Recontextualising graduate employability in support of pedagogical reform in public universities in the Kurdistan Region-Iraq

In light of the high graduate unemployment rate and migrant crisis, graduate employability in the Kurdistan Region – Iraq is an ever more pressing issue. Reducing the issue of graduate employability to a skills gap between Kurdish graduates and the private sector labour market is too simplistic and dismisses other sociocultural and structural factors that are external to graduates and higher education institutions (HEIs), and which impact the former’s employability. Through a qualitative study and using Bourdieu’s (1977) habitus as an explanatory framework for the analysis, this article aims to recontextualise graduate employability by exploring five stakeholders’ perceptions of what impacts graduate employability in the region. The findings uphold previous labour market reports that there is a skills gap, but also reveals other sociocultural and structural factors that also impact graduate employability. The Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research (MHESR) has introduced a programme of pedagogical reform in KRI’s public HEIs and is in the process of training its academic practitioners in the tenets of Freire’s (1970) critical pedagogy. This article supports the implementation of Freire’s critical pedagogy in KRI’s public HEIs as a critical pedagogy can address the skills gap while also creating spaces for students to explore, question, analyse and evaluate the sociocultural and structural factors that impact graduate employability in KRI.