The Contribution of Interdisciplinary Teaching to the Development of Students’ Employability

Employability, a multifaceted and elusive concept, proves challenging to define and measure. It involves a complex interplay of skills, knowledge, attitudes, and personal attributes that individuals bring to the workplace. To make this concept more tangible, various authors have attempted to formulate employability models tailored for higher education settings. While these models differ in their emphases, a recurring theme across them is the significance of self-efficacy. This work contends that self-efficacy can serve as a parametric measure to assess the effectiveness of employability interventions. Specifically, it explores the impact of interdisciplinary teaching on students' employability, positing that such pedagogy can illuminate overlooked mastery experiences within a subject and alleviate disciplinary egocentrism—both of which are expected to positively influence employability outcomes. It has been discussed in the literature that graduate employability is often poor and, in this work, we aim to examine the relationship between this and students’ non-disciplinary understanding. To establish this connection a teaching intervention was devised to examine how interdisciplinary teaching can affect students’ feelings of self-efficacy and their understanding of their own level of knowledge – to this end the generalised self-efficacy scale along with a false consensus effect tool were used to gather data pre- and post-intervention to make comparisons. We find weak to moderate agreement that this intervention style improves self-efficacy and limited evidence that the false consensus effect is impacted. These results suggest that this form of teaching intervention has the potential to benefit students beyond their disciplinary education, however more work is necessary to establish the level and longevity of this benefit.