The education-to-work transition: A systematic analysis of pedagogical interventions in the context of higher education

Higher education has implemented various pedagogical interventions to increase connectivity with the workplace and ease students’ education-to-work transition. However, the effectiveness and underlying mechanisms of these interventions in supporting students with this transition remains largely unexplained. The present review article analyzed 49 articles bringing together two theoretical frameworks on this transition: connectivity and boundary crossing. Results show that connectivity can be increased by collaborating with the workplace in several ways. However, our results also show that higher education seldom learns from this collaboration, resulting in a lack of effective boundary practices to support students in their education-to-work transition. On top of that, our research demonstrates the importance of assessing the effectiveness of any of these interventions from both a student and a labor economics perspective.