Reframing 'Employability' as 'Critical Work Literacy'
Reframing 'Employability' as 'Critical Work Literacy'
Project Leads: Georgios Pazaitis and Juliet Raynsford
Co-creators: Tomi Soetan (Philosophy, Politics and Economics), Franklyna Brun (Chemistry), Kirsty Reed (GSD), Morenike Allinson (Psychology), Shuhan Liu (Education Studies), Sunehar Aneja (Warwick Writing Programme)
2023

Project Summary
Being at university is – although at times trying and intense – an incredibly exciting time. Universities are spaces that bustle with activity, and the vast range of opportunities come with questions attached: How do I make the most of my uni experience? How do I set myself up for ‘success’ beyond graduation? What and who do I look to become? Increasingly, the frame in which these questions get articulated is the ‘employability’ concept. Referring to an individual’s skills, experiences, and characteristics that support one in finding, maintaining and succeeding in a particular career, employability becomes a catch-all term for a range of questions and anxieties attached to the looming question: ‘What Next?’.
With this project, we build on our experiences as staff and students, who are faced with negotiating these questions on a daily basis, thinking about our own future as students, and looking to support students to make informed decisions about their careers. We were struck by the absence of a large-scale, cross-departmental and engaged conversation about the myriad questions students who graduate from university nowadays are faced with, and the responsibilities we hold as educators to create spaces to address them. From financial concerns, and personal aspirations, to questions of the inequality of the labour market and the politics of immigration – ‘employability’ encompasses a vast web of social, cultural, political, economic, and not least very personal issues and contradictions. An instrumental focus on getting students ‘ready for work’ will therefore, we believe, simply not cut it.
Through this project, we have developed an alternative approach, that we now call ‘Critical Work Literacy’ (CWL). This approach sets out to build a culture that expands ‘employability’ provision by supporting students to ask critical questions about their careers and the opportunities and challenges that come with them. Working with a team of Student Co-Creators and supported by multiple staff members across different departments, we have explored how this approach could look like, what it needs to address, and how it could support students and staff in better responding to some of the challenges rooted in the question: ‘What Next?’. This page provides an overview of our work and features some resources to learn more about our project and approach. Please also visit our project webpage to find out more.
Interested in an issue that involves stakeholders at all levels across an institution? Please see our Lessons Learned for some key reflections
Assets
Critical Work Literacy (CWL) - An Engaged Pedagogy for 'Work-Readiness'
‘Critical Work Literacy’ (CWL – or what we initially called ‘Critical Employment Literacy’) is an attempt at using principles and practices from critical pedagogy to think about the ways we support students to make sense of their ‘employability’. Our work and experience have shown that ‘employability’ is not simply about ‘getting a job’ – although it must also be about that! – but that both students and staff are acutely aware of a number of critical issues connected with students’ transition into the ‘world of work’. CWL is borne out of a perceived need to create spaces and cultures in which we can confront the realities of this transition head-on; ask engaged questions about opportunities and challenges, and why they are structured as they are; and think about ways to collectively address some of these issues. CWL does not claim to replace employability, since ‘getting a job’ is still a concern that is pressing and must be addressed by trained careers consultants whose work is invaluable in providing guidance and information. What CWL represents is an attempt at extending or broadening the conversation, to earnestly engage with student experience and wellbeing in these processes, and resist the urge to boil down the vast political, economic, social, and cultural questions that ‘employability’ broaches to the simple edict: ‘become employable’. The resources below provide an overview of this approach and link to further resources.
Critical Work Building Blocks
Principles
The Critical Work Literacy approach is rooted in a set of principles that have helped us define and navigate the sorts of issues we explored through this project. They form the basis for a critical praxis that is grounded in an active process of reflecting about the ethics and politics that underpin ‘employability’ work. These principles are:

Issues
Building on these Principles, we have engaged in exploratory work with our project partners to better understand the issues that arise when critically questioning the ‘employability’ agenda. Although this list is by no means exhaustive, it provides a reflection of some of the questions and critiques that arose from our work:

Practices
Lastly, as a critical praxis, CWL relies on actions that can be implemented in a reflective process of improving and expanding on existing practice. We have formulated these actions or practices to guide staff members who would like to engage with this work and implement a more engaged, holistic and inclusive ‘employability’ practice. As with the overview above, this selection is not complete, but merely meant to provide practical starting points to reframe ‘employability’ towards Critical Work Literacy:

Engaged PedagogyLink opens in a new window
As educators, we believe the university and the people in it have a responsibility to engage with students’ questions regarding their transition into working life. In this blogpost, we outline our motivation for developing the ‘Critical Work Literacy’ approach, and discuss why we believe that a pedagogical response to the ‘employability’ agenda is required.
IATL BlogLink opens in a new window
In this blog post, we reflect on our project journey and summarise our reasons for engaging in this work, as well as what we accomplish and plan to do next:
What Next?Link opens in a new window
‘What Next?’ is a question that all students must ask themselves, whether they are set to enter a grad scheme post-graduation or plan to take a year out to pursue a passion project. In this blogpost, we discuss why the traditional framing of ‘employability’ may not offer a satisfactory answer to this question.
Co-creation
Co-creation Summary
While our project has focussed on the issue of ‘employability’, we see our experiences with using co-creation as an approach and methodology for our work as an important part of the outcomes or contributions of this project. We framed our work as an Action Research project, since we were convinced that traditional approaches to knowledge-making would not suffice to achieve our goal of not only understanding what ‘employability’ means to students and staff in practice, but also to attempt to reframe conversations, provide critical input, and ultimately change culture.
Working with our Student Co-Creators was an amazing opportunity to explore how co-creation cannot only serve as a tool for educators who wish to involve students in the design and evaluation of curricula or assessment practices, but can serve as a unique research methodology. We believe that the interrelationship between our Action Research approach, our positionality as researchers, and the experience with our Student Co-Creators fundamentally influenced the way this project played out, and framed our research findings. Through these experiences, we are now proposing to think of co-creation as a methodological stance for Action Researchers that facilitates a process of politicisation. We understand by this the process of drawing out political questions and value conflicts that underpin educational issues but may not readily be part of the existing conversation. In our case, co-creation has allowed us to bring the political questions underpinning ‘employability’ into the open, and facilitate critical and engaged conversations about the ethics of ‘employability’. You can learn more about our reflections on co-creation through the below-linked blogposts and resources.
Co-creation BlogLink opens in a new window
Our project was designed as a co-creative endeavour to research and impact the way ‘employability’ is done at the university. In this blogpost, Georgios reflects on the possibilities for conceiving of co-creation as a ‘politicising’ research methodology.
Reflections on Co-creation
Reflecting on our approach and process of co-creation has been very valuable to us. IATL have been extremely helpful in providing resources and examples of good practice, and in many conversations
with them, they have helped us think through some of the ‘learnings’ we took away from engaging in this project. This graphic represents some of our reflections on ‘co-creation’:

Resources
Take a look at these resources if you would like more information about our project:
· The CWL approach was informed by Georgios’ research in his undergraduate degree. The initial idea stems from this piece entitled: “Reframing ‘Employability’ as ‘Critical Employment Literacy’ to Subvert the Dystopian Forces of Marketisation in UK Higher Education – A Critical Response to the DfE Command Paper from February 2022”. You can access it here: https://criticalworkliteracy1.files.wordpress.com/2024/02/reframing-e28098employability-as-e28098critical-employment-literacy-to-subvert-the-dystopian-forces-of-marketisation-in-uk-higher-education.pdf .
· The approach was then further explored in the Action Research project that underpinned his dissertation: “Reclaiming Space for Critical Education in the Neoliberal University - Co-producing a Critical Employment Literacy Model in an English Russell Group University”, which can be accessed here: https://criticalworkliteracy1.files.wordpress.com/2024/02/reclaiming-space-for-critical-education-in-the-neoliberal-university-1.pdf.
· Our work has further been informed by a variety of critical scholarship around ‘employability’ and existing efforts by practitioners and researchers to change practice. We have compiled a reading list on these issues which can be accessed here: https://warwick.rl.talis.com/lists/5C11B498-1958-8993-30C4-4D2359719DA2.html.
· If you are interested in seeing how our project evolved over time, you may be interested to take a look at some of the initial materials we compiled, like our Project Summary, Draft Research Proposal, and the original website: https://criticalworkliteracy1.files.wordpress.com/2024/02/cel-project-brief.pdf https://criticalworkliteracy1.files.wordpress.com/2024/02/cel-research-proposal.pdf https://livewarwickac.sharepoint.com/:u:/s/CriticalEmploymentLiteracyCEL122/EV7oPfjAj2BIuqPBphCGVawB_4LE_SPabhRejNdxcwIpeg.
· A resource we found extremely helpful in our work was the website: ‘Career Guidance for Social Justice’, which features critical content for HE and careers practitioners and is run by a team around scholar and careers practitioner Tristram Hooley, whose writing has inspired our project: https://careerguidancesocialjustice.wordpress.com/.