11 topics among 7,591 employability research abstracts (1942–2024): a structural topic model and call for interdisciplinary perspectives

Purpose: Our goal was to empirically evaluate what topics can be discerned in employability scholarship. We sought to illustrate the diverse specialised expert knowledge across the full multidisciplinary breadth of employability literature, not only in the two predominant fields of graduate employability and career development. Design/methodology/approach: Structural topic modelling, an unsupervised statistical method that helps discern latent topics in a corpus of texts, analysed the abstracts of 7,591 journal articles on employability. Exploratory analysis showed that the 11-topic model offered the highest number of distinct and meaningful topics. Findings: The 11 topics within the field of employability reflect research in a range of scholarly disciplines. We summarise the content of each topic and visualise the topic profiles of top journal articles, journals and authors. Research limitations/implications: Recent calls for greater integration between graduate employability and career development scholarships are warranted. But this study demonstrates that employability is studied in a much broader range of disciplines than just those two. Therefore, we argue that future scholarship should foster the advancement and application of research insights across the full breadth of disciplines, education and training systems and socio-cultural contexts. By doing so, the often-noted fragmentation and fuzziness in the employability literature will begin to be addressed. Originality/value: Existing reviews of employability research have been grounded in a particular scholarly discipline. In contrast, we adopt an inductive approach, surveying the literature through the widest possible lens, free from disciplinary biases and assumptions.