In the last couple of decades, there has been a shift from speaking about employment to speaking about employability. The interest in this article is directed at how discourses on employability are mobilized in the wider discursive terrain of governance. How does governance operate, what subject is produced and, more specifically, who is made responsible for the employability of the citizen through such discourses? These questions are addressed by analysing three different practices: transnational policy documents on lifelong learning and the labour market; a Swedish policy text on in-service training in the health care sector; interviews with employees at six nursing homes for elderly people. A discourse analysis is performed inspired by the concepts of governmentality and the enabling state. Although the results indicate that the individual is constructed as responsible for her/his own employability, and the "state" and the employer are construed as enablers, such results are not clear-cut or deterministic. Even though there is an incitation, through discourse, to act in a particular way, there is always the possibility of acting wilfully in disregard of this incitation.