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/).
Cite this article
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 -