The regular cycle of policy debate about universities’ economic contributions and their role in the migration squeeze can make it easy to lose sight of the fact that universities serve as the primary engine for building a globally connected society. They inject diverse perspectives into the international neighbourhood's social and intellectual fabric, as campuses act as hubs for global citizenship, intercultural diplomacy and shared human capital.
What is mobility and does it need to change?
International mobility has become a prominent feature of the shift in higher education towards broader internationalisation. Universities now offer study tours, exchanges, international internships, clinical placements, research experiences and service-learning programs that immerse students in unfamiliar cultural, academic and professional environments. These experiences have attracted large numbers of students, seeking intensive international learning experiences without the time and cost burden that comes with fully or partially completing a degree overseas.Against the backdrop of this rise in student enrollment, the expectations attached to mobility programs are also changing. Universities and policymakers increasingly expect international experiences to do more than broaden horizons. Instead, they should also prepare students for their future careers in which international collaboration and partnership can be a dominant theme. If graduate employability is now part of the promise of mobility, we need to ask a more fundamental question: are we designing mobility in ways that equips students to thrive?
Beyond a skills-based view of employability
Mobility research has often focused on intercultural understanding, global perspectives, language development and personal growth. These align with the conventional wisdom that by understanding each other better, and by being able to communicate, we can more effectively collaborate. Even when employability is examined explicitly, the emphasis has often remained on knowledge, skills and competencies.Certainly, these outcomes matter, but employability is about more than just a portfolio of skills, it’s increasingly being understood as the development of multiple forms of capital including human, social, cultural, identity, psychological and agentic capital (Tomlinson, 2017; Pham & Soltali, 2021) These capitals encompass what students know and can do, who they know, how they understand professional and cultural contexts, who they believe they can become, how to build confidence and resilience to transitions, and their capacity to act with purpose and stewardship.Viewed through this wider lens, international mobility can be a rich employability-development environment. Students may strengthen communication and problem solving, but they can also build relationships, navigate unfamiliar cultural expectations, reconsider career aspirations, develop confidence and resilience, and learn to exercise agency in uncertain situations. The value of mobility may therefore lie not in producing a few additional ‘global skills’ or imparting ‘global experiences’, but in developing an interconnected portfolio of resources that span international borders and can be translated from an education setting into the workplace..
The opportunity within mobility programs
My experience with Monash University’s Global Immersion Guarantee (GIG) makes the opportunities that exist within these programs particularly visible. GIG provides first year students with an intensive overseas experience centred on global challenges. Within a short period, students encounter unfamiliar places, people, expectations and ways of thinking. These conditions create rich opportunities to develop multiple employability capitals simultaneously and often push students in a way they haven’t been pushed before.
Students may, for example, build social capital by forming relationships with international peers, academics and professionals. They can deepen cultural capital by learning to navigate unfamiliar cultural norms and perspectives. Managing demanding schedules, uncertainty and unfamiliar environments can strengthen confidence, adaptability and resilience. Mobility can also shape identity capital. By placing a student in an unfamiliar environment, exposing them to a range of different societal norms, paid and volunteer professions and general ways of living, it can encourage them to introspectively review their own values and passions. The end goal then is to support students in having tangible, meaningful impact wherever they choose to focus their career. Additionally, for some students, an international experience may go so far as to reveal the possibility of working internationally or pursuing a global career.
Reflecting on my interactions with students during the program showed me that whilst intercultural knowledge and interdisciplinarity were present, they were not the whole story of mobility. The mobility component of the program enabled them to overcome typical barriers (cost, distance, access) to deepening their knowledge and understanding of global issues and pushed them into situations that helped develop their abilities further. Whilst students experiencing the same program may engage with these opportunities very differently, they are at the very least given many chances to confront their biases, assumptions and views and see things in a new light. Detailed data collection by the GIG team for several years has shown consistent and significant improvements in 13 employability skills as defined by the World Economic Forum, a measurable testament to the power of mobility programs in building student employability.
There is always more to learn, and as I look forward to joining the team in Vietnam this year I am excited to further understand how students can grow and develop themselves through the opportunities provided and pedagogical structure implemented within GIG. How can we continue to help students recognise the employability opportunities embedded in mobility and encourage them to purposefully invest in developing them? If they are finding it harder to reflect on and understand the destabilisation of their environment and how it challenges their perspectives and understandings, how can we ensure that the valuable resources provided by mobility programs like GIG are realised and valued?
Where should mobility go from here?
For our universities to better prepare students for employability, two critical areas should continue to be reviewed. Firstly, how can employability capital frameworks continue to be integrated into the design and evaluation of mobility programs? Where employability is an intended outcome, program design could identify which employability capitals different activities are likely to develop and how they can be best supported in their growth. By combining the in-depth evaluation currently being undertaken with future student feedback we could examine which capitals develop, through what experiences, for whom and under what conditions. This would provide a strong basis for understanding what aspects of mobility contribute most meaningfully to employability.
Secondly, how can we continue to support students to recognise and purposefully develop these capitals? Pre-departure preparation helps students identify opportunities and set developmental goals, providing an invaluable starting point for reflection. During mobility, structured reflection helps them make sense of relationships, challenges and changes in how they see themselves. Post-mobility support helps students recognise what they have developed, how their mobility program has contributed to this, and translate these resources into career narratives, sustained networks and future actions. The question is then, how can we make best use of this period of study?
The key shift is to see international mobility not simply as an experience from which employability may spontaneously emerge, but as a deliberate educational process through which students can purposefully develop, recognise and mobilise employability capitals. This does not mean turning mobility into employment training. Rather, it means making the best use of the rich learning already embedded in international experiences.
