Over the last decade, UK higher education has been insistently asked to prove that what happens in teaching and learning contexts matters once graduates enter the labour market. National skills structures have been created and reorganised, regulators have tightened their grip on student outcomes, and students themselves are more willing to say “I’m here because I want a good job”.
Universities can no longer simply teach well – they must deliver work-ready graduates, at scale. That changes what counts as quality and value for money, and reshapes the relationships universities need with employers and with their own students.
The sector has responded with energy. Recent years have seen the continued proliferation of employability initiatives, extending from placements and sandwich years to degree apprenticeships, live projects, simulations, authentic assessments, graduate attribute frameworks, and more. Each helps students see how knowledge travels into practice. Yet we have ended up with a set of overlapping solutions and labels – work-based learning, work-integrated learning, experiential learning, apprenticeship – each of which focuses on one mechanism or setting. None of them, alone, quite capture the broader reorientation of HE towards labour-market outcomes.
At the same time, wider policy and economic contexts have moved decisively. The Office for Students’ B3 condition makes progression to meaningful work a core indicator of quality. Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs) and new Skills England guidance ask employer bodies, strategic authorities, and providers to align skills provision with local economic needs. Despite continuing to say that employability and future prospects are their core motivation, students judge the value of degrees against rising costs and pressures to earn alongside studying. The imperative to show that learning leads somewhere tangible is now built into funding, regulation and student choice.
The pressures on providers are clear. The government is pushing a skills agenda that wants closer coupling between education and productivity. Regulators have tied outcomes to quality in ways that make progression to skilled work a material issue. Students, facing a tougher labour market, want visible returns on their investment. Universities have already shown – in apprenticeships above all – that they can deliver employer-shaped learning even in financially and regulatory pressured conditions. As we’ve argued elsewhere, higher apprenticeship provision has been quietly doing this work and built practical know-how that can helpfully inform the sector.
Give the new paradigm a name
In a complex market, it is helpful to start from a simple description: we need to align learning and work. From there, it becomes natural to talk about “work-aligned learning” (a phrase we recognise has been used elsewhere, but which we seek to clarify and develop in this context) as a reflection of the shift in the HE paradigm – one in which familiar approaches to placements, work-based and work-integrated learning, experiential learning, and apprenticeships sit together. The point is not to pick a winner between models or labels, but to ask whether the whole ecosystem of HE is being designed and reviewed holistically, calibrated against contemporary and future work.
By work-aligned learning we mean the purposeful and continuous alignment of multiple elements of HE – curriculum, assessment, delivery modes, partnership activity, student support and services, institutional configurations and even programme pacing – with the realities, rhythms and values of labour contexts. Alignment must be intentional, designed at programme and institutional levels, not left to enthusiastic individuals, and reviewed against occupational standards, professional expectations, industrial practices, technologies and local economic needs. It should also reach across the student journey, because who students meet, the artefacts they produce, the way feedback is given, and which services sit inside the curriculum, all shape whether learning models work.
This, in turn, forces us to be more precise about what counts as work-like. The contemporary workplace is not just where technical disciplinary knowledge is applied; it is where, at speed, people collaborate, communicate across differences, work with data and digital tools, exercise judgement and maintain their own wellbeing.
Graduate-attribute frameworks and employer surveys tend to list the same capabilities; the idea of work-aligned learning brings these into the centre of curriculum design and treats them as co-equals with subject knowledge. This is broader than the familiar toolkit of active, experiential or authentic learning, but certainly includes them. Simulations, consultancy projects, work with real data and collaborations with community or industry partners remain excellent strategies because they operationalise learning-by-doing.
Instead of scattering initiatives across isolated modules, work-aligned learning sequences a coherent developmental arc, so that students build competence over time. In fields where AI and other technologies shorten the half-life of knowledge, the truly academic move is to teach students how to realign knowledge itself, and to ask whether the week-by-week reality of being on the course feels more like rehearsing for an exam or practising for work.
A different kind of contract
Work-aligned learning also asks us to think differently about relationships. Much recent debate has been shaped by the idea of the student experience, in which universities provide and students consume.
A work-aligned approach suggests a psychological contract closer to how productive workplaces operate: staff and students co-create a shared professional environment. Students are contributors to a community of practice; staff are designers of experiences that integrate personal development, wellbeing, upskilling and reskilling. Careers, enterprise, counselling and digital-skills teams become part of one integrated offer, rather than bolt-on services dependent on individual confidence or social capital. In employment, our graduates will use technology, work in teams, and face clients daily; programmes and support structures should mirror that integration.
The implications of this paradigm shift for key stakeholders are significant. For HE institutions, work-aligned learning is no longer a niche interest; it goes to the heart of programme design, quality assurance and risk management.
If outcomes are tied to quality conditions, and if LSIPs and other national strategies are reshaping expectations about who providers serve and how, universities need confidence that their provision – including services and digital infrastructure – aligns to the skills system emerging around them.
For employers, work-aligned learning invites long-term co-design and co-delivery, directly aligning to future skills needs and solutions for long-term sustainability and growth. For policy-makers and regulators, work-aligned learning calls for the joining up of labour and skills initiatives, funding models, and regulatory conditions on outcomes and access.
At its heart, this is about having a unifying conversation about how we prepare aspiring learners for a shared future, by bringing together learning experiences with those they can reasonably expect of life thereafter. It is about replacing the old model in which graduation marks a jarring break – the moment students discover that professional practice looks nothing like their student experience – with a model in which moving into meaningful employment is just the next step on the same journey. We may not have every detail worked out, but we ought at least to agree on the ethos: we will all learn-by-doing – creating viable HE provision aligned to the economic and social landscape graduates are entering.