Navigating the hidden curriculum: a systemic identity negotiation model of graduate employability

Graduate employability scholarship remains fragmented between analyses of individual graduates’ capital and the contextual workplace ideologies that determine its value. Addressing this gap, this paper introduces the Systemic Identity Negotiation Model (SINM), which reconceptualizes employability as the emergent outcome of a dynamic negotiation process. This paper analyses in-depth interviews with 50 New Zealand employers across ICT, Hospitality, Construction, and Business services. Findings reveal that employers articulate sector-specific Workplace Ideologies establishing implicit rules of the game, while simultaneously specifying contextually valued capital portfolios. Most significantly, the data underscore the essential role of systems capital, a learnable meta-capacity encompassing reading ideological fields, aligning personal resources, and iteratively shaping one's professional trajectory. Employability is fundamentally a context-dependent process of systemic engagement, where success hinges on graduates’ agentic deployment of these navigational capacities. By modelling strategic identity negotiation, the SINM theoretically bridges graduate employability and career development scholarship, integrating capital-based and contextual perspectives with developmental learning theory. Practically, the SINM offers a framework for higher education, advocating a shift from cataloging decontextualized skills to cultivating students’ strategic navigational intelligence, reflexive agency, and professional identities across diverse contexts.