Post-Covid19 Employability through Value Co-Creation

COVID-19 has impacted every corner of the world, threatening to disrupt the career progression of this generation, and revealing new employability skills gaps. Consequently, Higher Education Institutions (HEI) must address the skills demanded by this new way of working. Evidence shows that resilience is now a key skill required by employers (Agrawal et al., 2020; Buheji and Buheji, 2020). A key part of resilience is accountability, demonstrated by a student’s willingness to engage and co-create value.

The literature on student engagement shows a drive towards collaboration between HEIs and students, in curriculum development (Bovill, 2009), teaching approaches (Bovill, Cook‐Sather and Felten, 2011), and student experience (Dollinger, Lodge and Coates, 2018) and more. However, students often view their role in higher education as being one that is passive (Kahu, 2013), rather than being responsible for integrating their resources, to co-create value. This conceptual paper aims to apply the concept of value co-creation to identify how students integrate their resources and work collaboratively, to co-create learning experiences, and to develop resiliency, self-management, and accountability to meet the new employability skills gap. This paper will capture value co-creation based on an evidence-based model of student-staff co-creation conceptualised by Dollinger and Lodge (2020).