2. Overview

In the next section, we set out the two primary contexts underpinning our discussion: impact and employability, examining how these notions have been utilized to frame undergraduate curriculum provision. Following this, we turn to the design and implementation of Applied Sociolinguistics, a final-year module taught at BCU. This module has at its center a focus on collaborative research, where students work with a partner to investigate an issue related to language use (see the Appendix for an overview). This discussion concentrates on the aims and objectives of the module, its underlying pedagogical philosophy, and some practical considerations for implementation. We then examine the integration of career readiness into program design, drawing on ongoing work within a new linguistics department at Boise State University to embed career readiness from program inception. More specifically, we discuss interventions ranging from individual classroom activities to university-level collaborations aimed at expanding workplace engagement, demonstrating how employability can be embedded both structurally and interventionally as integral components of learning within linguistics curricula. Pulling these threads together, we finally consider the implications of this work, as well as how we might help students understand and reframe their orientation to employability.

3. Preliminaries

Before turning to our substantive discussion, we briefly outline how this collaboration emerged. In 2015, Anna Marie was invited to deliver a series of workshops in Birmingham, UK, exploring the themes of her (then in progress) book Bringing linguistics to work (Trester Reference Trester2017). These workshops prompted wide-ranging conversations about employability and its place within linguistics curricula. At the time, Robert had recently completed an edited volume focused on impact (Lawson & Sayers Reference Lawson and Sayers2016), while Anna Marie had transitioned from academia into the nonprofit sector, gaining a new perspective on both impact and employability. The event provided an opportunity for us to connect around shared interests, leading to ongoing correspondence, reciprocal classroom visits (virtually), and sustained engagement with one another’s work.

In 2019, Robert invited Anna Marie to the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, to co-facilitate a professional-development workshop for Ph.D. students. At the outset of this event, we asked students what they hoped to gain from the day. It became clear that questions of professional identity, precarity, and academic labor were central to students’ concerns. Although we initially planned to develop these discussions into a joint article, the COVID-19 pandemic and a series of significant personal and professional transitions delayed that work. By 2024, Anna Marie had returned to academia as a career-readiness coordinator, a role that complemented her earlier experience supporting graduate students and sharpened the comparative lens developed here, while Robert had been teaching his Applied Sociolinguistics module for several years at his home institution of BCU. This article thus emerges from a sustained dialogue spanning workshops, teaching practice, and institutional contexts over the past decade.

4. Impact: a ‘way in’ to thinking about employability

As noted in the introduction, impact is now a formally embedded part of evaluating British research effectiveness through a system known as the ‘Research Excellence Framework’ (REF hereafter). Held every seven years, REF aims to ‘provide accountability for public investment in research and produce evidence of the benefits of this investment; to provide benchmarking information and establish reputational yardsticks; and to inform the selective allocation of funding for research’ (REF 2026). This is achieved through a number of metrics, including research outputs, research environment and culture, and impact, the latter of which was intended to capture the broader application of academic research beyond the confines of the university setting (see UKRI 2021 for examples of impact case studies from a range of UK universities). The introduction of the impact metric was partly to satisfy growing calls among politicians and the public for universities to justify how taxpayer funds were being spent and partly to articulate more explicitly the value of academic research to a wider audience (see Lawson & Sayers Reference Lawson and Sayers2016 for a history of the impact agenda in the UK).

Across the arts and humanities sector, the introduction of impact has not been straightforward, particularly because, as Belfiore (Reference Belfiore2015:100) notes, the ‘ultimate outcome of [such] research is not immediately visible in the shape of illnesses cured, vaccines created, tsunamis and natural disasters averted, or new inventions brought to market’ (although see Pedersen et al. Reference Pedersen, Grønvad and Hvidtfeldt2020 for a discussion of impact across social sciences and humanities subjects). In the decade since impact was established as an REF metric, it has been variously critiqued, rejected, and challenged in arts and humanities subjects, resisting attempts to reduce the value of scholarly inquiry solely to an instrumentalized financial or economic dimension (Belfiore Reference Belfiore2015, Benneworth Reference Benneworth2015). In this process, impact work in the humanities has pivoted away from an exclusively economic case to make strides in informing public policy, supporting community engagement and well-being, and raising awareness on issues of multilingualism, local culture, the effect of COVID-19 on the cultural industries, and more (see, for example, the collected case studies in Holmes-Henderson & Sewell Reference Holmes-Henderson and Sewell2024).

Despite these efforts, however, there has been animated debate concerning the ‘worth’ of arts and humanities subjects, often condensed to a form of ‘utilitarian logic’ (Belfiore Reference Belfiore2015:97). For instance, in mid-2023, Rishi Sunak (the former British Prime Minister and then Leader of the Conservative Party) vowed to ‘crack down on rip-off university courses’Footnote ² (see Bulaitis Reference Bulaitis2023 for an overview), highlighting career destination and graduate salary as the primary means through which to judge the efficacy of degree programs. Even if one were to overlook the fact that such a move would limit uptake of arts and humanities degrees among students from less advantaged backgrounds (i.e. the ones who stand to gain the most from going to university), with potential ramifications on social mobility and personal growth (Morrison Reference Morrison2023), it is clear that concentrating student enrollment on STEM degreesFootnote ³ (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) closes off opportunities for participation in community engagement, cultural debates, and exploration of social issues, from both historical and contemporary perspectives. With arts sector workplace engagement alarmingly low, especially in the aftermath of COVID-19 (Wamsley et al. Reference Wamsley, Gilmore, O’Brien and Torreggiani2022), Sunak’s statement further undermined the social and cultural contributions made by arts and humanities students and scholars in civic life.

Although discussions of impact are principally aimed at research-active staff within universities, we argue that centering impact in undergraduate linguistics curricula can foster a view of students as agents of social change, emphasizing how they can leverage their knowledge beyond academia (both during their degrees and after graduation). Thus, impact is not only a goal in its own right, but also a mechanism through which disciplinary knowledge can have wider social or economic effects. In a powerful call to action, Charity Hudley (Reference Charity Hudley2023:222) argues that ‘[i]t is time to move away from simply advancing linguistic scholarship and make the intellectual leap toward research that has articulated immediate tangible benefits for marginalized communities and communities of color’ (our emphasis). Applied linguistics has a long history of this approach, while disciplines like computational linguistics (Bender & Hanna Reference Bender and Hanna2025), corpus linguistics (McEnery & Brookes Reference McEnery and Brookes2024), forensic linguistics (Frazer Reference Frazer2024), and queer linguistics (Jones Reference Jones2023) have increasingly worked to relate research findings to tangible changes in practice and policy. In their recent volumes Decolonizing linguistics (Charity Hudley et al. Reference Charity Hudley, Mallinson and Bucholtz2024a) and Inclusion in linguistics (Charity Hudley et al. Reference Charity Hudley, Mallinson and Bucholtz2024b), Charity Hudley and colleagues also share powerful examples of advancing social change within our field.

As important as this call to social action is, though, it has yet to settle at the heart of the discipline. Moreover, impact (as a component of social action) cannot be uncritically integrated into an undergraduate curriculum, especially given how enmeshed it is within specific cultural contexts. As such, questions remain about how best to frame impact in a way that speaks directly to students’ interests, needs, and concerns. We argue that relating impact to employability is one approach of anchoring curriculum content in a way that is meaningful for students, particularly in terms of future job prospects and the desire among many (if not all) students to secure gainful employment upon graduation, in addition to being able to make a valuable contribution to the world through their work (see also Althorpe Reference Althorpe2024). Importantly, this approach can also strengthen students’ engagement with their studies, offering authentic opportunities to connect their learning with real-world issues and to develop skills such as communication, collaboration, and problem solving that are valued both within and beyond the university.

We acknowledge, however, that framing employability and impact in this way risks aligning with a more instrumentalized, market-driven view of higher education, one that might be perceived as running counter to the social justice angle promoted across the discipline (and elsewhere in this article). Nonetheless, we resist this characterization for the following reasons. First, employability ranks high among students’ priorities (regardless of degree focus), often influencing, or even determining, choice of degree (Jackson Reference Jackson2013, Behle Reference Behle2020, Jackson & Tomlinson Reference Jackson and Tomlinson2022, Gawne & Cabraal Reference Gawne and Cabraal2023:e38). Furthermore, work will be—for many—one of the main ways that they give back to their communities, and students will explicitly look for skills to bring to societal challenges as part of their criteria for continuing a course of study. If we can integrate employability into undergraduate linguistics curricula in a way that aligns with the pursuit of impact and the notion of doing good, while simultaneously developing students’ awareness of how they can leverage their degree beyond academia, equipping them with a sense of choicefulness and honing an ethical and moral compass around work decisions, this stands to benefit everyone involved.

5. Universities and the employability agenda

First, let us define what we mean by ‘employability’.Footnote ⁴ Rather than a comprehensive evaluation of different employability frameworks, our discussion here is necessarily selective, with an aim to briefly operationalize this term by exploring how it has been used in the literature. In one of the earliest discussions of employability in the higher education sector, Hillage and Pollard (Reference Hillage and Pollard1998:2) define it as ‘being capable of getting and keeping fulfilling work’ and the ‘capability to move self-sufficiently within the labour market to realise potential through sustainable employment’. Harvey (Reference Harvey2001:98) offers a similar conceptualization, noting that employability is the ‘propensity of students to obtain a job’, while Yorke (Reference Yorke2006:8) emphasizes skills-based attributes, defining employability as ‘a set of achievements—skills, understandings and personal attributes—that makes graduates more likely to gain employment and be successful in their chosen occupations, which benefits themselves, the workforce, the community and the economy’. Building on this formulation, Oliver (Reference Oliver2015:59) adapts Yorke’s definition to argue that ‘employability means that students and graduates can discern, acquire, adapt and continually enhance the skills, understandings and personal attributes that make them more likely to find and create meaningful paid and unpaid work that benefits themselves, the workforce, the community and the economy’.

In more recent work, Daubney (Reference Daubney2022:94) argues that the term ‘employability’ is often used to ‘describe the outcome of a transition from study to work, in other words the process of becoming employable’. This framing also relates to ‘future proofing’ students from the changeable conditions of the labor market, especially pertinent in the context of increasing automation and the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and associated fields (see also Curry et al. Reference Curry, McEnery and Brookes2025 for a discussion of AI in applied linguistics). As Römgens et al. (Reference Römgens, Scoupe and Beausaert2020:2588) presciently point out, ‘[h]igher education institutions need to prepare students for jobs that do not exist yet, for using technologies that have yet to be invented, and for solving problems that nobody has yet thought of’.

The set of skills that fall under the umbrella of ‘employability’ are multifaceted, and there have been multiple attempts to capture their composition. For example, Kornelakis and Petrakaki (Reference Kornelakis and Petrakaki2020) discuss the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority employability framework, which sets out skills related to information technology, numeracy, communication, problem solving, team working, and an ability to improve one’s own learning and performance. We can extend this list to include interpersonal skills, resilience, self-awareness, active learning, career management, enterprise, and cooperation (Fallows & Steven Reference Fallows and Steven2000, Mason et al. Reference Mason, Williams and Cranmer2009, Gill Reference Gill2018). In the United States, the NACE’s eight competencies add skills in critical thinking and equity and inclusionFootnote ⁵ (NACE 2024).

Universities are often positioned as the sector responsible for creating ‘work-ready’ graduates, either through specialist provision via specific employability-related modules (Yorke & Knight Reference Yorke and Knight2006) or through a more holistic ‘whole university experience’ allied to the world of work (Rae Reference Rae2007). Kornelakis and Petrakaki (Reference Kornelakis and Petrakaki2020:290) suggest that ‘[e]mployability skills may be developed through a variety of student learning opportunities and activities which are part of the higher education experience—for example, self-study, participation in lectures, attending specialized career-advising workshops or participating in work-integrated learning programmes’.

Nevertheless, the extent to which universities should take on this responsibility is contested. For example, drawing on views solicited from staff at one ‘case university’, Daubney (Reference Daubney2022:94) reports that many academic staff viewed the embedding of employability within university curricula as the responsibility of careers service departments, while also expressing concern that such a focus would come at the expense of disciplinary content and threaten curricular integrity. Daubney (Reference Daubney2022:97–98) consequently proposes the concept of ‘extracted employability’, or the ‘means of identifying elements that have innate employability value in a program, subject or discipline’, to answer the question of how an academic program develops knowledge, attributes, skills, and experience in its students. Daubney goes on to argue that an extracted employability framing can help academics identify how employability is already innate to existing curriculum provision, without needing to add new course or module content.

In more recent commentary, Hora (Reference Hora2023) suggests that we should not focus overly on skills to the exclusion of understanding how they function in context. In his words, ‘the first step in improving career-readiness efforts is to replace any frameworks or tools that perpetuate generic, normative views of soft skills with a more accurate view of skills as contextualized, culturally shaped modes of reasoning, interaction and behavior’ (Hora Reference Hora2023), an undertaking that sociolinguistic scholars seem to be particularly well positioned to lead, as we show in the following discussion.

Indeed, just about anything and everything that ‘gets done’ in the workplace is accomplished through language, so in some ways, nothing is more fundamentally transferable than linguistics. Thinking about linguistics curricula, then, how do we move from the general scope of employability skills to specific strategies that help students develop these skills and the ability to critically reflect on their own mastery and acquisition of these skills? Moreover, how do we support students in articulating their contextualized understandings of their skills? Ultimately, we argue that the concept of impact introduced in the first part of this discussion is one way to operationalize thinking about employability, including identifying, deploying, and reflecting on the transferable skills that demonstrate (and comprise) employability. Thus, the rest of this article considers to what extent these concepts can be integrated into curricula to serve broader social concerns. We begin by analyzing the structural integration of impact and employability in Applied Sociolinguistics, an undergraduate module taught at BCU.

6. Undergraduate provision: Applied Sociolinguistics

From 2016–2017, BCU undertook a review of curriculum content aimed at strengthening its commitment to practice-based education, research, and knowledge exchange. Departments were required to update their teaching provision in light of this objective, aligning their degree offering to better serve the next generation of students, including a more explicit focus on employability-related content. This process, known as ‘Transforming the Curriculum’ (TtC hereafter), was supported by a range of workshops, guidance documents, and internal reviews, with a planned launch date of September 2019 for revalidated degrees.

Given the nonvocational nature of the subject, academic staff in the School of EnglishFootnote ⁶ discussed how best to translate TtC requirements into a meaningful formulation for prospective students while also adhering to disciplinary benchmarks (see Lawson & Wood Reference Lawson and Wood2019 for details). For example, while the TtC strategy called for employment-enhancement activities to be embedded across the curricula, supplemented by ‘added value’ activities, this integration had to make sense within the specific subject context, rather than being simply shoehorned into the curriculum. The solution was two-fold. The first was to introduce a stand-alone ‘Work Placement’ module in the second year of all English undergraduate degree programs. In this module, students are tasked with securing an external placement totaling seventy hours over the course of a semester, with the assessment strategy giving students the opportunity to reflect on the development of their employability skills. There was, however, no requirement for students to apply their knowledge of English Studies during the placement, so while the module was useful from an employability perspective, it was arguably less so from an English Studies one.

The second, more linguistics-specific, solution was the introduction of a new final-year module titled ‘Applied Sociolinguistics’. This module was informed by work presented in Lawson & Sayers Reference Lawson and Sayers2016, resulting in a module grounded in existing research directions in sociolinguistics with impact at its core. As it is a final-year module, students have some prior knowledge of a range of linguistic frameworks and approaches, including phonetics, grammar, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, pragmatics, politeness theory, and stylistics, alongside familiarity with quantitative and qualitative methods. A typical module enrollment is around ten to fifteen students, which is a relatively small cohort to manage. Over twelve weeks, students are introduced to research impact, action-based research, building collaborative partnerships, research ethics, linguistic methodologies, and different approaches to the analysis of textual and spoken data (see the Appendix for an overview of module content). To augment the taught component of the module, external speakers are also invited to talk about their experience of working at the intersection of linguistics and ‘industry’ (broadly defined). In the past seven years, this has included scholars, entrepreneurs, and practitioners from Australia, Spain, Switzerland, the UK, and the US, covering businesses, consultancies, charity organizations, universities, and museums, highlighting new ways of bringing together linguistic expertise in novel contexts (see also Scott et al. Reference Scott, Connell, Thomson and Willison2019:704–5).

For the assessment, students are required to build a research collaboration with an internal or external partner to investigate an issue related to language use within the organization and then to submit a report for the partner outlining the research-informed recommendations that help address the problem identified. Importantly, this project is developed collaboratively with the partner, speaking to a broader agenda of ‘accompaniment research’ (Bucholtz et al. Reference Bucholtz, Casillas and Lee2016), as well as positioning universities and their students as agents of change (Sara & Jones Reference Sara and Jones2018). As such, the projects students pursue are very much driven by a bottom-up approach, with partners guiding and co-developing the kinds of questions and problems tackled over the course of the collaboration. This form of real-world and problem-based pedagogy represents a key connection between impact as a form of social good and employability as a form of student development.

In the first year of the module (2019), responsibility for sourcing university partners was deliberately centralized to manage expectations and evaluate which forms of collaboration were most viable. In subsequent years, students have been supported in establishing their own partnerships, drawing from their local community, personal networks, employment contacts, and friends and family connections. Since its introduction, students taking the module have developed collaborations with a range of organizations in Birmingham and the West Midlands region, including internal university departments (such as the School of Jewellery, the Widening Participation Team, the library, and the Careers Team), while partnerships beyond the university have included local businesses, museums, restaurants, coffee shops, bars, councils, art galleries, and care providers.

In many ways, the module moves the description and analysis of linguistic phenomena into the realm of concrete application of this knowledge to make a difference to civic society. This has included helping museums better understand the impact of their health and safety signage in relation to COVID-19 guidance; identifying imbalances in match day reports of women’s football coverage; developing glossaries and other student-facing resources for the university library; training back- and front-of-house staff in a local restaurant on idiom use and its effect on comprehension among L2 speakers of English; and informing teaching approaches in an outdoor pursuits school (immersive, experiential, outdoor learning experiences), among a range of other projects over the years.

Furthermore, given the diversity of student backgrounds at BCU (approximately 50% of students are Black, Asian, or Minority Ethnic), the module creates opportunities for students to pursue projects that speak directly to Nartey’s (Reference Nartey2023) call to ‘imagine our research as a transformative tool to advance diversity, equity and social justice’. In fact, we would go even further than this to argue that we can also imagine our teaching as a transformative tool to achieve these aims. By linking socially informed teaching and research more explicitly, it is possible to develop innovative approaches that position students more explicitly as agents of change, leveraging their knowledge to address problems of inclusion, diversity, and equality within their own personal contexts.

Not only do students’ projects sit squarely within the ‘impact agenda’, giving them the opportunity to contribute to their local communities and beyond by applying their knowledge of how language works, but they also help students develop their employability skills, including professionalism, motivation, initiative, communication, reliability, problem solving, emotional intelligence, teamwork, self-management, and more. The experience also helps them to story these skills by having a ready example when talking to a prospective employer. This value is something students recognize in their module evaluations. For example, reflecting on her project with Wolverhampton Art Gallery, one student reported that ‘[t]he opportunity to collaborate with the gallery [was] a formative experience. Working with everybody involved in this partnership, especially young people from Wolverhampton, has been an exciting challenge for me as a third-year student and it has allowed me to further my knowledge and understanding of professional relationships’. Similarly, another student described the module as a ‘great [one] which helps with career progression’.

As such, the module speaks to the point raised by Pegg et al. (Reference Pegg, Waldock, Hendy-Isaac and Lawton2012:4), who note that:

More specifically within linguistics, the module responds to Gawne and Cabraal’s call (Reference Gawne and Cabraal2023:e39) for educators to ‘clearly articulate the skills that linguistics training can offer students and the potential career pathways available to someone with a linguistics degree’.

We are not aware of comparable modules within other linguistics programs, in the UK or internationally, that structurally embeds employability within a linguistics curriculum. The closest equivalents include a module taught at the University of Leeds, where students collaborate with a local museum as the primary partner, a module titled ‘Applying Linguistics in the Real World’ taught at Queen Mary University of London, and internship pathways developed by Abdesalam Soudi at the University of Pittsburgh. The program of liberatory linguistics, as pioneered by Anne Charity Hudley and Christine Mallinson (see Charity Hudley Reference Charity Hudley2023:214), similarly foregrounds partnerships and impact, although primarily within primary and secondary education contexts. While all of these examples provide important applied opportunities, they operate within more defined partnership or placement frameworks than the structurally embedded model described here.

Nevertheless, extending such approaches to a curriculum-level model represents a distinct set of practical and institutional challenges. First is that the introduction of new undergraduate modules is often constrained by university processes (and often a concomitant lack of flexibility in these processes). For example, new degree programs in the UK are typically approved on a five-year basis (Lawson & Wood Reference Lawson and Wood2019:14), meaning that introducing new modules outside of that timetable is usually impossible. Even in cases where modules can be introduced during a curriculum redesign, these still need to be approved by university and faculty panels and resourced properly based on student demand (low or no student demand usually means that a module will not be approved). This restraint is potentially less of an issue in university systems where academics have more flexibility to design and implement new offerings, although new modules and courses must still be aligned with students’ learning needs.

Second, while university modules are usually taught by academic staff who have expertise in that topic area, it would be fair to say that staff teaching on any given linguistics degree program may well have limited experience in partnership building, even in their own area of research, and may lack institutional support for professional development. As such, this could be a barrier to developing module content, where staff do not have the knowledge to train students on impact, collaborative research projects, and embedding meaningful interventions. This is not an insurmountable problem, but it does rely on academic staff being willing to engage with different assessment methods and pedagogical approaches (such as the resources and activities suggested throughout this article).

The third problem relates to difficulties in partnership building, specifically in articulating to prospective partners not only the value of the collaboration, but also how and why language issues within the organization might be amenable to linguistic attention. Convincing partners that there is something in their organization worth studying from a linguistic perspective is regularly cited as an issue by students, partly due to students’ lack of confidence in their own problem-solving/identifying abilities and partly due to partners’ occasional (albeit misplaced) skepticism that linguistics is a ‘useful’ discipline. Having a set of ready-made examples to cite goes a long way toward resolving anxieties during preliminary discussions with prospective partners.

The fourth issue is the extent to which decisions about implementing the intervention rest with the partner organization. Once the assessment is submitted, there is no follow-up on whether the recommendations were adopted nor any monitoring of how effective the recommendations were. This is partly a consequence of the partnerships being time-limited collaborations for the purposes of student assessment. Ultimately, however, systems could be put in place to facilitate oversight of the proposed interventions, with a view to establishing longer-term and more robust collaborations with partners.

The final problems concern (i) the scalability of the module and (ii) the availability of partner opportunities, problems that become more pronounced in the context of larger student cohorts. The amount of staff time required to teach, guide, and advise students is substantial, while regular check-ins are needed to ensure that students make progress and avoid stressful ‘crunch times’ in terms of assessment deadlines. Moreover, there will undoubtedly be occasions where staff need to address partner concerns or, in extreme cases, to intervene in situations where the partner is not responding to student queries or emails. For larger cohorts, there is a higher chance that some students will struggle to secure a partner collaboration. Having ‘reserve projects’ (developed through the module leader’s own networks) can be a useful strategy to address this issue and to ensure that, in a worst-case scenario, students can still engage with the module’s aims and objectives.

To conclude this section, the module aligns with Benneworth’s (Reference Benneworth2015:48) argument for a ‘more positive set of conversations [which seek] to proactively reframe ideas of impacts, societal benefit and cultural value in terms of humanities’ own beliefs and practices’. In many ways, the module sets out a more inclusive conceptualization of what counts as impact and, importantly, broadens the scope of who can ‘do’ impact-related work (Ashwin Reference Ashwin2016). It also helps refine the frameworks students have about employability and the broader applicability of what they learn over the course of their degree, helping them better articulate these skills to prospective employers. In doing so, the module is an example of how productive collaborative research can be, opening up new directions for knowledge generation and making a difference in the world through linguistic inquiry.

7. Integrating employability across the curriculum

We now consider how employability might be integrated within both undergraduate and postgraduate training. This section draws primarily, though not exclusively, on experience in the US, and from activities created to give students opportunities to reflect on the broader impact and application of their research, skills, and training. Such activities are especially well suited to a linguistic pedagogy, given the centrality of synthesis and pattern finding to both method and analysis.

In developing curricula, ideas, and activities, in collaboration with faculty members, that relate to career exploration and education, this section contributes to Scott and Willison’s (Reference Scott and Willison2021:1121) call for practical in-class resources. Inspired by the Modern Language Association’s Report on English majors’ career preparation and outcomes (2024:1) and their recognition that ‘even the smallest step towards career preparation activities within a department is a step in the right direction’, this section shares a range of interventions around employability within linguistics, including practical activities and examples ranging from the easily implementable (e.g. topics for a ‘water cooler’ conversation) to more comprehensive and complex (e.g. changes to curricula), and looking for ways for these activities to be as student-led as possible.

8. Broader implications

All told, these ideas for interventions represent an orientation to careers and employability that brings the analytical skills and research orientation cultivated by our students to the challenge of designing meaningful careers where they get to use as much of their research and analytical training in their work tasks as possible. Building on our earlier discussion of skills (see Section 5), here we move on to explore four remaining themes that build out from dimensions of employability described in the literature review: choicefulness, professional self-presentation, dancing with capitalism, and, finally, job crafting (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Dimensions of employability as connected to themes explored in this article.

Table 1. Long description

The table is titled Employability and consists of six columns. The first column, titled Dimensions, contains the row header Themes explored in this piece. The subsequent five columns list the dimensions and their corresponding themes as follows. Assets corresponds to Skills. Deployment corresponds to Choicefulness. Presentation corresponds to Professional self-presentation. Circumstances corresponds to Dancing with capitalism. Perspective corresponds to Job crafting.

First is a sense of choicefulness—we want students to know that they have choices and to know why they are making the choices that they are making. Sometimes a student can spend months researching a potential job or world of work only to decide that this is not the way they want to go. But this is not lost effort; this is powerful self-knowledge. Even staying exactly where you are can be a powerful choice when you know why you are making it (and not another choice).

And our pedagogy needs to be critical; we otherwise do our students a disservice, beginning with how we set them up to engage with market capitalism. We see an important opportunity here to cue up the career conversation, even if it is a simple nod to the connection between the learning objective in an activity and a skill that might be utilized to solve a workplace challenge. This connection signals a continuity: students will continue to use their brain and the ethical sensitivities we have carefully honed over the course of their studies when they leave university. This matters because, for many students, career conversations may be the first time the subject of exchanging labor for wages as part of a market system has come up, which can (and often does) trigger resentment and a desire to disengage from the topic of employment. It can seem like a false duality that it is only upon ‘leaving’ academia that one participates in the inhuman(e) forces of the labor market, while ‘staying’ means living a life of the mind, unsullied by having to confront all the ways that the capitalist system shapes decision making and drives outcomes.

This is, of course, a false dichotomy, because academia itself participates in capitalism and is, in turn, shaped by forces that run counter to the aspirational purposes for which our institutions were designed (see, for example, Riebe’s Reference Riebe2024 discussion of academic capitalism). But to invisibilize how these forces operate in one set of institutions, while focusing only on how they work ‘over there’ in the ‘business world’, is disempowering and underpins, at least in part, the imposter syndrome (also referred to as ‘imposter phenomenon’) that so often arises when students ‘try on’ new ways of presenting themselves professionally.

Our collaboration has taught us to use this awareness of role distance. Rather than dismissing students’ sense of alienation, we can cue an orientation to career reflection through a lens of systems change and draw on the uniquely powerful training (cultivated by linguistics) in thinking and seeing how embedded systems interpolate (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, etc.). Systems thinking can thus be brought to help our students see their own positionality in the systems that structure employment and to identify those most in need of radical change, and also to see that these systems (including capitalism itself) were designed by people and therefore can and must be changed by people working together. For one thing, most of us do not have the choice to opt out. At present, most of us must participate in capitalistic systems to survive, but because these systems are not functioning as they should, we cannot and should not yield our critical minds. We must be able to imagine how things could be different, to think like citizens with agency, voice, and choice, and to recognize that we are responsible for changing the aspects of our social systems that do not serve the people for whom they were created. Crucially, when students are equipped with choicefulness, they are empowered to say ‘no’ to opportunities that do not align with their values, both while on the job hunt and during activities that they may be called upon to do during the job itself.

We suggest that one way to think about this is the concept of ‘dancing with capitalism’. We have agency, we have efficacy, and we have purpose and great potential. We want to express our gifts, and there are other forces pushing and pulling us around. To invoke the dance metaphor, someone else chose the music, and if we are not paying attention, capitalism is leading the dance. As educators, we can equip our students with this dual need for critical awareness and a sense of responsibility for change. When we engage broad awareness of the systems that shape the realities of work, our students can feel their autonomy and agency. The real challenge we want to prepare them for is not simply getting the job but sustaining themselves within it; thus, maintaining clarity of focus, purpose, and commitment to the values cultivated by linguistics—including being in community and sharing responsibility for it—is paramount.

This leads then to the theme of job crafting, a concept from the organizational development (OD) literature. OD researchers have contributed decades of analysis about how workers use their agency and voice to change the conditions and terms of their employment (see, for example, Lee & Lee Reference Lee and Lee2018, Tims et al. Reference Tims, Twemlow and Fong2022). This could begin with an employee working with their manager to find ways to do more of the things they enjoy and fewer things they do not, but it can also be extended to policy change, within organizations and beyond. Just as we encourage our students to be active participants in professional associations and meetings while they are in university, we can again signal continuity by advising that they should be active in the professional associations and meetings that structure whatever world of work they will be joining. What are their associations advocating for? What kinds of changes are needed? Who is leading the call? How can these efforts be supported?

Ultimately, we are talking about the time and energy that any of us has to give this world. For many of us, our work is going to be one of the major ways (if not the major way) we impact our communities, and we want to find work that aligns with our sense of purpose and meaning. Linguists bring powerful skills, and we can choose where to apply them to the challenges we see as being most in need of solving. Understood this way, then, conversations about employability are conversations about reaching one’s full potential. They are about human flourishing. If we take this stance, we can help (both from the inside and the outside) address the operative barriers that work against a sense of belonging at work. To start small, we can find something actionable, something that we can change as individuals and in community—for example, recognizing discriminatory hiring practices and assumptions made by those who have historically been in power about who can do what, or what ‘confidence’ looks and sounds like.

The more we can show how these social constructions, which tend to get filtered through one perspective, are subjective, the more we can teach our students to see both how things are currently set up and, crucially, how things can be different. When systems are invisible, every choice, behavior, and decision further reifies existing power structures, which stagnates the potential for any kind of change. This is why we need linguists on both sides of the table. We need linguists pointing out dangerous assumptions before they exclude the most qualified candidate for the job. We need linguists on hiring committees, in human resources, on boards of directors, and in the C-suite—or just being the voice at the table asking ‘why?’ when something is touted as ‘the way we have always done things’.

Linguistics is also excellent and systematic training to be equipped to deal with change. As researchers and analysts, we take change as a given and as a starting point (variationist sociolinguistics or historical linguistics are just two ready examples). There is no question that our societies and communities are in need of change. Our systems and policies and procedures need reshaping too. And they have been designed by people, so we need to call people in to redesign them. Just like any pedagogical puzzle, we can scaffold and frame the problem, breaking down the steps to equip our students to first see the problems so that they can then get out there and address them. We hope that this initial step of operationalizing impact will enable more visibility about the issues that shape the experience of work, and how by empowering our students we cultivate pathways for the next generation to create change that benefits us all.