From Extracted Employability to Curriculum Conversations in Modern Languages
Amy Harriet Kinsman
Careers Adviser (Career Management Team)
As Careers Advisers, we work closely with a caseload of academic Schools, supporting students through individual appointments, workshops and employer engagement activities. Increasingly, however, there are opportunities to contribute to conversations about employability within the curriculum itself.
My work with the School of Modern Languages began in 2024 through an Extracted Employability workshop, inspired by the work of Professor Kate Daubney (University of London). Working alongside Dr Karol Valderrama-Burgos, who was the School Employability Officer at the time, the aim was not to identify additional employability activities that could be added to programmes, but instead to explore the employability learning that was already taking place across the curriculum.
Starting with Existing Practice
Discussions around employability can sometimes focus on introducing new interventions, such as CV workshops, employer presentations or careers sessions. Whilst these activities play an important role, the Extracted Employability approach begins from a different starting point by asking what students are already doing through their studies that contributes to their future development.
Working with academic colleagues across the School, we explored where students were developing knowledge, skills and graduate attributes that could contribute to their future career journeys. As might be expected within a Modern Languages curriculum, this included examples relating to communication, intercultural awareness, critical thinking, research, collaboration and independent learning.
Some examples were immediately visible. Within SP4003, students participate in CV and cover letter workshops that encourage them to reflect on their experiences and present themselves effectively to a professional audience. Elsewhere, students on SP4019 undertake a simulated job interview as part of an assessed portfolio, providing opportunities to develop oral communication skills and reflect on professional identity in a realistic professional context. These examples sat alongside numerous other activities across the curriculum that contribute to students’ development but may not always be recognised explicitly as employability-related learning.
One of the most valuable aspects of the workshop was the opportunity it provided for colleagues to reflect on existing practice and to consider how these elements of the curriculum might be articulated to students.
Mapping Employability Across the Curriculum
Following the workshop, Dr Karol Valderrama-Burgos and academic colleagues across the School contributed to a shared spreadsheet, identifying learning activities, modules and assessments that supported employability development.
The resulting resource provided a rich picture of the ways in which employability was already embedded throughout programmes within the School. Rather than identifying gaps, the exercise helped to make visible a range of activities that were already supporting students’ development.
The next step was to consider how these connections could be communicated more clearly to students.
Using the examples gathered through the exercise, we worked together to create a student-facing blog post highlighting how employability is developed through the Modern Languages curriculum. The intention was to help students recognise the value of the learning experiences already taking place within their degree and encourage reflection on the skills and attributes they were developing throughout their studies.
While academic colleagues could clearly identify the employability value of activities within their modules, students do not always make these connections automatically. Making those links more explicit helped students understand how their curriculum related to their wider personal and professional development.
Developing the Conversation
The work on Extracted Employability led to wider discussions about curriculum-embedded employability within the School.
One example emerged through collaboration with Ms Ana Barazal Barreira on the Oral Skills Spanish module (SP3001). As the module is taught in Spanish, my role was not one of delivery. Instead, I worked alongside Ms Barazal Barreira in a consultancy capacity, drawing on my experience of module design and careers education to support the development of employability-related learning activities and content.
This involved providing feedback on learning materials, sharing insights from careers practice, and discussing how careers learning could be introduced within the disciplinary context. For example, I provided feedback on resources exploring career pathways for Modern Languages graduates, helping to ensure that opportunities were presented as illustrative rather than prescriptive. We also discussed how students might critically engage with the growing use of AI in recruitment and job searching, as well as how reflective activities could strengthen students’ understanding of their skills, interests and professional identity. Throughout the process, we drew on established careers education frameworks, including the DOTS model, to support students’ self-awareness, opportunity awareness, decision-making and transition learning.
What interested me most about this work was the opportunity to contribute to curriculum design as a partner rather than through a standalone career’s intervention. The experience highlighted how careers professionals can support academic colleagues in embedding employability within existing modules while allowing disciplinary expertise to remain at the centre of the student learning experience.
Sharing Practice
In January 2026, both the Extracted Employability project and the SP3001 collaboration were referenced in presentations delivered by colleagues from the School at the University’s Learning and Teaching Conference. Seeing these initiatives discussed in the context of learning and teaching practice was encouraging and reflected the ongoing conversations taking place within the School around employability and the curriculum.
More recently, in May 2026, I was invited to attend the School of Modern Languages Language Pedagogy Group. The meeting provided an opportunity to share both the Extracted Employability work and the experience of supporting SP3001.
The discussion focused on how this style of collaboration might be developed further and how Careers could support colleagues who wished to explore employability within their own modules and programmes.
What was particularly encouraging was that the conversation extended beyond employability as a standalone activity. Instead, colleagues were considering how employability, graduate attributes and career development learning could form part of broader discussions about curriculum design and the student learning experience.
Reflections
The Extracted Employability approach provided an opportunity to identify, capture and communicate practice that was already taking place. In doing so, it created a foundation for further collaboration around curriculum design and student learning. It also helped make visible the many ways in which employability is already embedded within disciplinary teaching, often without being explicitly labelled as such.
For me, one of the key lessons from this work has been the value of making the implicit explicit. By helping students recognise and articulate the knowledge, skills and attributes they develop through their studies, we can support them in understanding the wider value of their learning, both within and beyond university.
The conversations that began through the Extracted Employability workshop have already led to a range of activities and collaborations. With the appointment of a new School Employability Officer, Dr Ayah Arabi Durkawi, I look forward to continuing this partnership with colleagues across the School and exploring how these conversations develop further.
If you are interested in exploring Extracted Employability, curriculum-embedded employability, or a consultancy approach to module development within your own discipline, I would be delighted to continue the conversation. You can reach me at [email protected]. One of the most valuable outcomes of this work has been the opportunity to learn alongside academic colleagues, and I would welcome opportunities to share experiences and explore similar approaches across other disciplines.
Resources
Daubney, K. (2022). “Teaching employability is not my job!”: redefining embedded employability from within the higher education curriculum. Higher Education, Skills and Work-Based Learning, 12(1), 92-106.