An Educator’s Guide to Constructing Employable Identities combines research and practical workshops to help educators support graduates in developing professional identities, navigating workplace expectations, and shaping their working futures. What motivated you to write this book?

The book grew out of a gap I kept noticing between how employability is talked about and
how it is lived. Public conversation tends to centre on skills, competencies and labour-market outcomes. These matter, but they treat graduates as people carrying a toolkit into a workplace. In reality, people enter workplaces as identity negotiators. Who they become professionally is worked out with colleagues, managers, mentors and gatekeepers, in settings that have their own expectations about who belongs.

Through my research and teaching, I met many capable graduates who struggled, not because they lacked technical expertise, but because they were unsure who they were becoming in professional life. They were decoding unspoken norms, responding to how others saw them and weighing competing expectations, often with very unequal access to opportunity.

This led me to develop the Systemic Identity Negotiation Model (SINM), which treats employability as an ongoing negotiation between people, the social structures around them, and the futures open to them. The book translates that thinking into practical, workshop- based tools for educators. I wanted to move the conversation from “How do we teach students to get jobs?” to “How do we help students become professionals who can adapt, contribute and find meaning as work changes?” Employability is less a destination than an unfolding process of identity construction.

What does teaching systems capital look like when students can recognise unwritten rules but lack the power to influence them?

This matters because awareness alone does not create agency. Systems capital is often reduced to knowing how systems work, but understanding a workplace’s unwritten rules does little good if students conclude they are powerless to act on that understanding. The aim of teaching should not be to persuade students that systems are fair. It should be to help them navigate complexity strategically and ethically.

Unwritten rules are not fixed facts of nature. They are shared understandings, kept alive and occasionally changed through everyday interaction. So teaching systems capital means helping students see where influence is possible, where constraints are firm, and how change tends to happen gradually. A student may notice that networking opportunities are unequally distributed and be unable to redesign that system overnight. They can still learn to build professional relationships, join communities of practice, find mentors and create collective support with peers. In workshops, this might mean rehearsing and debriefing real workplace conversations, mapping where discretion exists in a given setting and developing shared strategies as a group.

Equally, adaptation should never be taught without reflection. Students need language to analyse power, recognise structural inequality and understand that career outcomes are not simply a reward for merit. In that sense, systems capital is both practical and emancipatory. It prepares learners not merely to fit into systems, but to understand them well enough to help reshape them when opportunities arise.

What insights do you hope educators gain from the facilitator reflections, and how might those insights change their approach to teaching employability?

I included them because employability education is not a neutral activity. Educators are participants in the very systems they help students navigate. How a facilitator responds when a student tries on a new professional identity can make certain futures feel possible or out of reach.

I hope readers come to see teaching employability as less about supplying answers and more about creating space for reflection, dialogue, and exploration. The reflections capture moments when participants challenged assumptions, understood concepts differently, or exposed tensions between institutional expectations and lived experience. Those moments are not interruptions to the teaching. They are where meaning is actually made.

A central insight is that employability cannot be reduced to a checklist of graduate attributes. Students arrive with different backgrounds, resources, aspirations and constraints, so the same activity will land differently for different groups. Once educators accept this, their practice shifts from transmission to facilitation. The question changes from “Have I delivered the employability content?” to “How are students making sense of their place in future work?” That puts students’ meaning-making at the centre.

The reflections also invite humility and reflexivity. Employability is a dynamic and contested idea, and educators need to stay open to questioning their own assumptions about success, professionalism and career development.

How should universities and employers assess professional growth in ways that recognise developing identities and address unequal access to career opportunities?

We need to move beyond assessment that looks only at outcomes and begin to recognise developmental trajectories. Conventional markers such as internships, leadership roles, networking success and job offers have value, but they hide big differences in access. Two students can reach the same outcome by very different routes, facing different obstacles and receiving different levels of support.

An identity-based approach asks, “How is this person developing as a professional, and with what support?” Beyond what students have achieved, we should look at how they reflect, adapt, learn, exercise agency and make sense of their evolving professional identities. In practice, that points to reflective portfolios, narrative accounts of learning, mentoring conversations and evidence of growth over time. These methods recognise that development is non-linear and shaped by context.

There is also a caution. Professional identities are not simply declared. They are recognised, or withheld, by others. Assessment is one of the places where that recognition is granted or denied, so who decides, and on what criteria, matters. Reflective methods can favour students who already know how to speak the language of professionalism. Institutions should make criteria explicit, draw on more than one assessor and perspective, and accept a range of legitimate ways of being professional.

Universities and employers also share a responsibility to confront structural inequality. Assessment should not just reward those who have inherited advantageous social and cultural capital. It should value growth, learning agility and the ability to navigate complexity in differing circumstances. Employers can help through transparent progression criteria, fair access to mentoring and sponsorship, and attention to how workplace norms define who
“fits”.

Ultimately, the most meaningful measure of professional growth is not whether someone has become an “ideal worker”. It is whether they are becoming reflective professionals who can keep learning, contributing, and renegotiating their identities across unpredictable careers.

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