Building a Successful Partnership Between Professional Staff and Academics to Improve Student Employability

This chapter explores the unusual history of a 15-year partnership between academics in a Teaching and Learning Centre and professionals in a Careers Centre who together developed, taught, and coordinated a credit-bearing elective unit “From University to the Workplace” that explicitly taught career development learning (CDL) as an attempt to meet increased demands from employers for flexible, collaborative graduates who are committed to lifelong professional development. In part, the success of this partnership was due to a high level of mutual trust and respect. We suggest that the experience of teaching into the unit gave the career advisors a different identity which positioned them as “third space professionals” an identity which they then transferred into their other work across the university. Further, we suggest that opportunities for open dialogue among professionals and academics across different work subcultures should be created within a university and these could be key for an effective higher education sector. With the demise of the unit (due to a university-wide curriculum restructure), our final act of partnership is to claim authority in this space by authoring, together, this chapter.