Employability development has become a central concern of higher education, with many students attending university to enhance their employability and career development. Universities offer a range of curricular, co-curricular and extracurricular employability-building activities, including work-integrated learning, mentoring and career…

Doctoral education aims to benefit those who undertake it, but does it exert a wider influence? Professional doctorates are commonly designed to have an impact beyond the individual concerned, but is this influence realised? This article focuses on a collaborative enquiry by a group of academics and doctoral alumni from non-discipline-specific…

Across Europe, assumptions are often made within the academic literature and by some social commentators that students have come to understand the purpose of higher education (HE) in increasingly instrumental terms. This is often linked to processes of marketisation and neo-liberalisation across the Global North, in which the value of HE has come…

How can higher education educate graduates who know more than "just knowledge"? Such an education includes developing in students an awareness of the limits of their knowledge, an ability to discern what kinds of knowledge are appropriate in a given situation and a sensitivity to different forms of knowing. When is scientific rigour…

Undertaking a PhD is a challenging endeavour. Pursuing a doctoral education in a "foreign" context tends to increase the demands of this intellectual venture. The nature of research-based PhD programmes, often characterised by a lack of formal curricula where academic supervision lasts several years, may add another layer of complexity.…

This article addresses the problem of how we theorise in writing about higher education through a reconstruction and interrogation of my previous work. I argue that theorising is messy, incomplete and a non-reductive process. Using C. Wright-Mills' notion of craft and Val Hey's insights into theorists who come to haunt us, I retrace the steps…

This paper is a case study exploring the author's use of reflective practice to facilitate the transition in role from a clinical manager with teaching responsibilities in a critical care unit to university lecturer. The similarities and differences in the roles with respect to learner characteristics, teaching contexts and effective teaching…

It is a major commitment to undertake doctoral study but relatively little is known about what motivates students to enrol or what they subsequently see as the benefits they have gained and they costs accrued. This report on a study of alumni who completed theses in Education in 1992, 1997 and 2002 in the UK argues that although the doctorate…