Employability is at the heart of our microcredentials. For many learners, choosing to invest time and money in a microcredential is closely linked to career progression. They want to develop new knowledge, respond to changing labour market demands, and apply what they learn directly in their professional context. For this reason, we have deliberately embedded employability into each course, weaving it into the academic content and making clear how study connects to career development.
To make this work, we needed an approach that could work at scale while still being meaningful for learners at different career stages and levels of experience. This required a model that was both consistent and adaptable; one that could be applied across subjects while allowing learners to personalise their skills development.
Our approach responds to these challenges directly. We have structured our microcredentials to make employability visible, supporting learners to identify, develop and clearly articulate their skills as they progress.
In this post, I’ll share how we have embedded employability in practice and how this supports learners to connect their studies more effectively to their professional goals.
Why does all this skill stuff matter so much?
Many of us working in learning and teaching in higher education recognise that learners are refining and strengthening a range of transferable skills beyond the core discipline-specific content they are studying. Equally, many employers recognise the breadth of skills development that occurs in HE beyond the specific academic content of a course. Yet while students may sense that their time in HE has enhanced their wider skills, many struggle to clearly synthesise and effectively articulate this development.
The challenge, then, is not whether skills are being developed, but how effectively learners are supported to recognise them, identify what they are, and communicate them in ways that translate into the workplace, whether in an appraisal, a job interview or a career transition.
Given this, we saw microcredentials as an opportunity to support flexible learners in these areas, enabling their studies to be not only an investment in lifelong learning, but also in their ongoing professional development and career trajectory.
To address this, we needed an approach that could make employability explicit, scalable and meaningful across different contexts.
Embedding employability: the Global Employability Skills
We used the University of London Careers Service’s Global Employability Skills framework as a practical way to help learners understand and develop the skills they need for the workplace.
Distilled from a range of sources on graduate competencies and workplace skills, we have developed a taxonomy of 10 Global Employability Skills. These have proven to be applicable across different disciplines, international contexts, sectors and career stages, whether learners are Career Starters, Career Developers or Career Changers (Brammar et al., 2025).
This has already been widely adopted across our undergraduate and postgraduate degrees and the approach has shown to be malleable and flexible – suitable to be applied to different academic disciplines.
In our microcredentials, we use these 10 skills to consistently and clearly link learning to employability. We use them to show how learning activities, modules and programmes develop specific employability skills alongside the core curriculum content, making that development more visible and meaningful to learners. We then embedded this framework into the learning experience through a structured sequence of activities.
Designing a structured learning journey for employability
We designed the employability activities as a structured learning journey with a carefully scaffolded sequence of activities embedded throughout the course, enabling learners to progressively recognise, identify and articulate their skills.
One of the biggest challenges was designing an approach that could work consistently across multiple microcredentials, while still feeling relevant to different disciplines and genuinely personalised for each learner. What made it work was giving learners ownership; through self-assessment, they choose the skills they want to develop, rather than being told. That allows the same design to scale, while still being meaningful at an individual level.
– Anna Armstrong, Senior Learning Designer
This principle of combining consistency with personalisation is reflected in how the learning journey is structured. Activities are scaffolded in three stages:
- Recognising skills
Learners are first introduced to the 10 Global Employability Skills and supported to assess their current confidence across them. This helps them understand what these skills are and how they relate to their own professional and personal experience. - Identifying skills in context
Learners then explore how these skills are applied in real-world settings, including through employer perspectives. They begin to connect specific skills to their own goals and select areas for further development, enabling them to personalise their learning in line with their career stage and professional priorities. - Articulating skills in practice
Finally, learners are supported to articulate their skills through applied and reflective activities. These include AI-supported experiences such as simulated job interviews, appraisal conversations, and learning activities that replicate real-world professional scenarios. Through these, learners practise applying their Global Employability Skills and receive feedback on their performance.
This structured progression helps learners move beyond simply developing skills to confidently applying and communicating them in professional contexts.
Using AI to support employability skills development
To give students the opportunity to practise and refine their employability skills, we worked with learning designers to develop three AI-supported activities. These activities enable learners to deepen their understanding of, reflect on and articulate their Global Employability Skills in different settings.
In each activity, the AI agent adopts a distinct role: a career coach, a manager conducting an appraisal, and a job interviewer. This gives learners the opportunity to reflect on and discuss their skills in complementary, real-world scenarios. At the same time, they develop confidence in using AI tools in a purposeful and reflective way, supporting the development of their wider digital and AI literacy.
Delivering this experience at scale required close collaboration across multiple teams.
Collaborating to design and deliver employability at scale
Embedding employability in a meaningful and scalable way required close collaboration across multiple teams. Working with learning designers, videographers, motion graphics designers and learning technologists, we developed a suite of learning resources, including video content and digital assets, to explain the 10 Global Employability Skills and show how learners can develop them in practice. Here’s an example from our series explaining each of the employability skills.
We also reviewed the learning activities within each microcredential to identify and clearly flag the specific skills being developed. Here’s how this looks on a page:
This work was time consuming, but essential in helping learners recognise, identify and articulate their skill development as they progress through the course. As they complete each activity, they can see how it contributes not only to their understanding of the curriculum, but how it develops their global employability skills, enriching their professional development and career trajectory.
This approach was further strengthened through collaboration with leading employers, including HSBC, Shoosmiths and Accenture. Their contributions, particularly through video content, provide real-world examples of how the 10 Global Employability Skills are applied in practice across their respective industries.
Looking ahead: Refining our approach
This first iteration of embedding employability in the microcredentials has established a strong foundation, and there are areas we would like to develop further as we continue to refine and extend the model. We would like to:
- incorporate a specific employability-related learning outcome so that GES can be part of summative, as well as formative, assessment, e.g. a compulsory reflection piece on a specific GES.
- explore ways to utilise the AI tools more comprehensively to enable the learners to record themselves discussing their skill development and receive AI feedback on what they shared. This will further enhance the students’ ability to articulate their GES. This is particularly appropriate as they need to verbalise as well as write about their skills in workplace settings.
Overall, this project has demonstrated how it is possible to successfully use a scalable and flexible approach to embedding employability, which can be applied to any programme development, including microcredentials. We are now building on this foundation to refine the approach further, supporting learners to recognise, identify and confidently articulate their skills.
To learn more about our work in this area, read our other posts in the microcredentials series.