Moreover, there is evidence of national variations between graduates from different countries, contingent on the modes of capitalism within different countries. and Soskice, D.W. (2001) Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [PDF] Graduate Employability Skills: Differences between the Private and 02 May 2015 Education is vital in the knowledge economy as the commodity of . Yet research has raised questions over employers overall effectiveness in marshalling graduates skills in the labour market (Brown and Hesketh, 2004; Morley and Aynsley, 2007). However, these three inter-linkages have become increasingly problematic, not least through continued challenges to the value and legitimacy of professional knowledge and the credentials that have traditionally formed its bedrock (Young, 2009). Bridgstock, R. (2009) The graduate attributes weve overlooked: Enhancing graduate employability through career management skills, Higher Education Research and Development 28 (1): 3144. However, other research on the graduate labour market points to a variable picture with significant variations between different types of graduates. Research by Tomlinson (2007) has shown that some students on the point of transiting to employment are significantly more orientated towards the labour market than others. Purpose. Brennan, J. and Tang, W. (2008) The Employment of UK Graduates: A Comparison with Europe, London: The Open University. 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). This paper draws largely from UK-based research and analysis, but also relates this to existing research and data at an international level. The strengths of consensus theory are that it is a more objective approach and that it is easier to achieve agreement. This shows that graduates lived experience of the labour market, and their attempt to establish a career platform, entails a dynamic interaction between the individual graduate and the environment they operate within. Over time, however, this traditional link between HE and the labour market has been ruptured. They see society like a human body, where key institutions work like the body's organs to keep the society/body healthy and well.Social health means the same as social order, and is guaranteed when nearly everyone accepts the general moral values of their society. Reviews for a period of 20 years between 1994 and 2013 have been assimilated and categorized into two propositions. Such perceptions are likely to be reinforced by not only the increasingly flexible labour market that graduates are entering, but also the highly differentiated system of mass HE in the United Kingdom. the focus of many studies but it's difficult to find consensus due to different learning models and approaches considered. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate the slides or the slide controller buttons at the end to navigate through each slide. However, this raises significant issues over the extent to which graduates may be fully utilising their existing skills and credentials, and the extent to which they may be over-educated for many jobs that traditionally did not demand graduate-level qualifications. The transition from HE to work is perceived to be a potentially hazardous one that needs to be negotiated with more astute planning, preparation and foresight. These concerns may further feed into students approaches to HE more generally, increasingly characterised by more instrumental, consumer-driven and acquisitive learning approaches (Naidoo and Jamieson, 2005). 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. Eurostat. It will further show that while common trends are evident across national context, the HElabour market relationship is also subject to national variability. Little and Arthur's research shows similar patterns among European graduates, there are generally higher levels of graduate satisfaction with HE as a preparation for future employment, as well as much closer matching up between graduates credentials and the requirements of jobs. Morley (2001) however states that employability . These two theories are usually spoken of as in opposition based on their arguments. (2006) The evolution of the boundaryless career concept: Examining the physical and psychological mobility, Journal of Vocational Behavior 69 (1): 1929. (employment, marriage, children) that strengthen social bonds -Population Heterogeneity Stability in criminal offending is due to an anti-social characteristic (e., low self-control) that reverberates . The research by Archer et al. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of some of the dominant empirical and conceptual themes in the area of graduate employment and employability over the past decade. Boden, R. and Nedeva, M. (2010) Employing discourse: Universities and graduate employability, Journal of Education Policy 25 (1): 3754. 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. For graduates, the process of realising labour market goals, of becoming a legitimate and valued employee, is a continual negotiation and involves continual identity work. They nevertheless remain committed to HE as a key economic driver, although with a new emphasis on further rationalising the system through cutting-back university services, stricter prioritisation of funding allocation and higher levels of student financial contribution towards HE through the lifting of the threshold of university fee contribution (DFE, 2010). PubMedGoogle Scholar, Tomlinson, M. Graduate Employability: A Review of Conceptual and Empirical Themes. Employers value employability skills because they regard these as indications of how you get along with other team members and customers, and how efficiently you are likely to handle your job performance and career success. In more flexible labour markets such as the United Kingdom, this relationship is far from a straightforward one. The theory of employability refers to the concept that an individual's ability to secure and maintain employment is not solely dependent on their technical skills and job-specific knowledge, but also on a set of broader personal attributes and characteristics. 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. (eds.) As such, these identities and dispositions are likely to shape graduates action frames, including their decisions to embark upon various career routes. For some graduates, HE continues to be a clear route towards traditional middle-class employment and lifestyle; yet for others it may amount to little more than an opportunity cost. On the other hand, less optimistic perspectives tend to portray contemporary employment as being both more intensive and precarious (Sennett, 2006). 1.2 THE CLASSICAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT The purpose of G.T. They also include the professional skills that enable you to be successful in the workplace. (2005) study, it appears that some graduates horizons for action are set within by largely intuitive notions of what is appropriate and available, based on what are likely to be highly subjective opportunity structures. Knight, P. and Yorke, M. (2004) Learning, Curriculum and Employability in Higher Education, London: Routledge Falmer. This is perhaps reflected in the increasing amount of new, modern and niche forms of graduate employment, including graduate sales mangers, marketing and PR officers, and IT executives. Consensus is the collective agreement of individuals. (2007) Does higher education matter? X@vFuyfDdf(^vIm%h>IX, OIDq8 - This review has highlighted how this shifting dynamic has reshaped the nature of graduates transitions into the labour market, as well as the ways in which they begin to make sense of and align themselves towards future labour market demands. While investment in HE may result in favourable outcomes for some graduates, this is clearly not the case across the board. Furlong, A. and Cartmel, F. (2005) Graduates from Disadvantaged Backgrounds: Early Labour Market Experiences, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Part of Springer Nature. Throughout, the paper explores some of the dominant conceptual themes informing discussion and research on graduate employability, in particular human capital, skills, social reproduction, positional conflict and identity. (2003) Class Strategies and the Education Market: The Middle Classes and Social Advantage, London: Routledge. In countries where training routes are less demarcated (for instance those with mass HE systems), these differences are less pronounced. Brown, Hesketh and Williams (2002) concur that the . While consensus theory emphasizes cooperation and shared values, conflict theory emphasizes power dynamics and ongoing struggles for social change. While they were aware of potential structural barriers relating to the potentially classed and gendered nature of labour markets, many of these young people saw the need to take proactive measures to negotiate theses challenges. This paper reviews some of the key empirical and conceptual themes in the area of graduate employability over the past decade in order to make sense of graduate employability as a policy issue. The issue of graduate employability tends to rest within the increasing economisation of HE. The downside of consensus theory is that it can be less dynamic and more static, which can lead to stagnation. Similar to the Bowman et al. It seeks to explore shortcomings in the current employment of the concept of consensus, and in so doing to explain the continued relevance of conflict theory for sociological research. Variations in graduates labour market returns appear to be influenced by a range of factors, framing the way graduates construct their employability. A more specific set of issues have arisen concerning the types of individuals organisations want to recruit, and the extent to which HEIs can serve to produce them. HE systems across the globe are evolving in conjunction with wider structural transformations in advanced, post-industrial capitalism (Brown and Lauder, 2009). Graduates increasing propensity towards lifelong learning appears to reflect a realisation that the active management of their employability is a career-wide project that will prevail over their longer-term course of their employment. (2011) Graduate identity and employability, British Educational Research Journal 37 (4): 563584. This is further reflected in pay difference and breadth of career opportunities open to different genders. In some parts of Europe, graduates frame their employability more around the extent to which they can fulfil the specific occupational criteria based on specialist training and knowledge. A consensus theory approach sees sport as a source of collective harmony, a way of binding people together in a shared experience. 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. Graduates appear to be valued on a range of broad skills, dispositions and performance-based activities that can be culturally mediated, both in the recruitment process and through the specific contexts of their early working lives. This tends to be mediated by a range of contextual variables in the labour market, not least graduates relations with significant others in the field and the specific dynamics inhered in different forms of employment. Furthermore, as Bridgstock (2009) has highlighted, generic skills discourses often fail to engage with more germane understandings of the actual career-salient skills graduates genuinely need to navigate through early career stages. Personal characteristics, habits, and attitudes influence how you interact with others. 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. Employability skills are sometimes called foundational skills or job-readiness skills. The consensus theory of employability states that enhancing graduates' employability and advancing their careers requires improving their human capital, specically their skill development (Selvadurai et al.2012). Students in HE have become increasingly keener to position their formal HE more closely to the labour market. Research by both Furlong and Cartmel (2005) and Power and Whitty (2006) shows strong evidence of socio-economic influences on graduate returns, with graduates relative HE experiences often mediating the link between their origins and their destinations. At one level, there has been an optimistic vision of the economy as being fluid and knowledge-intensive (Leadbetter, 2000), readily absorbing the skills and intellectual capital that graduates possess. More positive accounts of graduates labour market outcomes tend to support the notion of HE as a positive investment that leads to favourable returns. Arthur, M. and Sullivan, S.E. Learning and employability are clearly supportive constructs but this relationship appears to be under represented and lacks clarity. 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. Power and Whitty's research shows that graduates who experienced more elite earlier forms of education, and then attendance at prestigious universities, tend to occupy high-earning and high-reward occupations. For instance, non-traditional students who had studied at local institutions may be far more likely to fix their career goals around local labour markets, some of which may afford limited opportunities for career progression. 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). 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. This was a model developed by Lorraine Dacre Pool and Peter Sewell in 2007 which identifies five essential elements that aid employability: Career Development Learning: the knowledge, skills and experience to help people manage and develop their careers. Moreover, they will be more productive, have higher earning potential and be able to access a range of labour market goods including better working conditions, higher status and more fulfilling work. Even those students with strong intrinsic orientations around extra-curricula activities are aware of the need to translate these into marketable, value-added skills. While at one level the correspondence between HE and the labour market has become blurred by these various structural changes, there has also been something of a tightening of the relationship. <>stream Hesketh, A.J. conventional / consensus perspective that places . Critical approaches to labour market change have also tended to point to the structural inequalities within the labour market, reflected and reinforced through the ways in which different social groups approach both the educational and labour market fields. Thetable below has been compiled by a range of UK-based companies (see company details at the end of this guide), and it lists the Top 10 Employability Skills which they look for in potential employees - that means you! As HE's role for regulating future professional talent becomes reshaped, questions prevail over whose responsibility it is for managing graduates transitions and employment outcomes: universities, states, employers or individual graduates themselves? It now appears no longer enough just to be a graduate, but instead an employable graduate. In such labour market contexts, HE regulates more clearly graduates access to particular occupations. For other students, careers were far more tangential to their personal goals and lifestyles, and were not something they were prepared to make strong levels of personal and emotional investment towards. 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. Graduate employability is a multifaceted concept considering the Sustainable Development Goals. Research has tended to reveal a mixed picture on graduates and their position in the labour market (Brown and Hesketh, 2004; Elias and Purcell, 2004; Green and Zhu, 2010). Ainley, P. (1994) Degrees of Difference, London: Lawrence Washart. For much of the past decade, governments have shown a commitment towards increasing the supply of graduates entering the economy, based on the technocratic principle that economic changes necessitates a more highly educated and flexible workforce (DFES, 2003) This rationale is largely predicated on increased economic demand for higher qualified individuals resulting from occupational changes, and whereby the majority of new job growth areas are at graduate level. Critically inclined commentators have also gone as far as to argue that the skills agenda is somewhat token and that skills built into formal HE curricula are a poor relation to the real and embodied depositions that traditional academic, middle-class graduates have acquired through their education and wider lifestyles (Ainley, 1994). (1996) Higher Education and Work, London: Jessica Kingsley. (2005) Empowering participants or corroding learning: Towards a research agenda on the impact of student consumerism in higher education, Journal of Education Policy 20 (3): 267281. Greenbank, P. (2007) Higher education and the graduate labour market: The Class Factor, Tertiary Education and Management 13 (4): 365376. (2003) and Reay et al. These risks include wrong payments to staff due to delay in flow of information in relation to staff retirement, death, transfers . Consequently, they will have to embark upon increasingly uncertain employment futures, continually having to respond to the changing demands of internal and external labour markets. Dearing, R. (1997) The Dearing Report: Report for the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education: Higher Education in the Learning Society, London: HMSO. The shift to wards a knowledge econo my where k nowledge workers Sennett, R. (2006) The Culture of New Capitalism, Yale: Yale University Press. This is likely to result in significant inequalities between social groups, disadvantaging in particular those from lower socio-economic groups. In the United Kingdom, as in other countries, clear differences have been reported on the class-cultural and academic profiles of graduates from different HEIs, along with different rates of graduate return (Archer et al., 2003; Furlong and Cartmel, 2005; Power and Whitty, 2006). % This should be ultimately responsive to the different ways in which students themselves personally construct such attributes and their integration within, rather than separation from, disciplinary knowledge and practices. For such students, future careers were potentially a significant source of personal meaning, providing a platform from which they could find fulfilment, self-expression and a credible adult identity. This paper analyses the barriers to work faced by long- and short-term unemployed people in remote rural labour markets. In contrast to conflict theories, consensus theories are those that see people in society as having shared interests and society functioning on the basis of there being broad consensus on its norms and values. 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. Moreover, in such contexts, there is greater potential for displacement between levels of education and occupational position; in turn, graduates may also perceive a potential mismatch between their qualifications and their returns in the job market. The evidence suggests that some graduates assume the status of knowledge workers more than others, as reflected in the differential range of outcomes and opportunities they experience. This relates largely to the ways in which they approach the job market and begin to construct and manage their individual employability, mediated largely through the types of work-related dispositions and identities that they are developing. Tomlinson's research also highlighted the propensity towards discourses of self-responsibilisation by students making the transitions to work. Problematising the notion of graduate skill is beyond the scope of this paper, and has been discussed extensively elsewhere (Holmes, 2001; Hinchliffe and Jolly, 2011).Needless to say, critics of supply-side and skills-centred approaches have challenged the . Keynes's theory suggested that increases in government spending, tax cuts, and monetary expansion could be used to counteract depressions. Employment in Academia: To What Extent Are Recent Doctoral Graduates of Various Fields of Study Obtaining Permanent Versus Temporary Academic Jobs in Canada? *1*.J\ Elias, P. and Purcell, K. (2004) The Earnings of Graduates in Their Early Careers: Researching Graduates Seven Years on. The changing HEeconomy dynamic feeds into a range of further significant issues, not least those relating to equity and access in the labour market. Consensus Vs. (2009) The Bologna Process in Higher Education in Europe: Key Indicators on the Social Dimension and Mobility, Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. (2003) Higher Education and Social Class: Issues of Exclusion and Inclusion, London: Routledge. explains that employability influences three theories: Talcott Parson's Consensus Theory that is linked to norms and shared beliefs of the society; Conflict theory of Karl Marx, who elaborated how the finite resources of the world drive towards eternal conflict; and Human Capital Theory of Becker which is Employers and Universities: Conceptual Dimensions, Research Evidence and Implications, Reconceptualising employability of returnees: what really matters and strategic navigating approaches, Relations between graduates learning experiences and employment outcomes: a cautionary note for institutional performance indicators, The Effects of a Masters Degree on Wage and Job Satisfaction in Massified Higher Education: The Case of South Korea. This may have a strong bearing upon how both graduates and employers socially construct the problem of graduate employability. 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