The end of work and its commentators, The Sociological Review 55 (1): 81103. These concerns have been given renewed focus in the current climate of wider labour market uncertainty. 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. The problem of managing one's future employability is therefore seen largely as being up to the individual graduate. While some of these graduates appear to be using their extra studies as a platform for extending their potential career scope, for others it is additional time away from the job market and can potentially confirm that sense of ambivalence towards it. Becker, G. (1993) Human Capital: Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education (3rd edn), Chicago: Chicago University Press. Much of the graduate employability focus has been on supply-side responses towards enhancing graduates' skills for the labour market. In the context of a knowledge economy, consensus theory advocates that knowledge, skills and innovation are the driving factors of our society. Consensus is the collective agreement of individuals. Their location within their respective fields of employment, and the level of support they receive from employers towards developing this, may inevitably have a considerable bearing upon their wider labour market experiences. It now appears no longer enough just to be a graduate, but instead an employable graduate. A range of key factors seem to determine graduates access to different returns in the labour market that are linked to the specific profile of the graduate. X@vFuyfDdf(^vIm%h>IX, OIDq8 - Furthermore, this relationship was marked by a relatively stable flow of highly qualified young people into well-paid and rewarding employment. Fugate and Kinicki (2008, p.9) describe career identity as "one's self-definition in the career context."Chope and Johnson (2008, p. 47) define career identity in a more scientific manner where they state that "career identity reflects the degree to which individuals define themselves in terms of a particular organisation, job, profession, or industry". Greenbank, P. (2007) Higher education and the graduate labour market: The Class Factor, Tertiary Education and Management 13 (4): 365376. 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. Continued training and lifelong learning is one way of staying fit in a job market context with shifting and ever-increasing employer demands. The theory of employability can be difficult to identify; there can be many factors that contribute to the idea of being employable. These attributes, sometimes referred to as "employability skills," are thought to be . Value consensus assumes that the norms and values of society are generally agreed and that social life is based on co-operation rather than conflict. (2010) From student to entrepreneur: Towards a model of entrepreneurial career-making, Journal of Education and Work 23 (5): 389415. Dominant discourses on graduates employability have tended to centre on the economic role of graduates and the capacity of HE to equip them for the labour market. Little (2001) suggests, that it is a multi-dimensional concept, and there is a need to distinguish between the factors relevant to the job and preparation for work. Beck, U. and Beck-Gernsheim, E. (2002) Individualization, London: Sage. Department for Business Innovation and Skills (DIUS). 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. Wolf, A. 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). 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). Boden, R. and Nedeva, M. (2010) Employing discourse: Universities and graduate employability, Journal of Education Policy 25 (1): 3754. Such dispositions have developed through their life-course and intuitively guide them towards certain career goals. HE systems across the globe are evolving in conjunction with wider structural transformations in advanced, post-industrial capitalism (Brown and Lauder, 2009). (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 . Graduates are perceived as potential key players in the drive towards enhancing value-added products and services in an economy demanding stronger skill-sets and advanced technical knowledge. In some countries, for instance Germany, HE is a clearer investment as evinced in marked wage and opportunity differences between graduate and non-graduate forms of employment. This is likely to be carried through into the labour market and further mediated by graduates ongoing experiences and interactions post-university. (1996) Higher Education and Work, London: Jessica Kingsley. The research by Brennan and Tang shows that graduates in continental Europe were more likely to perceive a closer matching between their HE and work experience; in effect, their HE had had a more direct bearing on their future employment and had set them up more specifically for particular jobs. One is the pre-existing level of social and cultural capital that these graduates possess, which opens up greater opportunities. *1*.J\ 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. An example of this is the family. Graduates in different occupations were shown to be drawing upon particular graduate skill-sets, be that occupation-specific expertise, managerial decision-making skills, and interactive, communication-based competences. Students in HE have become increasingly keener to position their formal HE more closely to the labour market. Functionalism is a structural theory and posits that the social institutions and organization of society . Compelling evidence on employers approaches to managing graduate talent (Brown and Hesketh, 2004) exposes this situation quite starkly. (eds.) Universities have typically been charged with failing to instil in graduates the appropriate skills and dispositions that enable them to add value to the labour market. The correspondence between HE and the labour market rests largely around three main dimensions: (i) in terms of the knowledge and skills that HE transfers to graduates and which then feeds back into the labour market, (ii) the legitimatisation of credentials that serve as signifiers to employers and enable them to screen prospective future employees and (iii) the enrichment of personal and cultural attributes, or what might be seen as personality. Such notions of economic change tend to be allied to human capital conceptualisations of education and economic growth (Becker, 1993). 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 paper draws largely from UK-based research and analysis, but also relates this to existing research and data at an international level. Chapter 2 is to refute the Classical theory of employment and unemployment on both empirical and logical grounds. yLy;l_L&. Most significantly, they may be better able to demonstrate the appropriate personality package increasingly valued in the more elite organisations (Brown and Hesketh, 2004; Brown and Lauder, 2009). 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 . [PDF] Graduate Employability Skills: Differences between the Private and 02 May 2015 Education is vital in the knowledge economy as the commodity of . Players are adept at responding to such competition, embarking upon strategies that will enable them to acquire and present the types of employability narratives that employers demand. 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 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. (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. 9n=#Ql\(~_e!Ul=>MyHv'Ez'uH7w2'ffP"M*5Lh?}s$k9Zw}*7-ni{?7d Increasingly, individual graduates are no longer constrained by the old corporate structures that may have traditionally limited their occupational agility. This has coincided with the movement towards more flexible labour markets, the overall contraction of management forms of employment, an increasing intensification in global competition for skilled labour and increased state-driven attempts to maximise the outputs of the university system (Harvey, 2000; Brown and Lauder, 2009). This also extends to subject areas where there has been a traditionally closer link between the curricula content and specific job areas (Wilton, 2008; Rae, 2007). Scott, P. (2005) Universities and the knowledge economy, Minerva 43 (3): 297309. The paper then explores research on graduates labour market returns and outcomes, and the way they are positioned in the labour market, again highlighting the national variability to graduates labour market outcomes. Kirton, G. (2009) Career plans and aspirations of recent black and minority ethnic business graduates, Work, Employment and Society 23 (1): 1229. 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. Variations in graduates labour market returns appear to be influenced by a range of factors, framing the way graduates construct their employability. Individuals have to flexibly adapt to a job market that places increasing expectation and demands on them; in short, they need to continually maintain their employability. Fevre, R. (2007) Employment insecurity and social theory: The power of nightmares, Work, Employment and Society 21 (3): 517535. This has some significant implications for the ways in which they understand their employability and the types of credentials and forms of capital around which this is built. Hinchliffe, G. and Jolly, A. It also introduces 'positional conflict theory' as a way of A further policy response towards graduate employability has been around the enhancement of graduates skills, following the influential Dearing Report (1997). Moreover, this is likely to shape their orientations towards the labour market, potentially affecting their overall trajectories and outcomes. (2008) Graduate development in European employment: Issues and contradictions, Education and Training 50 (5): 379390. In countries where training routes are less demarcated (for instance those with mass HE systems), these differences are less pronounced. For Brown and Hesketh (2004), however, graduates respond differently according to their existing values, beliefs and understandings. Johnston, B. Graduate employability has seen more sweeping emphasis and concerns in national and global job markets, due to the ever-rising number of unemployed people, which has increased even more due to . Careerist students, for instance, were clearly imaging themselves around their future labour market goals and embarking upon strategies in order to maximise their future employment outcomes and enhance their perceived employability. 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. 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. 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! This tends to manifest itself in the form of positional conflict and competition between different groups of graduates competing for highly sought-after forms of employment (Brown and Hesketh, 2004). Harvey, L., Moon, S. and Geall, V. (1997) Graduates Work: Organisational Change and Students Attributes, Birmingham: QHE. Summary. The global move towards mass HE is resulting in a much wider body of graduates in arguably a crowded graduate labour market. This research showed the increasing importance graduates attributed to extra-curricula activities in light of concerns around the declining value of formal degrees qualifications. The research by Archer et al. Keynes's theory suggested that increases in government spending, tax cuts, and monetary expansion could be used to counteract depressions. Future research directions on graduate employability will need to explore the way in which graduates employability and career progression is managed both by graduates and employers during the early stages of their careers. 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. the consensus and the conflict theory on graduate employability . The downside of consensus theory is that it can be less dynamic and more static, which can lead to stagnation. Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). There is no shortage of evidence about what employers expect and demand from graduates, although the extent to which their rhetoric is matched with genuine commitment to both facilitating and further developing graduates existing skills is more questionable. The challenge for graduate employees is to develop strategies that militate against such likelihoods. The literature review suggested that there is a reasonable degree of consensus on the key skills. Even those students with strong intrinsic orientations around extra-curricula activities are aware of the need to translate these into marketable, value-added skills. Employability. Conflict theory in sociology. Department for Education (DFE). 2023 Springer Nature Switzerland AG. Avoid the most common mistakes and prepare your manuscript for journal This study examines these two theories and makes competing predictions about the role of knowledge workers in moderating the . The final aim is to logically distinguish . Applying a broad concept of 'employability' as an analytical framework, it considers the attributes and experiences of 190 job seekers (22% of the registered unemployed) in two contiguous travel-to-work areas (Wick and Sutherland) in the northern Highlands of Scotland. Purpose. The prominence is on developing critical and reflective skills, with a view to empowering and enhancing the learner. This agenda is likely to gain continued momentum with the increasing costs of studying in HE and the desire among graduates to acquire more vocationally relevant skills to better equip them for the job market. These changes have added increasing complexities to graduates transition into the labour market, as well as the traditional link between graduation and subsequent labour market reward. (2003) and Reay et al. 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). 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. The current climate of wider labour market uncertainty that it can be many factors that contribute to idea... As being up to the idea of being employable, skills and innovation are the driving factors our. Has been on supply-side responses towards enhancing graduates & # x27 ; skills for the labour market and further by. 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