English for University Graduate Employability: Students and Employers’ Voices

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.200406.002How to use a DOI?

Keywords

employers, employability, English, industry students

Abstract

Currently, English has taken a more significant role in all domains of life and is always associated with globalization and industrialization. In Indonesia, the growing importance of English has created new purposes and needs for learning English mainly by university students. This also calls for a shift in the mindset of universities from nurturing graduates for local to the global market. This study investigated the voices of university students and employers on the need for English language proficiency and skills for employment. Data were collected through interviews with forty final year undergraduate students at a private university and five employers from hospitality, service, and trading companies in Indonesia. The results show that both parties agree that English plays a major role in employability. English is important for a job interview in multinational companies and communication in the workplace (corporate training, company meeting, and presentation). It also becomes one of the keys to engaging in international communities and very important people in industries. In addition, there is a general agreement among students that good speaking skills are very important. However, in trading and service industries, employers put a great emphasis on listening and reading, followed by speaking and writing skills while in hospitality industries speaking skills are considered the most important. This study suggested that university should design English syllabus which caters the students’ needs to meet local and global industrial demands.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Akhyar Rido
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/04/09
TI  - English for University Graduate Employability: Students and Employers’ Voices
BT  - Proceedings of the Twelfth Conference on Applied Linguistics (CONAPLIN 2019)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 6
EP  - 10
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.200406.002
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.200406.002
ID  - Rido2020
ER  -