| Summary: | Achieving graduate-level employment is a major motivation for students to enter higher education, pushing HE institutions to support student engagement with employability practices and training. Employability is a complex construct, which can be conceptualised within its social context as a possession, position or process (Holmes, 2013). The thesis used mixed methods to incorporate selfregulated learning (SRL) as an underlying psychological process of learning into an existing model of employability in order to capture its individual, cognitive and social dimensions. Path analysis was conducted on data from 294 undergraduate students to identify relationships between SRL (as measured through measures of metacognition, self-efficacy, and views about knowledge and learning) and employability capitals (academic success, work experience, engagement with careers guidance, transversal skills). SRL showed a direct effect on skills (β=.58, p < .05), career-development support (β =.25, p < .05), and degree classification (β =.34, p < .05). However, there was no significantresult for engagement with work experience (β = .02, p > .05). Two qualitative studies examined the mediating role of identity on employability engagement, through a template analysis of individual interviews and focus groups with 20 first-year students and an interpretative phenomenological analysis on a focus group from three final year students. The findings provided novel insights into the complexity of and subtle barriers to students' engagement with graduate employability. The thesis supports the usefulness of a multifaceted model that accounts for patterns of engagement with graduate employability, and illuminates significant challenges to those developing employability interventions.
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