Not Just Job-Ready, But Future-Ready

• To be prepared for long careers in an evolving workplace, students will need the capacity to adapt, reflect upon, and reapply knowledge.
• At Kingston Business School, the Future Skills framework focuses on graduate employability by helping students develop and communicate skills such as adaptability, collaboration, creative problem-solving, and self-awareness.
• In the school’s Collect-Reflect-Connect model of self-awareness and articulation, students gather evidence of their new skills, consider how these skills might shape their futures, and use the knowledge to set new goals.

 
The term “graduate employability” used to refer to the idea that students were leaving college with discipline-specific skills that made them job-ready. But over the past five years, the phrase has evolved to also encompass students’ mindsets. Today, when graduates leave university, they are future-ready.

In other words, they are expected to have the capacity to adapt, reflect upon, and reapply knowledge as they experience a lifetime of changing work contexts. They move from having a set of literacy skills to possessing skills literacy—the ability to identify, evidence, and communicate their evolving skill sets.

Even at the outset of their careers, as students begin the recruitment process, they must be able to coherently and confidently articulate their skill sets. More employers are using tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to screen applicants. As students navigate this automated, data-driven hiring landscape, they must be able to show that they possess the necessary competencies.

To help students construct dynamic professional identities and prepare for jobs that don’t yet exist, business schools will need to design programs grounded in application, reflection, and self-awareness—not just knowledge acquisition. To make certain graduates possess the necessary skills, schools generally rely on the continuous improvement and assurance of learning strategies emphasized by AACSB. The next step is to ensure that students themselves can showcase their knowledge and growth at every stage of their careers.

A Skill-Building Framework

At Kingston Business School at Kingston University in the United Kingdom, we are focused on developing a “graduate employability mindset” that fosters reflective practice from day one. We want to ensure that students are not just work-ready at graduation—we want them to be equipped for lifelong adaptability.

Kingston University has developed the Future Skills framework, which revisits the concept of employability by considering how students learn and evolve, not simply how much they know. As a higher education institution, our goal is to support students as they develop and articulate their progress across their entire educational journeys. As well as recognizing the growing role of AI in shaping professional lives, the Future Skills approach emphasizes human qualities that machines cannot replicate.

The framework is built around two core principles. First, it helps students take responsibility for their own learning through reflection and critical analysis. Second, it enables them to articulate the development of nine key graduate attributes: adaptability, collaboration, empathy, enterprise, resilience, digital competency, self-awareness, a questioning mindset, and creative problem-solving ability.

As of September 2025, we began teaching and assessing the Future Skills framework in every undergraduate program across all three levels of study through modules tailored to each year. In the business school, these modules are supported by PebblePad, a personal learning platform that allows us to create interactive workbooks and portfolios.

The Future Skills Framework helps students take responsibility for their own learning through reflection and critical analysis and enables them to articulate the development of key graduate attributes.

In year one, Navigate, a suite of workshops helps students transition to university life and benchmark their current strengths. Students first evaluate their skills so they can build self-awareness and understand their gaps, then they develop personal brand maps and positioning statements. They also attend industry networking events to enhance their skills in communication, resilience, and adaptability.

In year two, Explore, students travel off-campus to engage in an experience at a graduate assessment center. There, they take part in group activities, give presentations, and participate in mock interviews. They are graded on these activities and receive personalized skills reports. As they engage in Explore activities, students connect what they learn to wider contexts in business and society.

In the final year, the Apply module utilizes peer-to-peer coaching to enable students to refine their professional identities and prepare to launch their careers.

As students progress through these stages, the skills that make them employable become embedded, visible, and cumulative. We position employability as a lifelong, evidence-based journey rather than a short-term goal.

The Portfolio Approach

Our Future Skills portfolio shifts students from literacy skills to skills literacy through what we call the Collect-Reflect-Connect model:

Collect. Students gather artifacts that demonstrate the skills they have acquired as they have taken courses, completed internships, volunteered, and participated in extracurricular activities. The collection process allows them to build a measurable, visible record of growth that can be tied to the nine graduate attributes. It also addresses the articulation gap—the disconnect between acquiring skills and being able to communicate them effectively. Through the act of collection, students begin to construct professional narratives grounded in tangible evidence.

Reflect. To analyze and draw meaning from experiences, students use structured reflection models such as the STARR framework (situation, task, action, result, reflection). Students who lead group projects, for instance, might explore how they resolved conflict, developed empathy, and demonstrated leadership under pressure. Reflection becomes an iterative cycle of awareness, based on what students did, why it mattered, and how it can shape their future actions. By engaging in this process repeatedly, students build the metacognitive capacity to recognize transferable skills and use professional language to articulate them.

Connect. Students are then encouraged to translate their reflection into action. They use their insights to plan for graduate employability, research potential career paths, identify skills gaps, and set development goals. They build what business professor Michael Tomlinson calls identity capital, a sense of professional self that underpins confidence, agency, and authenticity. Through this synthesis of evidence, reflection, and planning, students connect their academic experiences with their emerging professional identities.

Through the Collect-Reflect-Connect model, students gain a better understanding of how their attributes connect to employability and feel a sense of ownership over their development.

Last year, 109 first-year students engaged with the portfolio, recorded 744 Collect artifacts, and undertook 276 Reflect activities. Building their own skills evidence portfolios enabled students to reflect holistically on their personal development. As a result, their written reflective work showed a clearer articulation of skills and strengths.

The initiative has now been embedded across Kingston Business School and is the foundation for our Future Skills core curriculum. Through this model, students can gain a better understanding of how their attributes connect to employability. Just as important, they feel a sense of ownership over their development. At the same time, staff have observed that students are producing richer reflective writing and are more engaged with the concept of graduate employability.

Lessons for Business Schools

Experiences such as live client briefs, hackathons, and industry-embedded projects enable students to develop critical abilities and practice adaptability, collaboration, resilience, and creative problem-solving. But students must see how these opportunities are relevant to their own educational and career journeys. If students perceive skills development to be generic or disconnected from the workplace, they are less likely to see the value of these activities.

This means that schools should not present graduate employability skills in isolation, but rather should weave them throughout the learning journey in ways that allow students to transition from first year to final year and from classroom to workplace. When instructors regularly signal that graduate employability is central to the discourse, they reinforce that it is not a peripheral activity but a defining feature of business education.

For this reason, faculty engagement is essential. Making graduate employability a key feature of the curriculum requires both top-down leadership from administrators who can align initiatives with strategy and bottom-up ownership from faculty who understand the nuances of employability literacy. Therefore, to sustain this cultural shift, it’s critical that schools ensure faculty are on board with the approach.

At Kingston, our faculty recently had a chance to see firsthand how embedding employability skills into the curriculum prepares students for the job search. We held a speed interviewing event for accounting and finance students, and faculty could see how well students were primed to take on six three-minute job interviews with potential employers. In addition, we hold subject advisory panels between faculty and industry partners, and these events reinforce how important it is for employability to be a part of the curriculum.

Ultimately, the role of the business school must evolve from measuring skills to mobilizing them. Our responsibility is twofold: to equip students with the knowledge, intellectual agility, and graduate attributes they will need to become future-ready employees; and to ensure that students can communicate those competencies with clarity and confidence.

Through our skill-building framework, Kingston Business School addresses the articulation gap and prepares students to lead and thrive no matter how the job market changes. In this way, we are not just working to fulfill AACSB’s vision for providing innovative, socially impactful business education. We are ensuring that students graduate with confidence, self-awareness, and an ability to adapt that will see them through their entire careers.