"One of my chief strengths": Graduates' perceptions of using disciplinary knowledge and research skills at work

Description

Graduates’ disciplinary knowledge has been critiqued as being too narrow for the knowledge economy and is largely absent from graduate employability debates. These debates tend to reproduce what I term ‘the employability status quo’ by emphasising generic employability skills valued by the labour market and treating disciplinary knowledge similarly instrumentally. This gives only a partial account of, and obscures, the transformational potential of disciplinary knowledge.

In this paper I develop a conceptual link between disciplinary knowledge and research skills based on interview data with 20 Futuretrack graduates. I argue that powerful knowledge can deepen graduates’ understanding of using research skills, developed in a disciplinary context and integral to knowledge-based jobs, helping graduates approach their work in imaginative and critical ways.

Following from this, I report on our current project conceptualising how research skills are developed in higher education and used by graduates at work. Using the PRISMA protocol to inform our systematic literature review strategy, we searched four academic databases (Web of Science, ProQuest, Scopus, and EBSCOHost) yielding 3239 items. Through initial title/abstract sift, then full-text review we are currently finalising our review.

Our research so far shows that notions of research skills are often taken for granted and hence under-conceptualised. Whilst discipline-specific themes dominate the literature on the development and use of higher education research skills, there are comparatively few publications looking at the use of those research skills at work, which suggests a potentially promising area for further research, and an opportunity to bring disciplinary knowledge more firmly back into graduate employability and knowledge economy debates.

Period	19 Jan 2026
Held at	University of Leicester, United Kingdom
Degree of Recognition	Local