Greenbank, P. (2007) Higher education and the graduate labour market: The Class Factor, Tertiary Education and Management 13 (4): 365376. Increasingly, individual graduates are no longer constrained by the old corporate structures that may have traditionally limited their occupational agility. This is likely to be carried through into the labour market and further mediated by graduates ongoing experiences and interactions post-university. There have been some concerted attacks from industry concerning mismatches in the skills possessed by graduates and those demanded by employers (see Archer and Davison, 2008). 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. Historically, the majority of employability research and practice pertained to vocational rehabilitation or to the attractiveness and selection of job candidates. 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 Employability is a product consisting of a specific set of skills, such as soft, hard, technical, and transferable. 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. (2008) Graduate development in European employment: Issues and contradictions, Education and Training 50 (5): 379390. Bowman et al. 2003). Becker, G. (1993) Human Capital: Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education (3rd edn), Chicago: Chicago University Press. However despite there being different concepts to analyse the make up of "employability", the consensus of these is that there are three key qualities when assessing the employability of graduates: These . 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. Moreover, individual graduates may need to reflexively align themselves to the new challenges of labour market, from which they can make appropriate decisions around their future career development and their general life courses. The different orientations students are developing appear to be derived from emerging identities and self-perceptions as future employees, as well as from wider biographical dimensions of the student. (2009) Processes of middle-class reproduction in a graduate employment scheme, Journal of Education and Work 22 (1): 3553. Continued training and lifelong learning is one way of staying fit in a job market context with shifting and ever-increasing employer demands. On the other hand, less optimistic perspectives tend to portray contemporary employment as being both more intensive and precarious (Sennett, 2006). Brennan, J., Kogan, M. and Teichler, U. Handbook of the Sociology of Education, New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. Employment relations is the study of the regulation of the employment relationship between employer and employee, both collectively and individually, and the determination . 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. 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. Purists, believing that their employability is largely constitutive of their meritocratic achievements, still largely equate their employability with traditional hard currencies, and are therefore not so adept at responding to signals from employers. This contrasts with more flexible liberal economies such as the United Kingdom, United States and Australia, characterised by more intensive competition, deregulation and lower employment tenure. Introduction. Elias and Purcell's (2004) research has reported positive overall labour market outcomes in graduates early career trajectories 7 years on from graduation: in the main graduates manage to secure paid employment and enjoy comparatively higher earning than non-graduates. 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. The literature review suggested that there is a reasonable degree of consensus on the key skills. Eurostat. Moreover, in terms of how governments and labour markets may attempt to coordinate and regulate the supply of graduates leaving systems of mass HE. 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. If initial identities are affirmed during the early stages of graduates working lives, they may well ossify and set the direction for future orientations and outlooks. Savage, M. (2003) A new class paradigm? British Journal of Sociology of Education 24 (4): 535541. - 91.200.32.231. 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. Google Scholar. Wider critiques of skills policy (Wolf, 2007) have tended to challenge naive conceptualisations of skills, bringing into question both their actual relationship to employee practices and the extent to which they are likely to be genuinely demand-led. Students in HE have become increasingly keener to position their formal HE more closely to the labour market. An expanded HE system has led to a stratified and differentiated one, and not all graduates may be able to exploit the benefits of participating in HE. 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). Little ( 2001 ) suggests, that it is a multi-dimensional construct, and there is a demand to separate between the factors relevant to the occupation and readying for work. Boden, R. and Nedeva, M. (2010) Employing discourse: Universities and graduate employability, Journal of Education Policy 25 (1): 3754. [PDF] Graduate Employability Skills: Differences between the Private and 02 May 2015 Education is vital in the knowledge economy as the commodity of . 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). Mass HE may therefore be perpetuating the types of structural inequalities it was intended to alleviate. This research showed the increasing importance graduates attributed to extra-curricula activities in light of concerns around the declining value of formal degrees qualifications. Career choices tend to be made within specific action frames, or what they refer to as horizons for actions. Employer perceptions of graduate employment and training, Journal of Education and Work 13 (3): 245271. Graduate employment rate is often used to assess the quality of university provision, despite that employability and employment are two different concepts. 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. 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. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that the department had reached a "low confidence" conclusion supporting the so-called lab leak theory in a classified finding shared with the White . Sennett, R. (2006) The Culture of New Capitalism, Yale: Yale University Press. This insight, combined with a growing consensus that government should try to stabilize employment, has led to much 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. 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. (2006) The evolution of the boundaryless career concept: Examining the physical and psychological mobility, Journal of Vocational Behavior 69 (1): 1929. (2003) Class Strategies and the Education Market: The Middle Classes and Social Advantage, London: Routledge. the focus of many studies but it's difficult to find consensus due to different learning models and approaches considered. (2006) showed that students choices towards studying at particular HEIs are likely to reflect subsequent choices. Employability is a promise to employees that they will hold the accomplishments to happen new occupations rapidly if their occupations end out of the blue ( Baruch, 2001 ) . 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. The strengths of consensus theory are that it is a more objective approach and that it is easier to achieve agreement. 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