Introduction

International education plays a significant role in Australia and in the UK’s economy. The sector contributed A$40.3 billion to Australia’s economy in 2019 (Department of Education, 2019). However, Australia’s position in the international education market has been threatened, because both traditional (e.g. the UK) and non-traditional (Asian countries) immigration countries have actively launched policies to attract and retain high-skilled migrants (Czaika, 2018). For example, Japan surpassed Australia to become Vietnamese students’ favoured destination after it launched the Revitalization Strategy in 2014, targeting to employ 50% of international students by 2020 (Thanh Nien News, 2016). Post-study career prospects are a key goal for many international students (Department of Education, 2018). Unfortunately, in Australia, international graduates’ employment rate has been found consistently low compared to that of their local counterpart. For example, it was found that the unemployment rate of this cohort was much higher than the national average (10.6% and 5.7%, respectively), and a large number worked either part-time or in low-skilled occupations (30% and 17%, respectively) (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2019). Consequently, 29.6% went back to studying (Department of Home Affairs, 2018), and a large number have returned to their home countries (Pham, 2021c; Singh & Fan, 2021). Therefore, to become more competitive in the international education market, different stakeholders, of which higher education (HE) is an important one, need to better support international graduates’ employability outcomes.

However, there is currently a dearth of knowledge about international graduates’ employability experiences. The literature has documented a few studies which have explored the connections between visa status, credentials, and international graduates’ employment outcomes (e.g. Pham et al., 2018; Tran et al., 2019). Very little is known about how other resources contribute to international graduates’ employability. Employability has been increasingly claimed as individuals’ responsibilities (Fugate & Kinicki, 2008; Pham et al., 2019; Jackson, 2009; Singh, 2022), and graduates’ future in the labour market lay mainly in their own hands (Bridgstock, 2009; Li, 2013). However, there has been little research exploring student understandings and management of their employability (Tomlinson, 2017; Tymon, 2013). In the case of international graduates, one of the areas that needs more attention is how international graduates develop strategies to prepare themselves for their long-term journey. This chapter aims to address this area of attention. The chapter consists of three main sections. It starts with a discussion of key issues of international graduates’ employability to build a background for the study. It then discusses the conceptual frameworks underpinning the study. Finally, it describes how the research was conducted, followed by the concluding section, which presents and discusses the findings and implications for policy, higher education, and international graduates.

International Graduates’ Employability from Different Perspectives

The literature about international graduates’ employability is still limited, and the focus has been about a wide range of difficulties this cohort faced when negotiating employability. Rich evidence has been reported that international graduates have limited English proficiency, low-level communication skills, and limitations in a range of Western personal values such as being proactive, critical, innovative, and independent (Gribble & McRae, 2017; Kelly, 2017). Therefore, they need additional assistance to excel in their studies and gain most of their overseas study experiences (Briguglio & Smith, 2012). When international graduates enter the workforce, they have been criticised as portraying similar lacking behaviours. For instance, common comments about international, especially Asian, students are that they are “not active,” “unconfident,” and “not critical.” Howells et al. (2017) found that workplace supervisors complained that international students, particularly those from Asia, were disengaged because they did not ask questions.

Another line of research has explored how international graduates are often positioned in the labour market. Although this cohort holds similar qualifications, many employers are often reluctant to employ international graduates because they hold a biased “perception of fit” against migrants (Almeida et al., 2015). For instance, recruiters were found to have negative attitudes towards migrants because they had non-Anglicized names (Booth et al., 2009), heavy accents (Creese & Kambere, 2003), non-recognition of qualifications and skills (Madziva et al., 2014), especially in relation to Asian accented immigrants (Hosoda & Stone-Romero, 2010), ethnic and religious reasons (Madziva et al., 2014), and cultural biases (Dunn, 2004; Wong, 2010). Wong (2010, p. 191) generalised that “the recruiters examine the immigrant candidate’s expression, communication skills, confidence, grooming, appearance, accent, sense of humour and ability to make small talk to determine their ‘fit’ with the organisational work culture.” Almeida et al. (2015) evinced employers often taking attire, name, accent, and any overtly expressed religious affiliations of migrant and international graduates into consideration when making recruitment decisions. Consequently, the graduate employment market in Australia is suggested to be non-transparent, because the industry appears to favour recruiting those with a similar background to the existing workforce (Blackmore et al., 2015).

Recent research started questioning the deficit perspective that sees international students as “inferior others” who have difficulties and struggles in the host environment, and thus they need support (Samuelowicz, 1987). To survive in the host country, they need to go through a process, as described by Marginson (2014), of “adjustment” or “acculturation” to the requirements and habits of the host country. The capacities that international students possess and may develop to overcome challenges in the host country are not taken into consideration. An increasing number of researchers have criticised these stereotypical assumptions. They have started exploring how international students exercised agency in managing their studies and careers (Marginson, 2014; Montgomery & McDowell, 2009; Pham et al., 2019; Pham, 2021b). These studies found evidence of how this cohort could make choices to decide their identities and use strategies to negotiate studies and careers in the host country. In the field of employability, Pham and Jackson (2020) and Pham (2021a) found evidence of the significance of students’ agency and argued that to obtain optimal outcomes in the employability negotiation process, they needed to develop “agentic capital,” that is, the capacity to develop strategies to use various forms of capital effectively and strategically, depending on one’s ethnic background, areas of expertise, career plans, contexts, and personal qualities. However, while this line of research is necessary, there should be caution about the tendency for overemphasis of individual agency and underestimation of the impacts of structural factors. In employability, although international graduates’ agency has been evident, we have not known much about the extent to which they could exercise agency and develop strategies to negotiate employability.

In sum, the current literature has explored employability of international graduates from different angles. However, given that employability has been increasingly claimed as individuals’ responsibilities, more attention should be paid to how international graduates develop strategies to negotiate employability. This study aimed to redress this gap. The study was guided by an overarching research question: What were the strategies that international graduates deployed to negotiate employability?

Conceptual Frameworks

This study used a combination of three conceptual frameworks including Holmes’ (2013) employability approaches, Tomlinson’s (2017) capital model, and Pham’s (2021a) Employability Agency Framework to explore the strategies that international graduates undertook to negotiate employability. Holmes’ employability approaches were used as the overcharging framework, whereas Tomlinson’s capital model and Pham’s Employability Agency Framework were used to explain key conceptual notions such as capitals and agency that were important components of Holmes’ employability approaches. Specifically, Holmes (2013) offered three approaches to employability. The first is possessive perspective that emphasises that students need to possess a range of skills, knowledge, and capacities. This approach has been the dominant approach that influences how higher education prepares students for future employment. Therefore, higher education has focused on training students in academic content and used the skills-based agenda to train students with professional skills. However, various researchers have criticised this skills-based agenda because the concepts of attributes are vague (Lowden et al., 2011; Mason et al., 2009). Jackson (2009) evidenced that there is a range of different interpretations of an attribute or skill, depending on the context, background, expertise, and position of the interpreter. This means that the skills that students learn in higher education are often interpreted and used differently in the workplace, although the name and classification might be the same.

The second approach is the positional perspective that emphasises that employability is not determined by human capital, but by “socioeconomic or cultural status, or a social positioning of graduates’ skills and achievements relative to and in competition with others” (Holmes, 2013, p. 548). Bourdieu’s cultural theory advocates this perspective. Bourdieu (1986) claimed that individuals’ positions and careers are determined by four forms of capital: economic, cultural, social, and symbolic (Maclean & Harvey, 2008). Economic capital includes tangible materials such as financial assets; cultural capital refers to material objects that do not include economic resources but cultural values; symbolic capital includes intangible values that are recognised as reputation; and social capital refers to social connections that come from one’s social position and status (Bourdieu, 1986).

A distinct feature of Bourdieu’s theory is the unequal capital possessed by different groups of people. According to him, people possess and can access different levels of capital, depending on their backgrounds and positions in society. Inequality occurs because cultural capital carries both standardised values, which are legalised and institutionalised, and embodied values, which refer to one’s preferences or perceived “correct” ways of doing things (Bourdieu, 1986). People may possess the same standardised values, but it is very often that only the dominant groups’ embodied values are acknowledged and validated. This is evidenced by how the education system uses “the mode of language (e.g., accent, vocabulary, mode of expression), set of values (e.g., on what constitutes ‘success’) and practices (e.g., dietary habits) of the dominant class” (Holmes, 2013, p. 547). This has led to students from privileged backgrounds having better employment opportunities (Tomlinson, 2013). This is not only because these cohorts have better educational outcomes, but also because of social networks that they inherit from their families (Pham, 2021b) and the cultural values, symbolic capital, and habitus that show the types of perceptions, orientations, and postures that are often more acceptable by employers (Holmes, 2013).

The final approach is the processual perspective that argues that employability is a lengthy process that requires resources that students articulate, both during and after higher education. This process is constrained and facilitated by students’ social background, labour market conditions, and many other factors. Holmes (2013) claimed that many of these factors can be outside of the individual’s control or influence; however, individuals are not “mere pawns in a game, just ‘victims’ of a system stacked in favour of the few and against the many” (p. 548). Holmes (2013) acknowledges that individuals can and do take action with regard to their future careers, and that such action is taken “over time and in interaction with others; it is processual” (p. 548). Tomlinson (2017) advocates this by showing that while graduates may have limited control over the state of the labour market, they can still exercise some element of volition in how they approach it, including strategies and key decisions.

Tomlinson’s (2017) capital model emphasises the need for graduates to build five capitals for employability negotiation. In brief, human capital refers to the knowledge and skills that graduates obtain to prepare for employment. Social capital refers to social relationships and networks with significant other, including family and peers. Cultural capital refers to cultural-valued knowledge, dispositions, and insights typically valued within organisations. Identity capital is how individuals are able to make active self-investments towards their future employment. Finally, psychological capital includes capacities that enable graduates to overcome barriers, adapt to new situations, and respond proactively to inevitable career challenges. Pham’s (2021a) Employability Agency Framework further develops Tomlinson’s capital model by adding employability agency as an important element for employability negotiation. Pham (2021a) conceptualises employability agency as a multidimensional phenomenon which is constrained and facilitated by a range of different structural and personal factors such as subjectivities (e.g. initial motivation), contextual structures (e.g. global recession), and agentic features and actions (e.g. beliefs, confidence). Depending on how these personal and contextual factors interact, graduates develop different forms of agency to negotiate their employability trajectories.

In sum, Holmes’ employability approaches guided the design of the study and the analysis of the data, whereas the notion of capital developed by Tomlinson and Pham guided the exploration of individual strategies. A combination of these three conceptual frameworks was innovative because it allowed for a comprehensive exploration of the approaches deployed by international graduates when negotiating employability in Australia.

Methodology

Participants

This study used purposeful sampling to recruit 18 international graduates with various degrees at Australian universities, to participate in this study. The participants had to meet the following criteria: (i) they had completed a degree in Australia (undergraduate, master’s, or PhD); (ii) they had stayed in Australia on a temporary graduate visa (the terms of which are that those who graduated with a bachelor’s or master’s by coursework degree can live and work in Australia for two years. This increases to three years for those who graduated with a master’s degree, and four years for those who graduated with a doctoral degree); (iii) they were living in Australia when the research was conducted; and (iv) they had either full-time, part-time, or casual work experience. No restrictions were set on the time elapsed since the participants had graduated, but the majority had lived in Australia from one to five years. Only three had lived in the country for more than five years. All participants were made aware of the nature of the study, consented to participate, and were assured that any name used in the research publications was a pseudonym. The study obtained the necessary ethical clearance as approved by Monash University, before data collection. The participants consented to the use of obtained data in any subsequent article(s). The sample was diverse in terms of gender, nationality, educational level, and discipline.

Data Collection and Analysis

This study utilised a biographical interpretive method via in-depth interviews for data collection. As informed by the research question, the semi-structured interviews focused on unpacking how the participants understood and prepared for employability during and after university. Example interview questions included: “What kind of resources/capitals did you prioritise during university, in preparation for your career?” “What kind of resources/capitals did you prioritise to prepare for your career after you graduated?” and “How do you perceive the changes in your life during and after your graduation?” Since the graduates had different experiences, the interview questions were revised depending on each case. Each interview lasted for approximately 30–40 minutes.

The analysis began with the researcher and an assistant thoroughly reading the interview transcripts, and then repeatedly discussing and questioning any taken-for-granted assumptions until a clear understanding of the graduates’ experiences emerged. Thematic analysis was used, which was mainly theory-driven, while any remarkable new codes that emerged from the data were also recorded and used to inform the underlying theory. The thematic analysis process moved from a general to a more specific level.

Results

The findings showed that the participants engaged with different employability approaches depending on the impact of both personal and contextual factors at different stages of their career development.

Possessional Approach: Building Human Capital as Guided by Study Programmes

The responses revealed that the participants were heavily engaged with the possessional approach to build human capital when they were still at university. They prioritised the performance and improvement of discipline knowledge, completion of assignments and examinations, and improvement of technology literacy. Since every job advertisement required a degree, they considered the completion of all assignments and examinations as their biggest concern during the four years of university.

The university made it clear that we could not graduate if we did not pass all the assignments and examinations. If we cannot graduate, we should not think about applying for a job. (James)

They also aimed to obtain a degree because they wanted to apply for permanent residency (PR), which was an important element for almost all job positions in Australia.

I could only apply for a PR if I had a degree. It gave me points, so no matter what else was more important, I needed to get a degree first. (Josh)

In addition to disciplinary knowledge, there were two areas to which most of the participants paid special attention. The first was information and communications technology (ICT) literature, which referred to capacities in using software, typing skills, and digital programmes used in their occupation areas. All participants were aware of the significance of having good technological literacy skills, so they invested in learning and improving these skills and capacities, both from and beyond their official curriculum programmes. One participant stated:

In my discipline, one of the main things was HTML, C-Sharp, and TSQL. It was not easy, so I invested a lot in these areas by doing extra classes during the last two years. (Nga)

Another area that bothered most of them was communication skills. Those who were not from an English-speaking country originally, like Vietnam, China, or Indonesia, were worried about having sufficient communication skills for their jobs. Several participants shared that the feedback they received from their lecturers about their assignments and examinations made them worry about their written and speaking capacities. They even lost motivation and confidence about seeking a job in the host country because they thought their English proficiency would be an issue. Others stated that their English unproficiency sometimes led to issues related to behaviours, shared interests, and values, when conducting conversations with local friends and academics. They had to deal with accidents described by Millet (2003) as “hitting icebergs” when venturing different cultures without adequate preparation. For example, one participant said:

When I was on placements, I did not know what I should talk about. I often felt left out because they spoke too fast, and I could not find a space to join.

Many respondents divulged a sense of getting stuck while obtaining appropriate communication skills and vocabulary to develop natural and smooth conversations with the local people. This was why most participants expressed that they were anxious and worried about applying for positions which required frequent and direct verbal communication with the local people.

After entering the workforce, although the participants were from various disciplines and worked in different industries, they expressed a common experience that the degree helped them significantly in obtaining immediate employment (especially in the academy), remaining employed, and earning promotions. However, the usefulness of their degree varied depending on the disciplines and types of jobs. Some felt that their qualification was “very important” or “important,” while some others felt they had to learn on the job a lot. In general, those in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines agreed that their expertise and knowledge were significant because their jobs required the knowledge and skills that they had obtained in university quite often. Those in non-STEM disciplines stated that although they could not use the content knowledge that they had obtained in university, they were advantaged in a more generic sense, having gained a stronger overall foundation of work-related knowledge. For example, one said:

I came to Australia without knowing how to write a good essay, but now I can write reports, so writing skills were something that I benefitted a lot from university, and I needed them for my current job. (Quyen)

Positional Approach: Being Positioned as a Disadvantaged Group in the Host Labour Market

The analysis reflected what Holmes (213) argued about how graduate employability is determined by “socioeconomic or cultural status, or a social positioning of graduates’ skills and achievements relative to and in competition with others” (p. 548) very clearly. The participants’ capitals were evaluated negatively by local employers in various aspects. The area that made them disadvantaged compared to their local counterparts the most was English competencies. They were perceived to have heavy accent, limited terminologies, and poor writing skills. For instance, one participant said:

I applied for more than 100 jobs and failed all of them. I knew why. I was always ranked the second because they appreciated my qualifications, work experience and many other things but not English. (Andy)

A couple shared they failed to obtain positions that required rich understanding of local culture and local experiences such as a programme coordinator and a team leader.

I had a degree in leadership and rich experiences in working as a dean at my university in Vietnam, but they chose someone with much less experience simply because she was local. (Nga)

Another noticeable theme coming up in the analysis was the contested role of ethnic capitals in the participants’ career trajectories. Ethnic capitals included ethnic communities, social networks with co- and similar-ethnic people, and home country habitus and native language. The current literature has reported that ethnic capitals could facilitate international graduates to obtain jobs that did not require a high level of English competencies and rich local knowledge. For instance, some could use ethnic capitals to obtain full-time, part-time, and casual jobs when they failed to compete with local graduates in the mainstream labour market (Pham et al., 2019; Pham, 2021b). Several participants in this study shared similar experiences when revealing how they used ethnic capitals for casual jobs, illustrated in the excerpt below.

I failed to apply for two positions at an Australian company mainly because of my English. I never thought about seeking something at a Chinese restaurant, but when I continuously failed, I suddenly realised that I needed to use my Chinese network.

However, there was also evidence about how ethnic capitals disadvantaged the graduates. Almost all participants who had had work experience in their ethnic community shared that their labour was exploited because they had to work more than what they had agreed. They were paid lower than the normal rate that local people with a similar degree would receive. One spotlighted the lack of PR was one of the main reasons contributing to this exploitation as follows:

He [the shop owner] employed two of us at the same time but I was paid lower than the other girl simply because the girl already got PR. This meant she could work for him for long, so he invested in her. (Yitong)

Processual Approach: Enacting Various Forms of Agency to Negotiate Employability

Although career trajectories of the participants were impacted by various factors that went beyond their control, the participants demonstrated that they could, to some extent, control their short- and long-term employability by enacting different forms of agency. For instance, when realising their disciplines did not embed enough work-integrated learning, a couple actively looked for advice from lecturers, friends, and alumni to find part-time work so that they could obtain work experience. They were aware of how work experience could add values to their degree to make them advantaged in both host and home countries. Although the most common types of part-time work were working in a supermarket and tutoring, which were not closely connected to their future profession, they acknowledged various benefits of this part-time work such as time management, intercultural knowledge, initiative, and teamwork.

I started working casually at a Thai shop in my second year. It was quite time-consuming, but I learned heaps of things. The most important experience I gained from this work was that I became more active and better with time management. (Sue)

A couple were more strategic when volunteering to work for organisations that were connected to their future profession. For instance, one participant persistently approached more than ten schools to ask for after-school caring volunteering work so that she could step in the school’s system in an informal way. She was eventually offered a volunteering position for four months and then won an official teaching position at the school where she did the volunteering work. The type of agency these two participants enacted could be called future-vision agency, which refers to the capacity that they visioned the types of resources they needed to build and journeys that they needed to go through to obtain their dream job.

There was also evidence showing how the participants were willing to accept temporary work so that they could fulfil basic needs while waiting for an official position. For instance, several accepted manual, casual, and low-skilled jobs such as taxi drivers, tutoring, and supermarket serving to earn a living and obtain work experience but still engaged in completing their degrees and extra courses and preparing for PR. They committed to pursuing a dream profession that required long-term and challenging preparations but aligned with their identity. The strategies that these participants deployed during this preparation process could be called temporary needs-response agency.

Finally, a common constraint facing international graduates in Australia is that they need to meet high expectations and face discrimination of local industries and employers about professional skills and work experience. International and local graduates may hold the same degree, but many international graduates fail to compete with their local counterparts for job opportunities due to their perceived weaknesses in these areas. However, there was evidence that international graduates could use various strategies to deal with their limitations in professional skills. For instance, some used persistence to deeply integrate in the local context to improve English. Some engaged with self-reflection and observations to enhance understanding of local culture. Some knew how to use their strengths such as diligence, resilience, and honesty to win support of key stakeholders who then bridged them to job opportunities. Some made use of ethnic capitals like ethnic community and language and connections with similar-ethnic people to obtain casual and short-term employment. One participant said that she had obtained some work experience in the field of her studies in Indonesia. Therefore, she crafted her resume to highlight these work experiences and emphasised how this experience could help her with her job if she were employed. This was an advantage that enabled her to stand out and obtain the job—a strategy that enabled graduates to win the employment battle in many cases (Brown et al., 2004). The type of agency these graduates perform can be called “strengths-based agency.”

An important note was that observations and self-reflection emerged as important tools enabling the participants to engage with the process of enacting agency. For instance, a participant stated that although they held an excellent academic record, they observed and learned that they had to improve their understanding of workplace culture and demonstrate flexibility so that they could not only deal with cultural diversity in Australia, but also use their content knowledge more effectively. This graduate said:

Sometimes, I felt frustrated because I did not know how to use what I had learned from university. I got stuck, but then I found out that sometimes people did not let you use what you had because they did not like you. I then invested in enhancing my teamwork skills.

Two other participants stated that during the journey of finding different jobs, they constantly reflected on their work and living experiences to accumulate self-knowledge, review their evolving commitments, sort their priorities, reflect on the external world as an object, and weigh their actions in relation to external factors that affect their interests. They sometimes needed to change their employability journey due to emerging personal commitments.

I had to quit my full-time job when I had a daughter. As a woman, I wanted to prioritise my child. I knew it would be extremely difficult to find something like this later, but I could not find a better way.

Discussion and Conclusion

The findings revealed how the graduates engaged with different strategies to negotiate their employability trajectories. When they were still at university, their perceptions were largely influenced by the possessive perspective, which emphasises the need to articulate human capital. The graduates focused on enriching their disciplinary expertise, which included content knowledge, ICT literacy, and English competency. The participants held these perceptions due to two main factors. First, Australian universities continue to disseminate the human capital doxa and embed the assumption that higher education leads to improved employment outcomes (Blackmore et al., 2015; Chen, 2014). International students and their parents internalise the policy doxa about the importance of qualifications, degrees, and university-based resources promoted by universities and therefore place great emphasis on attaining academic performance and technical knowledge. Second, the graduates were also influenced by job advertisements, which often emphasised desirable recruitment criteria such as English proficiency, PR visa, high-level communication skills, Australian work experience, and a range of Western personal values such as being proactive, critical, innovative, and independent (Blackmore et al., 2015; Pham et al., 2019). Due to limited insights about the labour market and real-life work practices, the participants mainly worked on what the universities advertised and what the employers expected, which was reflected in job advertisements.

However, the participants significantly changed their perceptions and strategies when they entered the labour market. They still acknowledged the importance of qualifications but agreed that the usefulness of qualifications depended on other factors including work experience, an understanding of workplace culture, and social networks. The graduates’ employability experiences during this period align with the arguments proposed by positional and processual perspectives. In the host labour market, graduates were positioned as “inferior others” due to the hidden expectations of employers. This was reflected in their experience of using English competencies. Although their English was standardised and institutionalised because they had completed a degree in Australia, their communication was not favoured or accepted by many employers. This was because the local workforce emphasised “legitimate language,” which refers to “subtle normative codes” (Cederberg, 2015, p. 34). International graduates need to show the right knowledge, appropriate communication skills, and sensitivity to cultural differences, and a “standard” accent so that they can develop natural and smooth conversations (Pham, 2021b). Those coming from non-English-speaking countries were unable to prove this “legitimate language” and as a result, failed interviews and were excluded from small talks in the workplace. It was evident that international graduates had limited knowledge about the unwritten “rules” and particular codes of behaviours and norms of the workplace, making it difficult to use their expertise and integrate it into the host labour market (Pham et al., 2019; Pham, 2021b). Recently, international graduates’ inferior positions have been reinforced because Australia has been inflated with graduates with credentials. Therefore, local employers have become increasingly interested in assessing “legitimate” capitals so that they can evaluate how international graduates “fit in” the Western labour market (Blackmore et al., 2015).

Moreover, graduates only realised the importance of building a range of other resources, such as social networks, cultural understanding, and psychological capacities, after entering the labour market. The articulation of these resources enabled them to mobilise and apply their expertise. When they were at university, they had little knowledge of the need to build these resources due to the dominant human capital embedded in official curricula. It is evident that although an increasing number of researchers have advocated that employability outcomes result from the development and utilisation of a range of forms of capital, including not only humans but also social, cultural, identity, and psychological capital (e.g. Brown et al., 2004; Tomlinson, 2017), this perspective was not emphasised enough in university programmes.

Finally, graduates’ employability trajectories were well supported by Holmes’ processual perspective because it reported how the participants interplayed a range of contextual and internal factors in their employability journey. They proactively cultivated their personal development by continuously reflecting on their past experiences, envisioned short and long futures, and worked on possibilities for present actions. Employability varies over time, context, and conditions. Some prioritised employment at some point, and thus had strong agentic features and took various agentic actions to achieve this goal. However, they also neglected their career at some points due to other commitments, and thus did not engage in activities associated with their career development. Their employability trajectories are connected to the development of their identities. Their identity commitment guides, directs, motivates, and hinders how they take action and engage in activities to achieve their career and personal goals (Eteläpelto et al., 2013, p. 58; Hitlin & Elder, 2006).

The findings of this research imply a significant gap between how universities prepare students for employability and what the labour market actually expects. There is a need for more collaboration between higher education and industries so that university curricula and services can be developed in a way that better prepares students for their transition to the labour market. International students should obtain more real-life insights into the workforce by doing work or engaging in the community in some way. If they view the labour market based on their “naïve” understanding, as promoted by policies and institutions, they continue to struggle.