Enterprise and employability: to conflate or not to conflate?

Back in 1992, Watts and Hawthorn provided definitions of ‘enterprise’ that could subsume the concept of employability. They argued that enterprise may be about: helping students set up a business; working within an enterprise (organisation); or being enterprising, innovating and creative. Their comments were made in the context of the Enterprise in Higher Education programme, which ran for eight years until 1996. This predated the nomenclature ‘employability’, but ran alongside traditional employability elements such as career development learning. More recent enterprise initiatives (for example the National Centre for Graduate Entrepreneurship) have focused more specifically on entrepreneurship, innovation and knowledge transfer, not on employability.