinary knowledge and expertise for a range of different communi-
cative situations and genres.
[TRANSPORT ENGINEER] They [graduates] definitely need the basic skills, but after
that it’s how these skills are managed in the organisation. Probably the main thing they
need is to be adaptable.
[ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENTIST] We often need to tell them how the writing is going
to be different. The quality we’re looking for most of all is a readiness to adapt their
writing, and for them to be flexible in their approach.
The attitude of many informants was that the responsibility to make graduates ‘job-
ready’ for this aspect of their work fell largely to the organisation itself. For many infor-
mants, this was not just an inevitable outcome of the specialised nature of its communi-
cation practices, but was also a means of inducting newcomers into the ‘lifeworld’ of
the organisation (Habermas 1987), thus ensuring the effectiveness and continuity of its
operations. The evidence of the interviews suggested that, in many cases, such a view
was backed up by the application of well-developed, on-the-job methods designed to
achieve such outcomes.
5. Discussion and implications

The findings of the study suggest a number of broad conclusions, ones that do not
necessarily fit with those currently advanced in debates about higher education and
graduate employability. These can be summarised as follows:
. that informants’ judgements of the written communication abilities of their gradu-

ates suggest that these skills may not be as overwhelmingly deficient as is com-
monly reported in industry and government surveys;
. that modes of writing in the professional workplace appear to be of a different
order from those generally required in academic domains, and that some of the
perceived ‘deficiencies’ of graduates’ writing can be attributed in part to the
types of contrasts identified;

. that it is difficult, if not in practice impossible, to identify writing requirements of
professional areas in any generic sense, and that these are often unique to specific
professional areas, organisations, and workplace roles;
. that the highly exigent nature of workplace roles and communication practices
means that graduates often need to be carefully and progressively inducted into
these practices on the job;
. that an important written communication ‘skill’ that needs to be developed in stu-
dents is the ability to recognise the specific circumstances and constraints that
shape any writing episode (purpose, audience, etc.), and to be able to ‘adapt’
their writing to suit such contexts.
Certainly, these experiences described by informants bear little resemblance to practices

referred to in debates about the idea of job readiness (‘hitting the ground running’,
‘being thrown in at the deep end’, etc.). The types of contrasts noted between written
communication in the two domains have, in fact, been explored in a number of linguis-
tic and discourse studies (see e.g. Dias et al. 1999; Chanock 2003; Le Maistre and Paré
2004). One clear distinction often noted is the fundamental ‘action orientation’ of work-
place communication. Thus, Chanock (2003) explains that while conventional aca-
demic genres are well attuned to making students aware of the ‘complexities’ of
issues, such an outlook is not necessarily valued in the workplace – where rhetorical
activity is often oriented towards ‘swift decision-making and action’. Dias et al.
(1999) identify a number of other distinctive features of writing in the professions,
including the highly diverse political and economic purposes that underlie professional
communication routines and practices. These understandings of the highly situated
nature of such routines and discourses have in recent times been strongly developed
within a range of related theoretical positions – including Bourdieu’s (1977)
‘habitus’, Schatzki’s (1996) ‘practice theory’, and Engestrom’s (1987) ‘activity theory’.
In a study, most relevant to the current investigation, Le Maistre and Paré (2004)
seek to explain differences in academic and professional communication norms in
relation to basic differences in the ‘activity systems’ of the two domains. Drawing
on Engeström (1987), the authors characterise differences between these domains, in
terms of configurations of what they call – the ‘mediational means’ and ‘outcomes’
in organisations. In universities, the ‘mediational means’ are those practices and arte-
facts that enable learning to happen (classes, labs, textbooks, assignments, etc.); and
the outcomes are the discipline-based knowledge and skills students acquire through
these means (i.e. theories, methods, techniques). In the move to professional practice,
the ‘outcomes’ of university learning become in effect the ‘mediational means’ of the
workplace; that is to say, the new professional draws on the outcomes of their learning
to enact a fundamentally different type of ‘outcome’ (i.e. the provision of professional
services to clients, patients, pupils, etc.). Le Maistre and Paré (2004) suggest it is this
shift – where the focus of learning becomes in effect the means of practice – that is the
critical distinction between school and work, and is the reason, they say, ‘that transition
between the two contexts is frequently difficult’ (45). Some of the difficulties described
by the informants in our study – especially the initial persistence of a strongly academic
style in the writing of graduates – can be understood partly in terms of this type of
‘activity analysis’.
The ‘skills gap’ concept, discussed earlier, sees the challenge of curriculum design
as one of seeking to ‘bridge the gap’ between the two domains – especially to find simi-
larity in tasks and content between what is termed ‘the learning and application settings’
(Jackson 2013). Both the findings of the study and the theoretical understandings from
discourse studies suggest, however, that founding curricula on this type of principle is
problematic. These problems relate both to the fundamentally different communicative
purposes of writing in the two domains, as well as the quite different audience types to
which the communication is addressed.
An additional problem with the ‘skills gaps’ idea is the conceptual difficulty of
establishing the points that in fact need to be bridged. Thus, while some generalisations
can be made about the broad activities that characterise the two domains – universities
and workplaces (Le Maistre and Paré 2004) – it is not at all possible to generalise about
the specific types of workplaces and workplace roles that our graduates will ultimately
enter. Thus, it was noted in the study that a number of informants saw their particular
workplaces being somehow unique, and the work practices pursued in them of a highly
specialist nature. This led some to view as unrealistic the idea that graduates could
somehow be systematically prepared for the specific skills and genres characteristic
of their particular setting. Le Maistre and Paré (2004) allude to this issue, when they
note that ‘each individual workplace has its own geography, political structure and
culture’, and that, as a consequence, knowledge of the organisation must be acquired
‘in each particular organisation or worksite’ (46, emphasis added). This was the con-
clusion largely drawn by many of the study’s informants.
A more valid approach to the development of students’ writing abilities, we argue,
is one that seeks not to bridge (nor to try to conflate) these domains, but instead assumes
the distinctiveness of all communicative situations. The rhetorician Charles Bazerman
(1988) sees the diversity of written forms – of the type observed in the study – as
instances of the highly variable ways that disciplinary knowledge is typically
‘shaped and constructed’ in different contexts of use. Such a ‘shaping’, he suggests,
arises from such factors as: the object under study, one’s communicative purpose,
the anticipated audience, and the writer’s own self and circumstances. Drawing on
this analysis, what students are in most need of, we would argue, is not instruction in the
writing of specific workplace genres (e.g. emails, business reports, etc.), but rather
exposure to a range of experiences and tasks that will help them to learn how to
‘shape’ their acquired disciplinary knowledge in distinctive and communicatively
appropriate ways. Examples of good practice we have seen in our institutions
include History students being set the task of writing about the same historical
episode, as both an essay introduction (academic genre) and as a textbook entry (ped-
agogical genre), or Engineering students required to write up the results of a lab session
not as a formal laboratory report (academic genre), but as a report to a simulated client
(professional genre). The value of such work is not for students to achieve some ade-
quate approximation of a notional target genre (i.e. a skills approach), but rather is to
have them reflect on the contextual and interactional issues that may be at stake in
such episodes (Moore and Hough 2005; Moore 2013).
Taylor (2000, 162) describes the quality to be encouraged in students as ‘judgement’.
This notion, he points out, has a strong philosophical grounding, found, for example, in the
Aristotelian category of phronesis (translated variously as ‘practical knowledge’, ‘under-
standing’ or ‘prudence’) and also in the Kantian idea of judgement being founded upon
experience in the world. ‘It is only judgement’, Taylor suggests, ‘that truly enables
people to make appropriate use of the knowledge and skills they have built up in the differ-
ent situations’ of their learning. Taylor goes on to point out that such a faculty cannot be
taught in any systematic way. But what we should do, he explains:
is create the conditions under which judgment in our students is given a chance to
flower, to chance their arm or pen. … What their education needs to put before them is
as wide a variety of experiences, situations, circumstances, language games as possible.
(162)
6. Conclusion
This study has been concerned with questions about appropriate pedagogies in our uni-
versities. Underlying these issues, however, is a more fundamental one, namely the new
type of relations developing between the academy and outside agencies such as indus-
try and business. As we have noted, this relationship has become a much closer one in
recent years, with the clear effect this appears to be having on the shaping of university
curricula. Such trends were strongly in evidence recently, when Universities Australia
announced – to some fanfare – the signing of an agreement with certain business groups
(including the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Business
Council of Australia) ‘to collaborate on vocational training to improve the employabil-
ity of graduates’ (The Conversation, 2014). In the announcement, it was suggested that
the initiative would help to equip ‘university graduates … with on-the-job skills in an
increasingly competitive job market’. But not all in the sector were so enthusiastic
about the initiative. Simon Marginson, for one, was keen to point out in response,
the dangers of an increasingly vocational – and for him an increasingly narrow –
approach:
If education is tailored too closely to particular jobs or workplaces it becomes inflexible –

the skills are not readily moved to other places. (The Conversation, 2014)
Marginson went on to point out that while we all aspire to enhance the employment
prospects of our graduates, in fact ‘[graduates] can only learn to be job-ready in the
particular job they undertake after study’ (cited in The Conversation, 2014). This is
largely the finding of the present study, and one that we think needs to be considered
keenly in current conceptualisings of the study–work nexus in university education –
both in Australia and abroad. A key to this conceptualising is for universities to have
a better understanding of the broad contexts of activity their graduates are bound for;
but equally for industry and business in their recruitment and training activities to
recognise from whence their graduates have come. In such processes, we think it
also important that universities do not surrender too much authority and expertise on
such matters; nor allow decisions to be left too much to the predilections and interests
of others.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Gordon Taylor, Glen Bates and two anonymous reviewers who provided
helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
We are grateful to two agencies, whose funding supported the research described in this article:
the IELTS Joint-funded Research Program (IDP: IELTS Australia, British Council, Cambridge
English Language Assessment); Swinburne University Research Fund.
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Appendix. Extract from sample discourse-based interview segment

(environmental scientist)
Let’s look at some samples of writing.
So I had a graduate late last year who was doing some fairly complex analysis of information
about how an area had been burnt and using a tool that’s been developed in-house in the depart-
ment, so she had to write about how she used the tool and what results she got.
I was going to say for the recording, this is [DOCUMENT A]

And this is, I think, pretty much as [GRADUATE X] wrote it. She didn’t really refer to me
for her first draft. She’s quite confident and she just started writing. And then to make it some-
thing that I could distribute, I needed to add the introduction about why we’re doing it and the
context, the bigger project context, and some recommendations at the end. But I found that I
didn’t have to make much change to the body of the text, but it was a little more detailed
than we needed so I probably trimmed it down a little. And I needed to make its overall purposes
clear.
And this one, it’s largely GRADUATE X but also partially some of you
Oh no, I think this is as she prepared it and then I moved on. I made new versions of the
document when I started to edit it.
I think we’re also interested in the type of document as well as the actual, the content of it.
Yes. Yeah, so this one’s quite technical. It reflects understanding of the tool and a little bit
about the subject matter, understanding of the [CONTENT X].
Would this be something which would be typical for a graduate to need to produce or to be
requested to produce?
Yes. Yes. I had another student earlier in the year who was working casually and he had
actually started to do some similar work and I asked him to … We had some feedback, some
technical issues with the tool or, the computer program we were using, so he wrote this docu-
ment listing or documenting the areas of difficulty we were having with the tool and that went
back to the developers of the computer program we were using. So it’s just a short technical
documentation, I guess.
And so this one’s DOCUMENT B; the one previous was DOCUMENT A. Which of these
would a graduate have the most trouble producing, do you think? Is there one which might
be more difficult to produce than others? They’re quite different, aren’t they?
And this, I’ll just give you my third example here. So this is closer to a final product of a
communications tool.
This is DOCUMENT C.
So this is the harder document. This is where I say the language has got to be suitable for this
broader audience who are not necessarily very strongly scientific, so ranging from our technical
to our staff to our stronger management staff so the style of writing, because it’s for a broader, it
needs to be more spot on because it’s for a broader audience. Yes, it takes a lot more refinement
for them.
They’re quite different.

DOCUMENT A is a scientific paper. And it’s an internal report, which I will send to a
number of people in the department, but it’s for a more technical audience.
The DOCUMENT B is internally for people, to show people how to use …

It’s to tell them about a set of computer programs and databases that we have available. And
we actually took it from this straight text format into a more of what we call our factsheet format,
so we had to put some branding on it and turned it into, “look here’s a handout, this is what we
can offer to support you in your work”. And this material was also reworked onto our web page
that the student worked on developing.
And then the audience for this one [DOCUMENT C] would be perhaps the general public
or is it more … ?
Yes, it could be the general public, but largely general DEPARTMENT A and DEPART-
MENT B staff. The ORGANISATION has about three and a half thousand staff. We have a
project in LOCATION X so this is a flyer that we can give to staff in the area or the public.
So we might go out to interest groups who are concerned about the impact of X on biodiversity,
groups like the local field naturalists or bird observers club, and we’ll give them these project
description sheets so that they’ve got a handout, something that tells them what our project’s
doing. So, yes, the writing’s got to be right on target there for the broader audience, and
that’s difficult especially when you’re new into the organization.
Yeah, they’re quite different, aren’t they? What would be the greatest difficulty with pro-
ducing this one, DOCUMENT C you’re referring to, for example? So you mentioned
making the language easily understandable, so fairly plain English would be one thing.
And short sentences and those sort of things. There are technical issues because it’s a more
complex format, with a header and two columns and layout, so there’s some of that production.
But you’re interested in the writing. So it’s getting the right balance, I think, between the differ-
ent elements of the story. So here we’ve got background, we’ve got the key research questions
that we’re tackling, how we’re designing our approach, what methods we’re using. So it’s
getting the balance in telling about the different elements of our program is probably the
other challenge.
And how much input would have been put into this (??) graduate?
So I’ve got a scientists based in LOCATION X who’s managing this project, he will have
provided input. So he’ll have provided some materials about his project and then the graduate
will have worked up a draft of the factsheet, as we call it, and it will have gone back to the scien-
tist in LOCATION X for their review, to see that they were happy with the way it was presented.
Can I take these?

You can keep those, yes. So there’s a lot of variety, and there’s a need to get the right pitch,
the right language in each case. And getting the right balance with the technical knowledge and
who you’re conveying it to.

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The myth of job readiness? Written communication,

Recent developments in higher education have seen a strong emphasis placed on

directions of higher education.

*Corresponding author. Email: tjmoore@swin.edu.au

© 2015 Society for Research into Higher Education

2. Background: the employability agenda and the idea of job readiness

speciﬁc employability skills such as communication skills in university programmes

. The writing abilities of graduates

Table 1. List of professional areas.

[ACCOUNTING PRACTICE MANAGER] The written communication seems to be a

[ACCOUNTS MANAGER] I blame electronic communication. Young people are trans-

A ﬁnal caveat concerned a distinction many informants drew between a perceived

The preceding comments certainly do not suggest overwhelming satisfaction on the

4.2. Perceived differences in academic and professional written communication

The tendency of graduates to be wordy was traced to assessment regimes at universities,

4.3. The uniqueness and diversity of workplace writing

[MEDICAL RESEARCHER] In many respects this is a very foreign workplace, and a

[ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENTIST] The fact sheet material is the harder document to

4.4. Workplace pedagogies

4.4.1. Training and mentoring

Examples of formal training were conﬁned to larger organisations. In most instances,

[ALLIED HEALTH SPECIALIST] We have a mentoring process. Basically over a three

4.4.2. The use of scaffolding

Such examples of cooperative learning conform very much to modes of workplace

4.4.3. Monitoring and reviewing of documents

In many instances, the reviewing of documents was conceived by informants as a sig-

[LABORATORY MANAGER] I look upon my role very much as that of a reviewer,

4.4.4. The graduating of tasks

A number of informants spoke about a progressive diminishing in the level of super-

4.5. Preparing students for workplace communications

5. Discussion and implications

. that informants’ judgements of the written communication abilities of their gradu-

types of contrasts identiﬁed;

Certainly, these experiences described by informants bear little resemblance to practices

If education is tailored too closely to particular jobs or workplaces it becomes inﬂexible –

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Appendix. Extract from sample discourse-based interview segment

I was going to say for the recording, this is [DOCUMENT A]

They’re quite different.

The DOCUMENT B is internally for people, to show people how to use …

Can I take these?

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