These negotiations continue well into graduates working lives, as they continue to strive towards establishing credible work identities. . Needless to say, critics of supply-side and skills-centred approaches have challenged the somewhat simplistic, descriptive and under-contextualised accounts of graduate skills. Bowers-Brown, T. and Harvey, L. (2004) Are there too many graduates in the UK? Industry and Higher Education 18 (4): 243254. Consensus theories include functionalism, strain theory and subcultural theory. The consensus theory of employment and the conflict theory of employment present contradictory implications about highly skilled workers' opportunity cost for pursuing entrepreneurial activities in the knowledge economy. Thus, graduates successful integration in the labour market may rest less on the skills they possess before entering it, and more on the extent to which these are utilised and enriched through their actual participation in work settings. If individuals are able to capitalise upon their education and training, and adopt relatively flexible and proactive approaches to their working lives, then they will experience favourable labour market returns and conditions. 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. (2009) Processes of middle-class reproduction in a graduate employment scheme, Journal of Education and Work 22 (1): 3553. The key to accessing desired forms of employment is achieving a positional advantage over other graduates with similar academic and class-cultural profiles. yLy;l_L&. Kirton, G. (2009) Career plans and aspirations of recent black and minority ethnic business graduates, Work, Employment and Society 23 (1): 1229. This is then linked to research that has examined the way in which students and graduates are managing the transition into the labour market. 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. Graduates are therefore increasingly likely to see responsibility for future employability as falling quite sharply onto the shoulders of the individual graduate: being a graduate and possessing graduate-level credentials no longer warrants access to sought-after employment, if only because so many other graduates share similar educational and pre-work profiles. It was not uncommon for students participating, for example, in voluntary or community work to couch these activities in terms of developing teamworking and potential leadership skills. The inter-relationship between HE and the labour market has been considerably reshaped over time. ISSN 2039-9340 (print) ISSN 2039-2117 (online) Return to Article Details Graduate Employability Skills: Differences between the Private and the Public Sector in South Africa Download Download PDF Graduate Employability Skills: Differences between the Private and the Public Sector in South Africa Download Download PDF Greenbank, P. (2007) Higher education and the graduate labour market: The Class Factor, Tertiary Education and Management 13 (4): 365376. The second relates to the biases employers harbour around different graduates from different universities in terms of these universities relative so-called reputational capital (Harvey et al., 1997; Brown and Hesketh, 2004). 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. Knight, P. and Yorke, M. (2004) Learning, Curriculum and Employability in Higher Education, London: Routledge Falmer. While in the main graduates command higher wages and are able to access wider labour market opportunities, the picture is a complex and variable one and reflects marked differences among graduates in their labour market returns and experiences. 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. Englewood Cliffs . Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate the slides or the slide controller buttons at the end to navigate through each slide. (2007) The transition from higher education into work: Tales of cohesion and fragmentation, Education + Training 49 (7): 516585. 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. 213240. As a wider policy narrative, employability maps onto some significant concerns about the shifting interplays between universities, economy and state. Consensus v. conflict perspectives -Consensus Theory In general, this theory states that laws reflect general agreement in society. It appears that students and graduates reflect upon their relationship with the labour market and what they might need to achieve their goals. Moreau and Leathwood reported strong tendencies for graduates to attribute their labour market outcomes and success towards personal attributes and qualities as much as the structure of available opportunities. This has tended to challenge some of the traditional ways of understanding graduates and their position in the labour market, not least classical theories of cultural reproduction. Employability skills are sometimes called foundational skills or job-readiness skills. 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. . Further research has also pointed to experiences of graduate underemployment (Mason, 2002; Chevalier and Lindley, 2009).This research has revealed that a growing proportion of graduates are undertaking forms of employment that are not commensurate to their level of education and skills. Book The more recent policy in the United Kingdom towards raising fee levels has coincided with an economic downturn, generating concerns over the value and returns of a university degree. Keynesian economics was developed by the British economist John Maynard Keynes . develop the ideas in his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). Consensus Theory: the Basics According to consensus theories, for the most part society works because most people are successfully socialised into shared values through the family Ideally, graduates would be able to possess both the hard currencies in the form of traditional academic qualifications together with soft currencies in the form of cultural and interpersonal qualities. The prominence is on developing critical and reflective skills, with a view to empowering and enhancing the learner. It will further show that while common trends are evident across national context, the HElabour market relationship is also subject to national variability. Yet at a time when stakes within the labour market have risen, graduates are likely to demand that this link becomes a more tangible one. Chapter 2 is to refute the Classical theory of employment and unemployment on both empirical and logical grounds. (2008) Graduate development in European employment: Issues and contradictions, Education and Training 50 (5): 379390. Perhaps increasingly central to the changing dynamic between HE and the labour market has been the issue of graduate employability. Employability is a key concept in higher education. Fevre, R. (2007) Employment insecurity and social theory: The power of nightmares, Work, Employment and Society 21 (3): 517535. Department for Education Skills (DFES). 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). 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. 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. (2000) Recruiting a graduate elite? This analysis pays particular attention to the ways in which systems of HE are linked to changing economic demands, and also the way in which national governments have attempted to coordinate this relationship. Functionalism is a structural theory and posits that the social institutions and organization of society . They are (i) Business graduates require specific employability skills; (2) Curricular changes enhance . Increasingly, individual graduates are no longer constrained by the old corporate structures that may have traditionally limited their occupational agility. 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. As such, these identities and dispositions are likely to shape graduates action frames, including their decisions to embark upon various career routes. These attributes, sometimes referred to as "employability skills," are thought to be . These concerns have been given renewed focus in the current climate of wider labour market uncertainty. 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 ) . (2007) Round and round the houses: The Leitch review of skills, Local Economy 22 (2): 111117. Graduate employment rate is often used to assess the quality of university provision, despite that employability and employment are two different concepts. 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 may have a strong bearing upon how both graduates and employers socially construct the problem of graduate employability. The past decade has witnessed a strong emphasis on employability skills, with the rationale that universities equip students with the skills demanded by employers. 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. 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. Savage, M. (2003) A new class paradigm? British Journal of Sociology of Education 24 (4): 535541. Employability is a product consisting of a specific set of skills, such as soft, hard, technical, and transferable. 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 This appears to be a response to increased competition and flexibility in the labour market, reflecting an awareness that their longer-term career trajectories are less likely to follow stable or certain pathways. Green, F. and Zhu, Y. Crucially, these emerging identities frame the ways they attempt to manage their future employability and position themselves towards anticipated future labour market challenges. The Routledge International Handbook of Sociology of Education, London: Routledge, pp. Perhaps one consensus uniting discussion on the effects of labour market change is that the new knowledge-based economy entails significant challenges for individuals, including those who are well educated. This makes it reasonable to ask whether there is any such thing as the consensus theory of truth at all, in other words, whether there is any one single principle that the various approaches have in common, or whether the phrase is being used as a catch-all for a motley . 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 . Conflict theory in sociology. Research on the more subjective, identity-based aspects of graduate employability also shows that graduates dispositions tend to derive from wider aspects of their educational and cultural biographies, and that these exercise some substantial influence on their propensities towards future employment. 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. The consensus theory emphasizes that the social order is through the shared norms, and belief systems of people. The perspective gained much currency in the mid 20th century in the works of Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons, for whom . 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. The label consensus theory of truth is currently attached to a number of otherwise very diverse philosophical perspectives. (2006) showed that students choices towards studying at particular HEIs are likely to reflect subsequent choices. Employer perceptions of graduate employment and training, Journal of Education and Work 13 (3): 245271. Introduction. 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. The shift to wards a knowledge econo my where k nowledge workers 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). known as "Graduate Employability" (Harvey 2003; Yorke 2006). 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. This is likely to result in significant inequalities between social groups, disadvantaging in particular those from lower socio-economic groups. Beck, U. and Beck-Gernsheim, E. (2002) Individualization, London: Sage. European-wide secondary data also confirms such patterns, as reflected in variable cross-national graduate returns (Eurostat, 2009). (1999) Higher education policy and the world of work: Changing conditions and challenges, Higher Education Policy 12 (4): 285312. Employable individuals are able to demonstrate a fundamental level of functioning or skill to perform a given job, or an employable individual's skills and experience . A number of tensions and potential contradictions may arise from this, resulting mainly from competing agendas and interpretations over the ultimate purpose of a university education and how its provision should best be arranged. 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. and Leathwood, C. (2006) Graduates employment and discourse of employability: A critical analysis, Journal of Education and Work 18 (4): 305324. The themes of risk and individualisation map strongly onto the transition from HE to the labour market: the labour market constitutes a greater risk, including the potential for unemployment and serial job change. This research showed the increasing importance graduates attributed to extra-curricula activities in light of concerns around the declining value of formal degrees qualifications. At the same time, the seeming consensus regarding employability as an outcome with reference to employment or employment rates belies the complexity that surrounds the concept in the wider literature. 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). What their research illustrates is that these graduates labour market choices are very much wedded to their pre-existing dispositions and learner identities that frame what is perceived to be appropriate and available. In a similar vein, Greenbank (2007) also reported concerns among working-class graduates of perceived deficiencies in the cultural and social capital needed to access specific types of jobs. 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). The New Right argues that liberal left politicians and welfare policies have undermined the . Slider with three articles shown per slide. 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. 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. For graduates, the challenge is being able to package their employability in the form of a dynamic narrative that captures their wider achievements, and which conveys the appropriate personal and social credentials desired by employers. (eds.) Chevalier, A. and Lindley, J. The underlying assumption of this view is that the 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. Such notions of economic change tend to be allied to human capital conceptualisations of education and economic growth (Becker, 1993). One is the pre-existing level of social and cultural capital that these graduates possess, which opens up greater opportunities. This is further raising concerns around the distribution and equity of graduates economic opportunities, as well as the traditional role of HE credentials in facilitating access to desired forms of employment (Scott, 2005). Argues that even employable people may fail to find jobs because of positional competition in the knowledge-driven economy. Students in HE have become increasingly keener to position their formal HE more closely to the labour market. Career choices tend to be made within specific action frames, or what they refer to as horizons for actions. The Varieties of Capitalism approach developed by Hall and Soskice (2001) may be useful here in explaining the different ways in which different national economies coordinate the relationship between their education systems and human resource strategies. Marginson, S. (2007) University mission and identity for a post-public era, Higher Education Research and Development 26 (1): 117131. 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 . A range of other research has also exposed the variability within and between graduates in different national contexts (Edvardsson Stiwne and Alves, 2010; Puhakka et al., 2010). Part of Springer Nature. Keynes's theory suggested that increases in government spending, tax cuts, and monetary expansion could be used to counteract depressions. Such changes have coincided with what has typically been seen as a shift towards a more flexible, post-industrialised knowledge-driven economy that places increasing demands on the workforce and necessitates new forms of work-related skills (Hassard et al., 2008). Learning, Curriculum and employability in Higher Education 18 ( 4 ): 245271 states. Knowledge-Driven economy view consensus theory of employability empowering and enhancing the learner mid 20th century the... Result in significant inequalities between social groups, disadvantaging in particular those from socio-economic... 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