Tales of the Unexpected: what skills and attributes successful graduates of a combined journalism course felt had improved their employability

In a previous edition of the AJE Journal, Cathy Darby examined what skills the next generation of professional journalists will need. But not everyone who studies journalism will become a journalist or even want to do so. So what skills do former students who took a course in journalism value about that course in relation to their employability, particularly those in graduate level jobs?
This small scale study focused on a combined degree course (with journalism as a core component) at a post 1992 university. The aim was to find out what skills and attributes, taught through the course, graduates who had obtained graduate jobs, (according to the SOC definition of Elias and Purcell, 2004), felt had enhanced their employability. This is against a background where figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (2013), collated by Grove, show that 36% of first degree graduates are in non-professional jobs six months later.
Yet, for the majority of students—and their parents—a degree as regarded as a passport to a better job. This is evidenced through both small scale studies such as Newstead and Hoskins ( in Fry, Ketteridge and Marshall,1999:63) and extensive such as those conducted by Purcell, Elias et Al( 2005) which show that one of the major reasons students choose to go to university is to obtain a higher-status and better paid job. It was hoped that if the author could discover which skills and attributes graduates valued most in terms of employability, more emphasis could be placed on them so that future graduates would become more employable.