Connectedness learning in the life sciences: LinkedIn as an assessment task for employability and career exploration

Prevailing approaches to graduate employability tend to focus on human capital, in the form of work-related skills and knowledge. Such approaches often overlook dispositional and contextual factors that contribute to a person’s employability, such as strength of career identity and connectedness with professional communities. This chapter evaluates an effort to incorporate connectedness learning into a core third-year unit of a health sciences degree at an Australian university, using the social networking site LinkedIn as the basis for a reflective employability report and goal setting assignment. Student feedback about the module and qualitative thematic analysis of the students' employability reports demonstrated that most students viewed employability as the possession of human capital and exhibited low levels of connectedness capabilities. We argue that university leaders and educators need to adopt more sophisticated approaches to employability, such as connectedness learning, in order to help students become employable graduates.