Part-time work and postgraduate students: Developing the skills for employment?

Increasingly, postgraduate students enrolled at UK universities are turning to part-time paid employment to help fund them through their studies. While a number of recent studies have sought to explore employers' use of student labour, there is little known about the nature of students' part-time work experiences in relation to skills attained or developed in the workplace. Reflecting on Yorke and Knight's (2004) three aspects of employability-process, core and personal skills-this paper seeks to explore the experiences of hospitality and tourism postgraduate students undertaking part-time work in the UK and considers the skills they develop through paid employment in relation to future employability.