Decolonising career and employability within higher education: lessons from the field of health and social care

The ‘employability’ of graduates leaving Higher Education (HE) is becoming a focus for the sector emphasizing ‘high skilled’ graduate destinations. ‘Employability’ has its roots within the career development literature which has a focus on individual agency as opposed to the social, economic, and political structures in which agency is immersed (Gee et al., 2022). This chapter provides a decolonial lens upon employability policy discourse to highlight how they are based upon a colonial logic of ‘othering’ and the myth of ‘progress’. The chapter centres on the field of Health and Social Care in the UK to illustrate how such logic still permeates today, reproducing structural disadvantage for students from minoritized groups. It considers the pedagogical impact of such conceptions and how this produces and reinforces modalities of oppression found within the neoliberal-university. It discusses how research into decolonization produces a tension between reinforcing the mechanisms of the neoliberal university and subverting such practices. It concludes that HE promotes a smokescreen of meritocracy to students whilst maintaining the societal status quo via filtering processes that feed the precarious labour market. The authors argue that a decolonial approach provides resistance to such oppressive mechanisms, via undermining of colonial ‘employability’ narratives, providing material and collectivist components to think about alternative routes to anti-colonialism, subverting employability discourse, to question its emphasis on ‘progress’, its metrics and their formulations to challenge neoliberal logic. Such inquiry informs how policy, pedagogy, and research may benefit from taking a decolonial approach to employability (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Giroux, 2011, 2021).