Graduate employability

Information literacy and graduate employability: a new lens for the SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy

employment graphOn behalf of SCONUL – the Society for College, National and University Libraries – InformAll has produced a resource that explains how information literacy contributes to the employability of graduates.

Employability is an increasingly important issue for higher education institutions. There is value in mapping of information skills and competencies against what is expected of graduates entering into the job market and, in the longer term, developing their careers. InformAll has therefore devised a graduate employability lens for SCONUL’s Seven Pillars of Information Literacy, backed up by a report on how employability is perceived by employers and other stakeholders. The resource is freely available: the report, together with the lens, can be found here. A tabular version of the lens only is also available here.

As well as setting out the relationship between information literacy and employability, the lens raises awareness, for the benefit of employers and others at the interface between higher education and employment, of how relevant and often crucial information literacy is to meeting business goals.

The lens and the underlying report are presented in terms that these stakeholders should recognise, deliberately removed from the academic contexts with which information literacy is often more closely associated. It highlights how information know-how contributes factors important for the well-being of employers, notably:

  • Business and customer awareness
  • Coping with workplace complexities
  • Analytical skills and problem-solving
  • Ability to work socially
  • Career management and lifelong learning capacity

The resource is free to use and is available under a Creative Commons license. If you would like further information, or to discuss any aspect of this work, please contact Stéphane Goldstein at sg@informall.org.uk .

 

Creative Commons License
This resource is licensed by SCONUL under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Photo: StockMonkeys.com, Creative Commons

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