Employers have long said that communication matters. New evidence suggests something slightly more important: they increasingly want graduates to prove that they can communicate, rather than simply claim that they can.

The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) Job Outlook 2026 Spring Update reports that, when recruiting graduates for entry-level positions, employers are particularly looking for evidence of three core capabilities: teamwork, problem-solving and communication. More than half of the employers surveyed identified ten or more different skills they wanted to see in candidates.

This reflects a broader change in graduate recruitment. According to NACE, 70% of employers now report using skills-based hiring, up from 65% the previous year, and 71% of those employers use it at least half of the time.

The degree still matters. But increasingly, employers want to know what a graduate can actually do.

The important word is “evidence”

This creates an interesting problem for universities and students.

A CV can say:

Excellent communication skills.

But what does that actually demonstrate?

Almost every graduate can make the same claim. Employers therefore increasingly look for examples: situations in which candidates have communicated complex ideas, worked with others, solved problems or explained something clearly to a particular audience.

NACE's advice is essentially show, don't just tell. Students need to identify experiences in which they have developed these skills and be able to articulate them during applications and interviews.

Communication is particularly interesting because, unlike many graduate attributes, it can actually be demonstrated.

A student does not have to tell an employer that they are a good communicator.

They can show them.

A short research talk is evidence

This is one reason initiatives such as the Three Minute Thesis (3MT) are potentially much more significant than simply being academic competitions.

A researcher taking part in a 3MT has to explain a complex piece of research to a non-specialist audience in just three minutes.

Doing that successfully requires several transferable skills simultaneously.

The speaker has to identify what is important, discard unnecessary technical detail, structure an argument, communicate clearly, engage an audience and work within a strict constraint.

Those are not abstract claims about employability. They are observable behaviours.

And they are remarkably close to the capabilities employers say they want.

The distinction matters because employers themselves see room for improvement. NACE's 2026 research found that employers rank communication among the most important career-readiness skills for new graduates, but are less impressed with graduates' communication abilities than with their teamwork skills.

For postgraduate researchers, the issue may be particularly acute. A PhD provides compelling evidence of technical expertise, persistence and intellectual ability, but those qualities may not be immediately apparent to someone recruiting outside the candidate's specialist discipline.

Being able to explain that research clearly changes the equation.

From CV to evidence portfolio

Graduate recruitment may therefore be moving towards something closer to a portfolio model of employability.

Instead of merely listing attributes—

• Communication
• Critical thinking
• Leadership
• Problem-solving

—graduates will increasingly benefit from being able to attach evidence to them.

For software developers, that might be a GitHub repository.

For designers, it is already standard practice to provide a portfolio.

For researchers, one of the simplest forms of evidence could be a short video demonstrating their ability to communicate their work.

This is where platforms such as my-thesis.org can potentially play a useful role.

my-thesis indexes short research presentations and connects them to searchable researcher profiles. Rather than allowing a three-minute presentation to disappear after a university competition or graduation ceremony, it can become part of a researcher's persistent professional identity.

A graduate applying for a role can therefore point to something concrete:

Here is my research. Here is how I explain it. Here is evidence that I can communicate complex ideas clearly.

That is considerably more informative than writing excellent verbal communication skills on a CV.

Communication matters beyond academia

The relevance also extends well beyond students intending to remain in universities.

NACE's findings concern entry-level employment generally, and the continued growth of skills-based recruitment means that employers are deliberately looking beyond degree subject and academic performance when assessing candidates.

This is potentially good news for postgraduate researchers.

A doctoral student investigating gravitational waves, cancer biology, medieval history or machine learning may apply for a career in which the precise subject of their thesis is not directly relevant.

What remains highly transferable is their ability to understand difficult material, identify the important information and explain it to somebody who is not an expert.

A short research presentation makes that ability visible.

Universities can help students create the evidence

There is an implication here for graduate schools and careers services as well.

If employers are moving towards evidence-based assessment of skills, universities should not only teach those skills. They should help students produce portable evidence that they possess them.

A presentation should therefore not necessarily be regarded as a transient classroom exercise or a competition entry that disappears once it has been assessed.

It can be a professional asset.

Universities already encourage students to build CVs, LinkedIn profiles and records of extracurricular activities. Short research communication should increasingly be considered part of that same employability infrastructure.

The question for graduates may soon be changing from:

“Do you have good communication skills?”

to:

“Can you show me?”

For thousands of postgraduate researchers who have already stood up and explained years of work in three minutes, the answer could be sitting in a video that already exists.

The challenge is making sure employers can find it.

This week, the University of Manchester announced plans to guarantee every undergraduate some form of real-world work experience before graduation, signalling something much bigger than a curriculum redesign. It may represent a fundamental shift in what universities believe a degree is actually for.

For generations, elite universities—particularly those within the Russell Group—have defended higher education as intellectual formation rather than vocational training. A degree was meant to cultivate critical thinking, analysis, communication, and intellectual independence.

But the economic reality facing graduates has changed dramatically.

Students now leave university with debts often exceeding £50,000, entering one of the most competitive graduate labour markets in decades. Many graduates struggle to secure professional employment and increasingly find themselves underemployed in roles that historically did not require degrees. Employers, meanwhile, continue to complain about “skills gaps” and lack of workplace readiness.

Against this backdrop, Manchester’s proposal feels less radical and more inevitable.

A Degree Plus Experience

Vice-chancellor Duncan Ivison argued that no student should spend three years engaged solely in academic study. Instead, every student should have the opportunity to contextualise their learning through placements, internships, employer projects, exchanges, or community engagement.

Importantly, this model applies equally to humanities and STEM subjects.

That matters because employers consistently report valuing transferable skills such as communication, creativity, collaboration, adaptability, and critical reasoning—precisely the capabilities many degrees already develop. The problem is often not the absence of these skills, but graduates struggling to demonstrate them convincingly.

Experience provides evidence.

A history student who has completed a museum placement or policy project suddenly has a narrative connecting academic abilities to practical application. Structured work experience becomes the bridge between intellectual capability and employability.

The Hidden Inequality Problem

Manchester’s proposal also addresses a quieter issue within graduate recruitment: access.

Prestigious internships and professional opportunities are often easier to secure for students with family networks, financial support, or existing social capital. Universities embedding work experience directly into degree structures may therefore help level the playing field.

Manchester explicitly stated that opportunities should not depend on “personal contacts” — a significant acknowledgement of how unequal graduate access can be.

However, scale remains a challenge. As Nick Hillman noted, coordinating meaningful placements for more than 30,000 undergraduates is a major logistical undertaking. Many students are already balancing paid work alongside study because of rising living costs. Adding additional placements without careful integration risks increasing pressure rather than reducing it.

The AI Era and the Value of Human Skills

Manchester’s move also reflects a wider transformation accelerated by artificial intelligence.

As AI automates more routine cognitive tasks — drafting, summarising, coding assistance, data analysis — the labour market increasingly rewards distinctly human capabilities: judgement, communication, creativity, collaboration, and adaptability.

Experiential learning develops precisely these attributes.

Placements force students to navigate ambiguity, institutional cultures, deadlines, teamwork, and practical problem-solving in ways difficult to replicate entirely within lectures or seminars.

This is where platforms such as my-thesis.org become particularly relevant.

One of the growing challenges for graduates is not simply possessing skills, but making those skills visible. Traditional CVs often struggle to communicate qualities such as communication ability, intellectual confidence, public engagement, or interdisciplinary thinking.

Short-format academic presentations — such as Three Minute Thesis competitions — provide direct evidence of those capabilities. They showcase not only subject expertise, but the ability to explain complex ideas clearly, think under pressure, communicate persuasively, and engage wider audiences.

By indexing and making these presentations searchable, my-thesis.org effectively creates a public-facing portfolio of graduate communication and research skills. In an increasingly competitive labour market, this gives students something far more dynamic than a transcript alone: demonstrable evidence of intellectual and professional capability.

In many ways, platforms like my-thesis.org complement the same shift Manchester is recognising — the move away from degrees as static credentials and toward graduates as visible, verifiable demonstrations of applied skill.

Beyond Employability

Reducing universities purely to workforce preparation would still be a mistake. Universities are civic and intellectual institutions, not simply employment factories.

But Manchester’s proposal is significant because it attempts to fuse intellectual development with real-world application rather than treating them as opposites.

The old divide between “academic” and “vocational” education is beginning to collapse. The future university may increasingly be defined not only by lectures and examinations, but by ecosystems connecting scholarship, communication, public engagement, workplace experience, and applied learning.

The question students increasingly ask is no longer simply: “What did I learn?”

It is: “How can I show what I’m capable of doing?”