I am currently leading a national project funded by the Office for Learning and Teaching (formerly the Australian Learning and Teaching Council) investigating the impact of WIL on student employment-readiness. We are conducting a suite of studies two of which involve the use of measures of employability using self-ratings of 18 key employability skills. Those 18 are a distillation of circa 40 constructs identified in literature and through a qualitative study of alumni. The distillation process itself was a worthwhile exercise because it involved making tough but necessary decisions and compromises around what constructs we included in the study (and what measures would be best for those constructs) and what were to be left out - and re-confirmed the suspicion that the idea of employability is so wide-ranging and in some senses ill-defined (analogous to the question 'what makes a good citizen' in some ways - just too big and vague) that it is not a measureable singularity but a rubric and catch-all term for a multi-dimensional collection of abilities; and that is putting aside the other concerns that Len Holmes reminds us to have about the idea. We are about to conduct the first of the studies using the measures we have selected so I cannot report on the psycholmetrics of that collection, but I'm happy to discuss further with you in the ensuing weeks.  

You can find out more about the project here:

http://www.griffith.edu.au/gihe/research/assessing-wil-impact/

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Design-focused evaluation article...