1.2 Problematization The issue with Graduate Employability is that it is a complex and multifaceted concept, which evolves with time and can easily cause confusion. This may be largely due to the fact that employers have been reasonably responsive to generic academic profiles, providing that graduates fulfil various other technical and job-specific demands. 's (2005) research showed similar patterns among UK Masters students who, as delayed entrants to the labour market and investors in further human capital, possess a range of different approaches to their future career progression. Brennan, J., Kogan, M. and Teichler, U. Warhurst, C. (2008) The knowledge economy, skills and government labour market intervention, Policy Studies 29 (1): 7186. consensus and industrial peace. Employability. This has illustrated the strong labour market contingency to graduates employability and overall labour market outcomes, based largely on how national labour markets coordinate the qualifications and skills of highly qualified labour. In countries where training routes are less demarcated (for instance those with mass HE systems), these differences are less pronounced. Ball, S.J. Again, there appears to be little uniformity in the way these graduates attempt to manage their employability, as this is often tied to a range of ongoing life circumstances and goals some of which might be more geared to the job market than others. Research Paper 1, University of West England & Warwick University, Warwick Institute for Employment Research. Summary. Rather than being insulated from these new challenges, highly educated graduates are likely to be at the sharp end of the increasing intensification of work, and its associated pressures around continual career management. Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). Moreau, M.P. Slider with three articles shown per slide. In light of HE expansion and the declining value of degree-level qualifications, the ever-anxious middle classes have to embark upon new strategies to achieve positional advantages for securing sought-after employment. Both policymakers and employers have looked to exert a stronger influence on the HE agenda, particularly around its formal provisions, in order to ensure that graduates leaving HE are fit-for-purpose (Teichler, 1999, 2007; Harvey, 2000). Elias, P. and Purcell, K. (2004) The Earnings of Graduates in Their Early Careers: Researching Graduates Seven Years on. Harvey, L., Moon, S. and Geall, V. (1997) Graduates Work: Organisational Change and Students Attributes, Birmingham: QHE. Based on society's agreement - or consensus - on our shared norms and values, individuals are happy to stick to the rules for the sake of the greater good.Ultimately, this helps us achieve social order and stability. It is also considered as both a product (a set of skills that enable) and as a . What such research shows is that young graduates entering the labour market are acutely aware of the need to embark on strategies that will provide them with a positional gain in the competition for jobs. Chapter 1 1. Purpose. . (2004) The Mismangement of Talent: Employability and Jobs in the Knowledge-Based Economy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Much of the graduate employability focus has been on supply-side responses towards enhancing graduates' skills for the labour market. This research highlighted that some had developed stronger identities and forms of identification with the labour market and specific future pathways. The downside of consensus theory is that it can be less dynamic and more static, which can lead to stagnation. While some graduates have acquired and drawn upon specialised skill-sets, many have undertaken employment pathways that are only tangential to what they have studied. The relative symbolic violence and capital that some institutions transfer onto different graduates may inevitably feed into their identities, shaping their perceived levels of personal or identity capital. This has been driven mainly by a number of key structural changes both to higher education institutions (HEIs) and in the nature of the economy. While investment in HE may result in favourable outcomes for some graduates, this is clearly not the case across the board. Consensus theory, on the other hand, looks at how individuals interact and how this can lead to agreement. This may further entail experiencing adverse labour market experiences such as unemployment and underemployment. The social cognitive career theory (SCTT), based on Bandura's (2002) General social cognitive theory, suggests that self-perceived employability affects an individual's career interest and behavior, and that self-perceived employability is a determinant of an individual's ability to find a job (lvarez-Gonzlez et al., 2017). (2009) Over-education and the skills of UK graduates, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 172 (2): 307337. Collins, R. (2000) Comparative and Historical Patterns of Education, in M. Hallinan (ed.) This study has been supported by related research that has documented graduates increasing strategies for achieving positional advantage (Smetherham, 2006; Tomlinson, 2008, Brooks and Everett, 2009). What this research has shown is that graduates anticipate the labour market to engender high risks and uncertainties (Moreau and Leathwood, 2006; Tomlinson, 2007) and are managing their expectations accordingly. Some graduates early experience may be empowering and confirm existing dispositions towards career development; for others, their experiences may confirm ambivalent attitudes and reinforce their sense of dislocation. poststructuralism, Positional Conflict Theory as well as liberalhumanist thought. Avoid the most common mistakes and prepare your manuscript for journal Cranmer, S. (2006) Enhancing graduate employability: Best intentions and mixed outcome, Studies in Higher Education 31 (2): 169184. Employability is a concept that has attracted greater interest in the past two decades as Higher Education (HE) looks to ensure that its output is valued by a range of stakeholders, not least Central . Thus, graduates who are confined to non-graduate occupations, or even new forms of employment that do not necessitate degree-level study, may find themselves struggling to achieve equitable returns. The challenge for graduate employees is to develop strategies that militate against such likelihoods. Teichler, U. The problem of managing one's future employability is therefore seen largely as being up to the individual graduate. editors. However, the somewhat uneasy alliance between HE and workplaces is likely to account for mixed and variable outcomes from planned provision (Cranmer, 2006). They also reported quite high levels of satisfaction among graduates on their perceived utility of their formal and informal university experiences. The theory of employability can be hard to place ; there can be many factors that contribute to the thought of being employable. This paper analyses the barriers to work faced by long- and short-term unemployed people in remote rural labour markets. As Clarke (2008) illustrates, the employability discourse reflects the increasing onus on individual employees to continually build up their repositories of knowledge and skills in an era when their career progression is less anchored around single organisations and specific job types. The extent to which future work forms a significant part of their future life goals is likely to determine how they approach the labour market, as well as their own future employability. (2003) The shape of research in the field of higher education and graduate employment: Some issues, Studies in Higher Education 28 (4): 413426. Employers propensities towards recruiting specific types of graduates perhaps reflects deep-seated issues stemming from more transactional, cost-led and short-term approaches to developing human resources (Warhurst, 2008). Well-developed and well-executed employability provisions may not necessarily equate with graduates actual labour market experiences and outcomes. The review has also highlighted the contested terrain around which debates on graduates employability and its development take place. Fevre, R. (2007) Employment insecurity and social theory: The power of nightmares, Work, Employment and Society 21 (3): 517535. Employability also encompasses significant equity issues. (2010) Education and the employability of graduates: Will Bologna make a difference? European Educational Research Journal 9 (1): 3244. It will further show that while common trends are evident across national context, the HElabour market relationship is also subject to national variability. Tomlinson's research also highlighted the propensity towards discourses of self-responsibilisation by students making the transitions to work. The past decade in the United Kingdom has therefore seen a strong focus on employability skills, including communication, teamworking, ICT and self-management being built into formal curricula. The most discernable changes in HE have been its gradual massification over the past three decades and, in more recent times, the move towards greater individual expenditure towards HE in the form of student fees. They also include the professional skills that enable you to be successful in the workplace. Knight, P. and Yorke, M. (2004) Learning, Curriculum and Employability in Higher Education, London: Routledge Falmer. volume25,pages 407431 (2012)Cite this article. Relatively high levels of personal investment are required to enhance one's employment profile and credentials, and to ensure that a return is made on one's investment in study. Employability depends on your knowledge, skills and attitudes, how you use those assets, and how you present them to employers. Greenbank, P. (2007) Higher education and the graduate labour market: The Class Factor, Tertiary Education and Management 13 (4): 365376. The functionalism perspective is a paradigm influenced by American sociology from roughly the 1930s to the 1960s, although its origins lay in the work of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, writing at the end of the 19th century. Bowman, H., Colley, H. and Hodkinson, P. (2005) Employability and Career Progression of Fulltime UK Masters Students: Final Report for the Higher Education Careers Services Unit, Leeds: Lifelong Learning Institute. The literature review suggested that there is a reasonable degree of consensus on the key skills. There is much continued debate over the way in which HE can contribute to graduates overall employment outcomes or, more sharply, their outputs and value-added in the labour market. Using Bourdieusian concepts of capital and field to outline the changing dynamic between HE and the labour market, Kupfer (2011) highlights the continued preponderance of structural and cultural inequalities through the existence of layered HE and labour market structures, operating in differentiated fields of power and resources. Rae, D. (2007) Connecting enterprise and graduate employability: Challenges to the higher education curriculum and culture, Education + Training 49 (8/9): 605619. The purpose of this paper is to adopt the perspective of personal construct theory to conceptualise employability. Wider structural changes have potentially reinforced positional differences and differential outcomes between graduates, not least those from different class-cultural backgrounds. Puhakka, A., Rautopuro, J. and Tuominen, V. (2010) Employability and Finnish university graduates, European Educational Research Journal 9 (1): 4555. Consensus Vs. However, while notions of graduate skills, competencies and attributes are used inter-changeably, they often convey different things to different people and definitions are not always likely to be shared among employers, university teachers and graduates themselves (Knight and Yorke, 2004; Barrie, 2006). That graduates employability is intimately related to personal identities and frames of reference reflects the socially constructed nature of employability more generally: it entails a negotiated ordering between the graduate and the wider social and economic structures through which they are navigating. Similar to Holmes (2001) work, such research illustrates that graduates career progression rests on the extent to which they can achieve affirmed and legitimated identities within their working lives. The consensus theory of employment argues that technological innovation is the driving force of social change (Drucker, 1993, Kerr, 1973). 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