Building professional graduates through lifelong learning

With rapid changes across the world bringing new dynamics and  expectations to daily lives and workplace practices, increasingly workers, employees and organisations are being required quickly to adapt to and adopt new ideas. However, some employers are claiming that, despite the positive rhetoric of current education systems, the skills and attributes needed for success in the contemporary working world are not forthcoming from educational systems. A key ingredient emerging as a new vision to address the existing gap between rhetoric and practice appears to be the development of the skills for lifelong learning. Data collected from 102 employers in Queensland's marketing industries are examined in this paper to illuminate the interface between employers' expectations of business graduates and Queensland's tertiary education system. As a result of this examination, it appears that what the employers desired from graduates was in line with lifelong learning skills at university level, but there is an apparent lack of provision for developing such skills at that level.