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Career preparation has gained increasing prominence in higher music education as governments and students alike demand a stronger focus on workplace readiness. While the existing graduate metrics work well for professions which feature traditional, full-time jobs, the potential for such a linear career path is limited for graduate musicians by fierce competition for work and a labor market in which precarious work is the norm. Music graduates tend to experience a career-long portfolio of part-time, casual, and contract-based work within and outside the music industry. This article reports on an innovative internship program that engaged student musicians in an in-curricular intervention related to their career thinking. The program and its assessments purposefully placed students into authentic learning contexts where their musical skills and their understanding of being a professional were challenged and expanded. Using the examples of scaffolded assessment tasks including an ePortfolio and a presentation of on-the-job learning, the article highlights students' reflections on how the internship engaged their career thinking and how the ePortfolio process helped them to curate that thinking. Students reported that the combination of an ePortfolio and scaffolded career thinking assessments enabled them to realize the relevance of their learning tasks and to create clearer career connections. Implications for the use of ePortfolios within WIL (work integrated learning) are discussed.

Attracting and retaining students' attention is a concern for educators at every level of education, including those in higher education. Despite compelling evidence that student-centred pedagogies enhance attention, motivation and learning gain, exposition-centred delivery in forms such as lectures persists across higher education. Contemporary research on student attention suggests that student concentration in class begins to wane within 10 minutes; that neither tutorials or lectures tend to engage students effectively; and that the optimum length of a lecture is as little as 30 minutes. Where previous studies of student attention have focussed on the impacts of active listening, flipped classrooms and authentic assessment, the exploratory study reported here sought to determine the impact of a "deliberate mistake strategy" (DMS). The study engaged 103 undergraduate business students who self-assessed their attention span before and after a DMS was employed within their semester-long unit. Analysis of the students' self-report involved paired sample t-tests and revealed that students' attention span had increased significantly as the result of their engagement in DMS; there were no significant gendered differences. Cohen's "d" revealed a large effect size with students reporting that DMS had helped them to increase their perceived attention span when in class. Amid continued debate about how to engage students and growing realisation that multiple approaches are needed, the findings suggests that the use of a simple strategy such as DMS merits further attention. [Note: The page range (193-212) shown on the PDF is incorrect. The correct page range is 193-210.]

Much research on the employability development of university students and the employability experience of graduates treats learners as experientially homogenous and ignores the potential impact of pre-entry work experience on either students' confidence or their employability-related behaviours. This study explored the confidence of commencing students aged 17 to 21. The objective was to understand whether and how study and career confidence differs among commencing students according to whether they have never worked, are working whilst studying, or have worked previously and have stopped work. The impact of work experience including that gained prior to university entry is often overlooked when discussing students' perceived employability. This largely quantitative study explores the perceived employability of commencing university students who began their studies soon after finishing high school and compares these self-perceptions relative to work experience. The study employed a self-measure of study and career confidence (Bennett, 2021) grounded in social cognitive career theory with 2,374 full-time students. Differences across the categories were explored using t-tests and multivariate analysis. The analysis concluded that 1,272 students (53.6%) were working at the time of the study, 1,025 students (46.4%) had previously worked but were not working at the time of the study and 77 students (3.2%) had never worked. The findings, illustrated by students' text-based descriptions of their employability development activities, suggest a hierarchical relationship between pre-entry work-experience and more confident self-perceptions of employability. Implications for higher education employability development are discussed.

Information seeking is integral to the workplace learning of organisational newcomers including new recruits, graduates in study-to-work transition, and students on work-integrated learning (WIL) placements. Despite the importance of information seeking in newcomers' workplace learning, previous research findings are fragmented and inconsistent. This indicates a need to inform research and practice by mapping the extant literature through a scoping review. This review synthesised and analysed findings from 25 empirical studies published in peer-reviewed journals during 2000-2021 and relating to factors influencing organisational newcomers' information seeking behaviour (ISB). The key theoretical contribution of the review is a model of organisational newcomers' ISB and its antecedents. Through untangling complicated dynamics involved in workplace learning among newcomers, the model has implications for employers in enhancing newcomers' learning and adaptation and for educators in preparing students for WIL placements and subsequent study-to-work transition.

This study examined the extent to which perceived organisational support (POS) predicts career exploration via the mediation effect of career adaptability. Grounded in career construction theory, the study employed an online survey with 611 Chinese undergraduate students. The survey employed POS, career adaptability and career-related exploration scales. Multi-group comparisons explored gender, discipline and place of origin (rural or urban). Although gender and major were moderating variables, there was no significant difference among rural and urban subgroups. There was a direct relationship between POS and career-related exploration via the mediation effect of career adaptability. Male students had higher and statistically significant path coefficients when it came to the relationship between POS and career-related exploration. The effects of POS on career adaptability and career-related exploration differed according to discipline. Humanities and social sciences (HASS) students reported significantly less organisational support than those in science and engineering. POS had negligible influence on career-related exploration among HASS students. The results suggest that assessing students' POS is an important preliminary step within career development learning. Recommendations include early assessment and discussion of students' POS and incorporating the concern, control, curiosity and confidence dimensions of career adaptability into career-related interventions.

Higher education has been positively linked with increased opportunity for women, including enhanced employability, increased migration, enriched cultural capital, and improved language skills. With the number of international students rising, understanding postdegree intentions is increasingly important for institutions, policy makers, and administrators. This qualitative study explored the postdegree intentions of female international undergraduate students at the Malaysian campus of an Australian university. In-depth interviews were conducted with students from a range of degree programs and data was studied using thematic analysis. Findings revealed that postdegree intentions were substantially influenced by other people and policies; a common aspiration was to balance career and family; postdegree intentions were not solely career-focused; and the students anticipated discrimination and inequality but were determined to successfully navigate these.

Despite continuous growth in the number of positions in Australia's Information Technology (IT) industry since 2015, only half of Australia's IT graduates go on to work in IT positions. A much-debated challenge for graduates is that the transition to work is complex and often demands several attempts. Less discussed is why school students choose to study IT at university and whether these motivational factors inform their career choice. The motivation to study at university has many potential influences including social factors, prior experience, self-perceptions, intrinsic or personal utility values, or simply the prospect of a good salary. Students' choice of university major has similar influences; however, many learners select their major and enter university without having thought about possible career pathways. As such, without appropriate support during their time at university, students may not translate interest and motivation into career identity or commitment, and they may not develop realistic career goals or job-seeking strategies. To understand the antecedents to career interest, this study investigated the choice of major and career aspirations of undergraduate IT students at an Australian university. The two-year study engaged students in two phases of data collection. First, students completed an online self-assessment of study and career confidence, answering two open questions on why they chose to study IT and how long they intended to work in the discipline. Students then responded to a short online survey about their short- and longer-term career aspirations and prior experience. The results show that the motivation to study IT is based largely on intrinsic interest and enjoyment of IT rather than on external factors such as salary or job security. Most students reported broad career aspirations related to IT; however, students were unable to articulate what these careers might entail and they were unsure about the amount of time they would spend in the IT profession. The study concluded that understanding IT students' motivation for study could inform career development learning activities through which students transform their interest into career choice and pre-professional identity.

Purpose: The study sought to determine whether there are gender differences in self-perceived employability of students enrolled in Australian higher education science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) programs. Design/methodology/approach: Using an online measure comprised of Likert style and open text items, STEM students (n = 3,134) reported their perceived employability in relation to nine dimensions of employability identified from the literature as having relevance to careers in STEM. Analysis determined whether student confidence differed according to gender, field of study, study mode, age, and engagement with work. Findings: Female students in STEM reported higher mean factor scores in relation to their self- and program-awareness, self-regulated learning, and academic self-efficacy. Male students were more confident in relation to digital literacy skills; these findings were consistent both overall and across several fields of study within STEM. Gender differences were observed across study mode, age, and engagement with work. Originality/value: The analyses of students' perceived employability provide important insights into the formation of a STEM "identity" among female students. The study has implications for policy, higher education, the engagement of girls in early STEM education, and future research.

This article presents the development, validation and deployment of a scale with which higher education students self-assess their perceived employability. Underpinned by social cognitive career theory and Yorke and Knight's (2007) USEM model for students' attainment of employability, a perceived employability questionnaire was developed and piloted with 1849 university students. The final questionnaire was administered with students from over 15 Australian universities, resulting in a sample of 10,193 students. The scale was validated using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, resulting in a 14-factor employability measure that met the acceptable validity thresholds. The multi-factor perceived employability scale validates the USEM model and has implications for theory and practice.

This study investigated why university students choose to major in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine/health (STEM(M)) disciplines, and how their study and career-related confidence compares with that of their peers. The study engaged 12,576 students enrolled at Australian universities. The findings suggest that STEM(M) students' career decision making is guided by their interest in the subject and their intentions to help people. Within the STEM(M) cohort, students in medicine and health were more confident in their career decision making than either their STEM or non-STEM(M) peers. Of interest, they were less aware of alternative career pathways and less prepared to reorient their careers should this be necessary. Female students reported greater confidence than male students in their career decision making, career identity, and career commitment. Implications include the need for career narratives beyond the STEM industries and for career development initiatives that are mindful of disciplinary and gendered differences.

This pilot study examined student engagement with a web-based digital professional portfolio through the 3C process of collect-critique-curate. To overcome common problems associated with electronic portfolios, including cost; specificity; lifelong access; and ease of use, the study used "Weebly" as its portfolio platform. The creation and use of the portfolio was embedded into the first professional studies unit in the second year of an undergraduate initial teacher education degree, and technical seminars ensured that the base portfolio was created. As students reflected on possible sources of evidence to demonstrate achievement of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (AITSL, 2011) and crafted their capacity statements to preface their CVs, they began to clarify their present selves and to envisage their possible future selves as graduate teachers. The study tested strategies, based on the notion of self-authorship that assisted the students' transition from aligning with a personal student identity to demonstrating a burgeoning professional teacher identity.

Research in higher music education acknowledges a persistent divide between performance studies and the realities of musicians' work. Alongside this is global pressure for curriculum that is more supportive of students' metacognitive engagement, experiential learning and career preparation. However, scholars assert that the provision of these curricular elements is insufficient unless students recognise their value and engage in them at a deep level; this is because career-long employability in precarious industries such as music is underpinned by strategic, lifelong and self-regulated learning. The study reported here featured a scaffolded employability intervention located within the existing curriculum and trialled with seven student musicians at a European institution. The study had three aims: to understand the students' career-related thinking and confidence; to determine whether such an intervention might be scalable; and to gauge the intervention's potential efficacy in helping students to become conscious of their learner identity. Results indicate that many student musicians are aware of the need to extend their essential professional capabilities but unaware of how to address these deficits. Participants realised that 'learning how to learn' would help them achieve personal and professional goals. The findings suggest that similar in-curricular interventions are achievable at scale. Furthermore, they have the potential to foster a more holistic vision of performance education and practice such that aspiring musicians might graduate as both skilled professionals and agentic learners.

Numerous policy interventions promote gender equity within STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) higher education enrolments and careers. Despite this, women in many countries continue to be under-represented and encounter barriers to access and career progression. These concerns are often attributed to gendered technical/technological confidence and gendered perceptions of career. Using an online self-assessment tool, this study reports the employability confidence of 12,708 university students. Utilising five employability constructs to assess the confidence of STEM and non-STEM women and men, we found that women in STEM were often more confident than men. Moreover, women in STEM reported higher confidence than women in non-STEM. These novel findings might help inform policies and strategies to attract and retain women in STEM degrees and careers. We emphasise the need to focus on career transition and advancement support given that women are confident whilst studying, yet less likely than men to advance in their careers.

Purpose: With a focus on Chinese higher education students, the purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between students' perceived employability and their levels of academic engagement and stress. Design/methodology/approach: The study engaged 1,155 students from three universities in China. Students responded to an online survey, reporting their confidence in relation to their perceived employability, academic engagement and stress in life. The authors employed structural equation modelling to explore students' confidence in each employability attribute and to assess perceived employability relation to academic engagement and perceived stress. Findings: The results suggest that self-perceptions of employability are positively associated with students' academic engagement and negatively associated with perceived stress. Perceived employability mediated the majority paths. Originality/value: This is one of the few studies to examine perceived employability in line with academic engagement or stress and the first study to do so in China.

This paper reports the findings of a project that investigated uses of electronic portfolios (ePortfolios) in the creative and performing arts at four Australian universities and raises four significant areas for discussion: engaging technologies as an ongoing requirement of planning, delivery and evaluation of teaching and learning in higher education; ePortfolios and their implications for curriculum planning; the influence of ePortfolios on learning, self-awareness and reflection; and differences in ePortfolio expectations and uses between the varying specializations of music study in higher education. Identifying marked differences between the four higher education institutions in this project and their applications of ePortfolio work, our discussion supports the hypothesis that ePortfolios cannot be applied generically across the arts; rather the ePortfolio requires qualification in expectations, roles, applications and theorisations. The paper makes recommendations for higher arts educators and highlights some of the strategies that heighten the development of professional practice and related learning.

Reflection is an essential part of students' critically reflective development within experiential-learning contexts; it is arguably even more important when working cross-culturally. This paper reports from a national, arts-based service-learning project in which students in creative arts, media and journalism, and preservice teachers worked with Aboriginal people in urban and rural areas of Australia. The paper uses Ryan and Ryan's (2010) "4Rs model of reflective thinking" for reflective learning and assessment in higher education to ascertain the effectiveness of the project work toward engendering a reflective mindset. The paper discusses how students learned to engage in critical self-monitoring as they attended to their learning experiences, and it describes how they "wrote" their experiences and shaped their professional identities as they developed and refined the philosophy that related to their developing careers. Examples taken from the narratives of students, community partners and academic team members illustrate the principal finding, which is that through a process of guided reflection, students learned to reflect in three stages: a preliminary drawing out of existing attitudes and expectations; a midway focus on learning from and relating to past experiences; and a final focus on reciprocal learning, change and future practice. The three stages were apparent regardless of program duration. Thus, program phase rather than academic year level emerged as the most important consideration when designing the supports that promote and scaffold reflection.

Graduate employment rates and self-reported employability are increasingly a feature of higher education funding measures. However, graduate outcomes do not denote the whole learning experience of the student nor is the student experience reducible to a single statistic. This paper discusses a design-centric approach to employability development which was enacted within a "hybrid learning space." The study engaged 52 final-year speech pathology students, their lecturer, the lead researcher and a career practitioner (advisor) at an Australian university. Students first created personalized employability profiles using an established online self-reflection tool. The online tool produced a personalized report and enabled students to access developmental resources relating to employability and student success. The project team used anonymized student data to transform a previously generic "careers" workshop into a targeted workshop in which students explored individual and cohort findings and participated in developmental activities informed by the data. The initiative's contribution to learning space research is in its composition as a "hybrid learning space" in which educators and students engaged as learners and developers of their online learning spaces, and educators collaborated to analyze student data and inform learning and teaching enhancements within the same study period. It is anticipated that the data from subsequent years will inform the curricular review, particularly if subsequent student cohorts express similar concerns. Implications for higher education policy and practice are discussed.

Many professional musicians would describe their careers as somewhat different to the careers they imagined when they were students. This study sought to understand the relationships between musicians' higher music education experiences and their professional work, and to expose the adaptive strategies they employ to sustain their work. The researchers amassed in-depth career narratives from eight musicians who were highly respected international performers. The musicians were also 'multi-professional' musicians in that they were recognised as highly proficient in multiple different roles. Narratives were analysed using selection, optimisation and compensation (SOC) theory. The results suggest that essential professional capabilities should be emphasised in the core curriculum of higher music education. A novel finding is that musicians who identify themselves as learners may be better able to create and sustain a career in music.

Attrition of up to thirty per cent in the initial years of a teaching career has led to a high level of disillusionment in teaching as a desirable and rewarding profession. Although many nations have responded with substantial investments in pre-service teacher education, these efforts have failed to dissuade newly qualified teachers from leaving the profession. An important factor in professional membership is a sense of identity to both a particular group of people and a set of established practices. This article examines the initial identity of pre-service science teachers who belong to the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) cohort of teachers in the primary and secondary initial education programs at an Australian university. We consider the alignment of participants' initial professional identity, including career commitment, with their concerns about entering the teaching profession. Recommendations are made for actions that might reduce the early career exodus.

Labour market trends and the economic impacts of COVID-19 are elevating the importance of knowledge as a factor of production whilst concurrently eroding traditional forms of employment. Mindful of the implications for higher education, this study approached employability development as 'the ability to find, create and sustain meaningful work across the career lifespan'. The study was grounded in social cognitive theory and adopted a metacognitive approach to employability. Data were generated through an online self-assessment completed by 12,576 students enrolled with Australian universities. Data from science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) students were compared with those from students in non-STEM fields. STEM students differed in several key employability traits. The paper highlights the need to promote more nuanced occupational literacy about the future of work alongside awareness that STEM skills and capabilities are valued across multiple sectors and roles. Opportunities and challenges for embedding a pedagogy for employability are discussed.

The enduring employability of twenty-first-century workers demands explicit and career-long attention. As a result, higher education finds itself tasked with enabling students to negotiate their career-long cognitive and social development as professionals and social citizens. Grounded in social cognitive theory, the study reported here seeks to understand students' career-related development. The participants reported in this article are 6,004 undergraduate business students enrolled with one of 32 Australian universities. The students created personalised employability profiles using an online tool. Drawing from the tool's data, the article reports students' text-based responses to the question of what they would change about their degree programmes. Students express concerns about the potential to establish a career as early as the first year of study. The findings suggest the value of adopting a research-informed, metacognitive approach to employability development to establish the relevance between the learning assigned to students and their future lives and work.

If graduates from STEMM -- science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medical sciences -- are to successfully navigate the labour market, they need diverse capabilities alongside self- and career awareness. The focus of this study was STEMM students' perceptions of self, career and employability. The study asked over 2,000 commencing students to respond to an open question which asked how long they intended to work in their discipline. The findings lend weight to the use of social cognitive career theory, which emphasises that career- and study-related decision making are influenced by feedback and feed-forward mechanisms and by intra- and inter-personal, historical, and contemporaneous dimensions. The article ends with implications for higher education teachers, including the need for strategies with which to help a diverse student body create meaning from the career-related messages that abound in public discourse.

Service learning is described as a socially just educational process that develops two-way learning and social outcomes for community and student participants. Despite the focus on mutuality in service learning, very little of this literature specifically deals with the intense importance of mutuality and reciprocity when working with Indigenous community partners and participants. This is problematic for Indigenous service learning projects that seek to partner respectfully with Indigenous communities in Australia and elsewhere. To address this issue, the paper draws on existing international literature and data from an Indigenous arts based service learning project conducted in the Northern Territory of Australia to propose a framework centred on relationships, reciprocity, reflexivity and representation that can be adapted for future Indigenous service learning partnerships and research.

Many higher education institutions have embraced e-Learning and urge, or make compulsory, engagement by academics. Despite this, it is often the educators themselves who take the initiative to engage with innovative e-learning approaches. These approaches, in turn, can influence both peer-and institution-wide thinking about e-Learning. This paper focuses on the introduction or extension of ePortfolios within the creative arts at four Australian universities. Each educator adopted the ePortfolio for a different purpose, and in doing so has influenced, or is at least being monitored by, their university. All four studies have resulted in the growth, development and enrichment of teaching and learning because of the ePortfolio's facility to engage students in such activities as reflection, ongoing student-teacher dialogue, collaborative essay writing, peer evaluation, identity formation, and the documentation of skills, competencies and graduate attributes for career awareness and employability. In sharing this knowledge the studies have also influenced curriculum design and e-learning policy. The academic literature notes institutional interest in ePortfolios in relation to career preparation, demonstrating and assessing student learning, academic advising, and addressing public accountability concerns by facilitating internal and external departmental review and accreditation. Within this paper we discuss the bi-directional impact and sharing of knowledge about ePortfolio use as it occurs between institution and educator. The study findings inform future development of curriculum, policy and practice for creative arts students and academics in a variety of higher education settings. Further, the findings suggest that ePortfolios provide an efficient and transparent means to archive and access student work, and that they facilitate internal and external departmental review and broader institutional assessment.

In comparison with classroom settings that are more accessible to the scrutiny of researchers and institutional monitoring, the one-to-one setting of instrumental and vocal studio teaching has been described as a 'secret garden'. The physical isolation of the music studio has deep roots within the traditions of apprenticeship and embodies aspects of conservatoire culture that are sometimes carried over into other musical styles. With a focus on higher education, this paper explores the nature and significance of isolation for the studio, alongside some of the benefits, limitations, and challenges that it offers. The authors contend that the physical disposition of the studio within the institution gives implicit support to the attitudes and assumptions that sustain traditional approaches to music performance teaching, and that making them explicit can help to open those approaches to further challenge, review and development.

Whether or not disadvantaged students are realising the same benefits from higher education as their peers is of fundamental importance to equity practitioners and policymakers. Despite this, equity policy has focused on access to higher education and little attention has been paid to graduate outcomes. The Australian study reported here used national data to investigate relationships between disadvantage and graduate outcomes. The study provides critical insights into how access to higher education does, or does not, lead to improvements in post-graduation equity. The study reveals that outcomes are not equal for all students and that higher education disadvantage persists for many students after they have completed their studies. Whilst the specific findings relate to the Australian university sector the broader discussion of the article is relevant to higher education policy more generally, especially in terms of how governments align institutional processes to measure and scrutinise achievement in relation to public policy objectives.

This article discusses a range of significant issues for consideration by music higher education institutions when preparing their students for a portfolio career in music. Drawing on insights from a review of literature undertaken as part of an Australian Research Council Linkage Project, "Making Music Work: Sustainable portfolio careers for Australian musicians", the article explores the dynamic structure of the music sector and the ways in which musicians are undertaking a portfolio of roles in order to ensure financial and creative sustainability. In particular, the article focuses on five career and educational issues of importance: enterprise and entrepreneurship, mobility, digitisation, gender parity, and health and wellbeing -- when preparing graduates for a portfolio career reality.