Plenty of people I talk to that work in graduate employability tell me there’s a problem.
They say that students develop skills at university but struggle to name them, evidence them, and talk about them convincingly to employers.
AGCAS’s (now the Graduate Futures Institute) recent “Uncovering Skills” research put numbers and texture to it.
Focus groups with higher education professionals found that students routinely fail to recognise the value of their experiences, particularly informal ones.
Participants observed that students “often think if it’s not linked to their degree then it is not relevant” and “disregard skills gained from everyday life – like being a parent or managing during Covid.”
The research identified widespread confusion about terminology, with one participant noting that:
the language around ‘skills’, ’employability’, ‘attributes’, etc. is very confusing, and there is no one central list of what ’employability skills’ are.
Students engage with reflection “just in time” – only when prompted by imminent job applications – limiting their ability to build coherent narratives about their development.
Meanwhile, employers report persistent concerns about graduate readiness. The Institute of Student Employers’ Student Development Survey tracks whether graduates meet expectations across various attributes, and the trajectory on resilience is fascinating.
In 2023, 25 per cent of employers said graduates showed “less than expected” resilience, but by 2024 that figure had risen to 35 per cent, and the 2025 survey recorded 48 per cent.
Nearly half of employers now think graduates lack resilience, and the problem is getting worse rather than better. ISE’s 2025 survey also recorded rising concerns about self-awareness, time management, and work-appropriate communication.
When the University Alliance commissioned CBI Economics to survey 252 employers in April 2024, the top factor in graduate recruitment was “the graduate’s enthusiasm and positive attitude towards the role” – selected by 68 per cent – while interpersonal and communication skills were the most important determinant of interview success according to 84 per cent.
Add it all up, and it looks like students can’t articulate their skills, employers say key attributes are missing, and the system seems unable to bridge the gap.
The “Uncovering Skills” research called for better pedagogy – helping students “uncover” what they’ve learned – but pedagogy alone can’t solve a problem that’s also about vocabulary and documentation.
Common tongue
Skills England’s UK Standard Skills Classification arrived in November – a new framework for describing skills across the labour market.
As my colleague David Kernohan outlined at the time, the SSC organises 3,343 occupational skills into a four-level hierarchy, with 22 skill domains at the top level breaking down into 106 skill areas, 606 skill groups, and individual occupational skills; alongside these sit 13 core transferable skills meant to capture generic capabilities valuable across sectors.
The SSC maps to HECoS subject codes, Ofqual qualifications, and SOC occupational classifications, and around 43 per cent of SSC skills matched to AGCAS graduate job profile skills.
If this becomes the common vocabulary for skills conversations – and that’s clearly the intention – it could help address the “no central list” problem identified in “Uncovering Skills”.
But does the vocabulary actually capture what employers say they want?
Mind the gap
An earlier attempt to codify graduate employability is worth a look. In 2011, the CBI and NUS jointly published Working towards your future – making the most of your time in higher education, and the timing was significant – just as £9,000 fees were arriving. The guide drew on a survey of 2,823 students across 71 institutions.
The CBI/NUS framework had a distinctive structure, with “positive attitude” positioned as the foundation underpinning everything else:
a readiness to take part, openness to new activities and ideas, and a desire to achieve results.
The other building blocks were self-management (including resilience, flexibility, self-starting, time management, and “readiness to improve your own performance based on feedback and reflective learning”), team working (“respecting others, co-operating, negotiating, persuading, contributing to discussions, awareness of interdependence with others”), business and customer awareness, problem solving, communication (written and oral, including listening and questioning), numeracy, and IT skills.
If we compare the SSC’s 13 core skills – Planning and Organising, Adapting, Working With Others, Listening, Speaking, Leadership, Learning and Investigating, Creating, Problem Solving and Decision Making, Reading, Digital Literacy, Numeracy, and Writing.
Some mappings work well – communication has been disaggregated into four components, which is more precise, and Problem Solving, Numeracy, and Digital Literacy have clear equivalents, while Leadership appears where it was absent from 2011.
But several 2011 concepts have no obvious SSC home. Positive attitude – the foundation of the entire CBI/NUS framework – has no equivalent, and resilience, a component of self-management, isn’t present either. “Adapting” covers flexibility but not recovery from setbacks.
Business and customer awareness doesn’t appear as a core transferable skill, and reflective learning is only weakly captured (since “Learning and Investigating” emphasises information gathering rather than improving through experience). Negotiating and persuading have been collapsed into the generic “Working With Others”, and self-starting and initiative don’t feature at all.
It’s all partly because the 2011 framework was dispositional – describing how people approach work, not just what they can do. The SSC is more taxonomic – categorising capabilities but lighter on attributes that shape how those capabilities are deployed.
The CBI Economics 2024 survey found “enthusiasm and positive attitude” was employers’ top recruitment factor, and ISE data shows resilience concerns have nearly doubled in three years.
The attributes employers emphasise most strongly are either absent from the SSC or significantly diluted compared to earlier frameworks.
Off the record
The gap between frameworks matters particularly for informal learning – the 2011 guide was explicit that employability skills developed through extracurricular activities as well as courses, and it devoted substantial space to SU roles (employed positions in SU venues, society and club committees, elected officer roles, course representative positions) and to volunteering.
It’s worth remembering what these roles actually involve. A student leader may spend a year managing staff, overseeing budgets, navigating institutional politics, handling crises – and the role requires resilience (things go wrong regularly), initiative (nobody prescribes priorities), and sustained commitment to a demanding public position.
A society treasurer, meanwhile, manages a budget ranging from hundreds to tens of thousands of pounds, planning expenditure, tracking spending, and ensuring compliance – developing numeracy in applied contexts, certainly, but also accountability and understanding of how organisations function.
Course representatives might gather peer feedback, attend committees, present the student perspective, and navigate disagreement, requiring listening and communication but also willingness to put yourself forward and persist when progress is slow. And a regular volunteer commits time to community projects over months or years, developing service orientation, reliability, and adaptability.
These activities develop precisely the attributes employers say are lacking – positive attitude, resilience, initiative. But those attributes have limited presence in the SSC vocabulary, and if the framework becomes the common language for skills, and extracurricular learning can’t be expressed in that language, then a vocabulary gap becomes a recognition gap.
Paper trail
Ironically, there is existing infrastructure designed to make qualifications transparent and comparable – infrastructure that could help with exactly these problems. The UK signed up to it – and it’s not being used properly.
The Diploma Supplement is a standardised document attached to a higher education qualification, describing what the qualification means, what the graduate studied, how the grading system works, and where the qualification sits within national frameworks.
It’s been a core Bologna Process transparency instrument since 1999, and ministers from participating countries – including the UK – agreed in 2003 that every graduate should receive the Diploma Supplement automatically, free of charge, and in a widely spoken European language.
The UK remains a full participating member of the European Higher Education Area, and Bologna membership isn’t contingent on EU membership – Norway, Switzerland, and other non-EU countries participate as full members.
A 2017 European Commission-funded study found that around 90 per cent of HR and recruitment professionals surveyed had used the Diploma Supplement or similar documents to obtain information about job candidates, and more than half of surveyed enterprises requested such documents “often” or “very often” from applicants.
Students most commonly used the document for job applications — either submitting it directly or consulting it when preparing CVs. Employers actively use the infrastructure when making selection and hiring decisions.
Partial credit
But the most recent Bologna implementation report tells a difficult story – of 48 European higher education systems, 39 now fully comply with all ministerial requirements for Diploma Supplement provision, but the UK is not among them.
The report explicitly identifies England, Wales, and Northern Ireland as partial and inconsistent implementers:
The Diploma Supplement is not universally issued. Some institutions issue the Diploma Supplement. Others issue the Higher Education Achievement Report (HEAR), which is ‘based upon and virtually reflects the Diploma Supplement, whilst remaining distinctly British’. Some institutions issue only a transcript, without either the Diploma Supplement or HEAR.
The UK doesn’t meet the commitment it signed up to. Some graduates get a Diploma Supplement, some get HEAR, and some get only a bare-bones transcript, with no system-level guarantee.
Worse still, HEAR adoption is on the wane – plenty of institutions that championed it a decade ago have quietly dropped it, citing administrative burden or low perceived demand.
The UK’s documentation infrastructure isn’t just incomplete – it’s moving backwards while Europe consolidates around a standard.
Plenty of UK graduates are missing out on the whole document – all eight sections of standardised qualification information that European employers are trained to read and trust.
Many don’t get the core transparency function of explaining what their degree means, how their grades work, and where their qualification sits in national frameworks.
For graduates seeking work or further study in Europe – facing reduced automatic recognition arrangements post-Brexit – this is a disadvantage built into the system. When European HR professionals expect the Diploma Supplement and UK graduates can’t provide one, or provide inconsistent alternatives, they start on the back foot.
White space
Beyond the basic provision problem, there’s a very specific opportunity being missed. The Diploma Supplement has eight sections, and Section 6.1 (“Additional Information”) is designed as flexible space for recording relevant information that doesn’t fit the core academic record but deserves formal recognition.
European universities use it systematically to record extracurricular activity, and several models are well-established.
In Germany, the Technical University of Munich publishes a detailed activity list specifying what qualifies for Section 6.1 recording – student council president, student representatives on Senate and University Council, student representatives on appointment committees, membership of quality circles, and voluntary work in faculty student council units – using a 90-hour threshold (equivalent to three ECTS credits) to determine what’s substantial enough to record. The Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt operates a similar model with a formal application process, and the standard wording is simple:
The student has served in an honorary capacity as [role].
In Poland, Kazimierz Wielki University publishes a “catalogue of achievements” for Section 6.1 explicitly including volunteering (verified by the university volunteering centre) and active involvement in students’ government (confirmed by the students’ government chair), while the University of Wrocław specifies eligible activities including Senate membership, faculty council roles, students’ government positions, and year representative roles.
In Portugal, the Instituto Politécnico de Bragança lists activity types including membership of institutional bodies and student bodies, with published examples showing entries like “The student contributed to R&D activities relevant for the Institution… under supervision of the lecturer…” and “The student represented the IPB in the event ’35º Congresso Técnico Científico da APTN’ that took place in 29/04/2012.”
In Sweden, Lund University uses capability-style descriptions naming leadership, communication skills, administrative skills, democratic decision-making, and cooperation.
In other words, systematic infrastructure exists across multiple European systems – treating extracurricular activity as a category of achievement worth formal recording on qualification documentation.
The few UK institutions that do issue Diploma Supplements aren’t generally using Section 6.1 this way, and the opportunity sits unused while European counterparts have built processes around it.
Show your working
If UK universities did adopt European approaches, Section 6.1 entries might look something like this.
A sabbatical officer’s entry might read:
The student served as Education Officer of the Students’ Union from September 2024 to June 2025, a full-time elected position. The role involved policy development, representation on University Senate and Academic Board, line management of student staff, and budget oversight. Approximately 1,600 hours across the academic year.
For a student representative on Senate:
The student served as elected student representative on University Senate from October 2023 to June 2025, attending scheduled meetings and contributing to governance decisions. Verified by the University Secretary.
A society president’s record might state:
The student served as President of the Economics Society during 2024-25, leading a committee of six officers and coordinating activities for approximately 200 members. Responsibilities included chairing meetings, event planning, and budget oversight. Approximate commitment: 150 hours.
And for volunteering:
The student participated in the Community Tutoring Programme from October 2023 to May 2025, contributing approximately 120 hours of educational support. The student completed safeguarding training. Verified by the Students’ Union Volunteering Coordinator.”
The German 90-hour threshold provides a ready standard – some roles far exceed it, significant committee positions typically meet it, and casual participation does not.
Using SSC vocabulary where it fits (planning and organising, problem solving, numeracy) while adding supplementary language for what the SSC doesn’t capture could help bridge the vocabulary gap for extracurricular learning.
Assembly required
Three interconnected problems need addressing – documentation, vocabulary and connection – but they’re currently being discussed in entirely separate conversations, if at all.
The documentation question is whether the UK is serious about the Bologna commitment it signed up to – the current patchwork of some institutions issuing Diploma Supplements, some issuing HEAR, and some issuing only transcripts fails that commitment and disadvantages graduates.
That might require national guidance, sector coordination, or regulatory attention – and institutions still issuing HEAR should consider whether declining sector adoption makes that sustainable and whether the Diploma Supplement’s European recognition makes it more valuable for graduates entering international labour markets.
For those that do issue the Diploma Supplement, guidance on Section 6.1 practice would help – defining what activities qualify, what evidence is required, and what verification applies, with German and Polish catalogues providing ready models.
The vocabulary question is whether the SSC’s core skills adequately capture the dispositional attributes that employer surveys highlight – the evidence suggests gaps, and adding concepts like positive attitude, resilience, and business awareness (or expanding existing definitions) would better reflect what employers actually prioritise.
Consultation with bodies interested in informal learning – GFI, SUs, student volunteering depts – could help identify where gaps bite hardest.
And the connection question is simply whether anyone will notice these issues are related.
Skills England is developing the SSC, Bologna compliance gets periodic implementation reports from panicked civil servants filling forms ahead of meetings, GFI is working on helping students articulate skills, and Advance HE promulgates employability and graduate attributes matrices.
Universities UK is running “Future Jobs” roundtables with employers about matching graduate skills to labour market needs, Russell Group students’ unions are gathering data on their collective employability contribution, and SUs across the sector facilitate activities that can part populate all of it.
But nobody seems to be connecting the vocabulary that could describe learning, the documentation that could record it, and the pedagogy that helps students recognise what they’ve gained.
The fixes aren’t technically difficult – they require using existing infrastructure properly, filling vocabulary gaps that employer evidence identifies, and connecting work happening in different parts of the system.
We no longer, it seems, have a government department with the capacity or disposition to undertake work like this – but it is an opportunity that’s there for the taking.