Special issue: Work placement learning – exploring self-employment and paid employment behaviour in higher education

Abstract

Why and how is work placement learning evolving today? This multifaceted question addresses the rationale for investments in work placement learning by higher education institutions (HEIs) around the world. Since a majority of the stakeholders (i.e. students, academics, higher education administrators, national policymakers and employers) have vested interests in this employability skills development component of higher education, our inquiry is best located within an exploration of the nature of work placement learning and how it might influence students’ selfemployment and paid employment preparatory behaviours. As Poulter and Smith (2006, 43) have explained, “a university work placement scheme is seen as a way of making graduates more employable after graduation by developing workplace skills sets, complementing academic learning and providing valuable exposure to the working environment”. However, recent researchers (Nwosu et al., 2022; Okolie et al., 2021) have argued that, in addition to workand employability-related skills for paid employment, students undertaking work placement learning in firms and other organizations may well develop skills relevant to starting up their own business ventures after graduation and thus to becoming self-employed. This special issue makes a fresh contribution to the literature through its specific focus on exploring the work placement learning, self-employment and paid employment nexus. We are privileged to present eight peer-reviewed papers. These contributions cut across themes such as selfemployment preparatory behaviours, work placement learning instructional methods, adapted work placement delivery methods during the COVID-19 pandemic, work placement learning and student employability, the students’ work placement learning and employability nexus, embedding real-life industry practice into the virtual learning environment, the experience of students with disabilities and, a fitting case study with which to conclude, the “eportfolio” as a curated digital narrative. These papers address theoretical, pedagogical and empirical perspectives of employability-related behaviours during work placement learning (Blau, 1994; Inceoglu et al., 2019; Madichie and Agu, 2022; Sawitri and Creed, 2021; Tennant et al., 2018). In doing so, they enhance our understanding of the factors that may influence students’ employment preparatory behaviours during a work placement (Okorie et al., 2022; Poulter and Smith, 2006) and the methods of placement tasks delivery that industry-based instructors may adopt to improve the quality of learning outcomes. In the first of these contributions, “Exploring the link between student placement learning in business organizations and self-employment preparatory behaviours” by Okolie et al., the authors draw on “social cognitive career theory to test a moderated mediation model of selfemployment preparatory behaviours in university students undertaking placement learning in a business organization (PLBO). Using data from 337 university students undertaking work placements in 123 organizations, the