This will actually be my last blog post for this week as I am taking a day's leave tomorrow to travel to Brussles where I will be visiting a close friend who is in hospital.

A lot of discussions I have been involved with today have been around the theme of employability. This came up at a meeting this morning about postgraduate students and postdocs, and again this afternoon at Learning and Teaching Committee.  There was a time when departments simply needed to teach students for their degrees and could leave the Careers Service to find jobs for their graduates.  There was a time when there was a general assumption that students who were doing PhDs would automatically go on to become unviersity lecturers.  I remember some years ago when a senior colleague, on learning that three of my ex-PhD students had secured academic jobs, gave me the advice that I could now stop taking PhD students on since I had produced a sufficient replacement for myself in the lecturing profession.

Those days are gone.  In an era of mass higher education (at undergraduate level) the nature of the graduate labour market has changed hugely, and the attributes that graduates need to develop in order to be successful in that market have also changed - often in ways that are unclear.  The flow of PhD students now is many times larger than the rate of advertisement of new lectureships. I am not sure that we have all caught on to these new realities.

Academics have often not worked outside academia - or have only done so a long time ago - and don't fully understand current labour markets (or understand them only in narrow technical areas and not in the generic graduate recruitment sectors that the majority of graduates enter).  So we are not always in a position to give very clear advice to students on the opportunities they may have on graduation.  But those opportunities depend crucially on the skills, knowledge and aptitudes that students develop whilst registered on our courses.  There is something of a conundrum there over everyone's understanding of what the contemporary (and future) labour market needs are and will be.

Employability is thus a crucial but rather difficult theme for us to grapple with.  I have been mulling over, during the past 24 hours, the view expressed by Lord Young at last night's meeting that he would like to see every university in the UK being required to have an employability strategy.  The idea has some attractions, but I'm not sure what such a strategy would look like - and I'm even less sure of how it might be operationalised.

That's it for this month: more towards the end of March.