All the above A are ignoring a basic tenant here in Q&A, and that's that the OP (Q) can only tell the A what he knows about what he's trying to do. So:
create table newemprequest(jobid
,jobcategory
,[skill]
,[opendate] date
,[enddate] date
,[experiencerequired]
,[numberofvacancies]
,[jobdescription])
This is not right. And forget about all A quibble over "default". Not important.
Do some help file searches on datetime, there are examples; that would be good advice. But here's what a table creation involves. Table names, column names, data types, data sizes. Ambiguity is the enemy. A schema too.
USE [database]
GO
CREATE SCHEMA [schema]
CREATE TABLE [schema].[newemprequest](
[jobid][int],
[jobcategory][nvarchar](25),
[skill][nvarchar](26),
[opendate][nvarchar](666),
[enddate][nvarchar](666),
[experiencerequired][nvarchar](11),
[numberofvacancies][int],
[jobdescription][nvarchar](251)
)
What's wrong with [nvarchar](666) as a date/time data type? Nothing.