The Employability Skills Discourse: A Conceptual Analysis of the Career and Personal Planning Curriculum

Abstract

The current focus on employability skills in Canadian public schooling raises important conceptual questions regarding this instructional approach to vocational education. In British Columbia, the Career and Personal Planning (CAPP) curriculum, introduced into secondary schools in 1995, reflects the growing trend toward skills education as a way to enhance the occupational relevance of schools. The career preparedness component of CAPP commits two fundamental category mistakes in its classification of employability skills both with potentially serious consequences for education. First, by incorrectly conflating distinct categories of concepts under the general rubric of generic skills, the contextual understanding, background know ledge, and epistemic attitudes required to achieve certain desired cognitive competencies are disregarded. Secondly, CAPP categorizes attitudes, values, and dispositions as skills and, in so doing, obscures important ethical distinctions between the contentious area of values education and basic skills instruction. By employing examples from both CAPP and the Conference Board of Canada's Employability Skills Profile (ESP), a mandatory supplement to the former program, this paper reveals how these category mistakes may prevent students from achieving program objectives, and circumvent important moral issues concerning the conveyance of values and attitudes to students.