Opinion
For decades, universities have been singing an old song, making students a relatively straightforward promise – higher education develops the knowledge, skills and capabilities that will help them succeed in work while providing economic stability by obtaining a meaningful and fulfilling career.
For international students, that promise carries weight. They invest significantly in an overseas education with an expectation that the experience will strengthen their employment prospects, whether they remain in their host country, return home or build careers across multiple countries.
But what if developing employability skills is only part of the equation?
Our recent open-source publication in Studies in Higher Education challenges one of the most persistent assumptions underpinning graduate employability – that skills and credentials acquired through university are readily transferable from education into employment and from one labour market to another.
The issue is particularly urgent for Australia.
International education is entering a markedly different era. Australia is moving towards a more managed international education system, with government policy increasingly focused on sustainable growth, quality, diversification and the student experience. At the same time, the Australian Government explicitly identifies improving international student graduate outcomes as a priority.
Globally, similar questions are being asked. The OECD describes international student mobility as entering a more uncertain phase as countries reconsider the relationship between international education, migration and labour-market needs.
In this environment, universities cannot afford to treat employability as an optional careers-service activity at the end of a degree.
Our research examined Graduate Outcomes Survey data from +5000 business graduates at a major Australian university from 2017-2023, along with textual analysis of 107 graduate recruitment advertisements in Australia and China, and semi-structured interviews with 20 employers and HR experts in Australia and China.
The findings show that employability capital is not universally portable, such as the same skills and credentials can be valued differently across labour markets. Utilising six years of Graduate Outcomes Survey data, 88% of domestic Australian graduates were employed at the time of the survey, compared with 47% of international Chinese graduates. Yet international Chinese graduates reported relatively strong confidence across capabilities including problem-solving, collaboration, adaptability and innovative thinking.
This does not prove that the two groups possessed equivalent skills. But it exposes an important problem. Possessing employability capabilities and successfully converting them into employment are not the same thing.
To explain this, our research introduces the concept of “employability recognition regimes”: the systems through which employers decide what counts as credible evidence of capability, potential and organisational fit.
And those systems differ substantially between labour markets.
In Australia, employers placed greater emphasis on communicative confidence, professional presence, initiative, learning agility, stakeholder engagement and an individual’s capacity to articulate what they could contribute.
In China, employability was more strongly filtered through credential legitimacy, institutional prestige, recognised internships and certificates, organisational alignment, resilience, relational fit and interdisciplinary capability associated with digital and industrial transformation.
The implication is deceptively simple. The same graduate can be valued in one labour market and discounted in another. For international graduates, employability is partly a translation problem. This finding should change how we should think about employability education.
Universities commonly invest in graduate attributes, work-integrated learning, career development learning, internships and employability frameworks. These remain important. But capability alone is not enough. Students also need signal literacy, such as knowing how to make their skills and experiences credible to employers. Students need opportunities within their curriculum to understand how employers interpret evidence. This often occurs through a project, internship, credential, international experience, leadership role or disciplinary capability.
For international students, this needs to be explicitly transnational.
A Chinese student studying in Melbourne, for example, should not have to choose between being prepared for the Australian labour market or the Chinese labour market. Universities recruiting globally should be capable of helping students understand both.
That means moving beyond generic advice about CVs, interviews and “soft skills”. It means using alumni, employers and international partners to expose students to different recruitment practices, digital platforms, cultural expectations and ways of demonstrating professional value.
Importantly, this work should not sit solely with careers teams. Our research argues that signal literacy should be embedded into disciplinary curricula and assessment rather than offered as an optional add-on.
The OECD’s latest analysis shows that international graduates initially experience weaker labour-market outcomes than domestic graduates in countries including Australia and the Netherlands. In Australia, the gap narrows over time, but differences in earnings and skills utilisation can persist.
As international education becomes more contested, governments and universities will understandably focus on numbers, visas, migration settings, quality and financial sustainability.
But students will continue to judge the value of international education partly by what their education enables them to do afterwards.
Universities therefore need to make a more sophisticated promise. We cannot guarantee any graduate a job. Nor can we make labour markets equitable through curriculum alone.
What we can do is prepare all students to understand that employability is not a universal currency. Australian graduates need to know how to translate their capabilities across labour markets and navigate increasingly non-linear careers. That is a worthwhile curriculum reform to consider.
Professor Rachael Hains-Wesson is the Associate Dean Learning and Teaching in the School of Global, Urban, and Social Studies at RMIT University and Dr Wei Li is a Senior Lecturer in International Business at The University of Sydney Business School.