The review has also highlighted the contested terrain around which debates on graduates employability and its development take place. Under consensus theory the absence of conflict is seen as the equilibrium . 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). However, conflict theorists view the . 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). 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. Compelling evidence on employers approaches to managing graduate talent (Brown and Hesketh, 2004) exposes this situation quite starkly. research investigating employability from the employers' perspective has been qualitative in nature. Chapter 2 is to refute the Classical theory of employment and unemployment on both empirical and logical grounds. Employability is a product consisting of a specific set of skills, such as soft, hard, technical, and transferable. Morley (2001) however states that employability is not just about . Morley ( 2001 ) nevertheless states that . 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 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. Employability skills are sometimes called foundational skills or job-readiness skills. 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. Functionalism is a structural theory and posits that the social institutions and organization of society . It first relates the theme of graduate employability to the changing dynamic in the relationship between HE and the labour market, and the changing role of HE in regulating graduate-level work. Thus, HE has been traditionally viewed as providing a positive platform from which graduates could integrate successfully into economic life, as well as servicing the economy effectively. Scott, P. (2005) Universities and the knowledge economy, Minerva 43 (3): 297309. Naidoo, R. and Jamieson, I. Report to HEFCE by the Centre for Higher Education Research and Information. 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. 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. Mass HE may therefore be perpetuating the types of structural inequalities it was intended to alleviate. Holden, R. and Hamblett, J. Increasingly, individual graduates are no longer constrained by the old corporate structures that may have traditionally limited their occupational agility. 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. Wolf, A. 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). The theory of employability can be difficult to identify; there can be many factors that contribute to the idea of being employable. Power, S. and Whitty, G. (2006) Graduating and Graduations Within the Middle Class: The Legacy of an Elite Higher Education, Cardiff: Cardiff University, School of Social Sciences. Nabi, G., Holden, R. and Walmsley, A. (2007) The transition from higher education into work: Tales of cohesion and fragmentation, Education + Training 49 (7): 516585. Introduction The theory of employability can be difficult to identify; there can be many factors that contribute to the idea of being employable. However, new demands on HE from government, employers and students mean that continued pressures will be placed on HEIs for effectively preparing graduates for the labour market. editors. 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). In the more flexible UK market, it is more about flexibly adapting one's existing educational profile and credentials to a more competitive and open labour market context. Chapter 1 1. Puhakka, A., Rautopuro, J. and Tuominen, V. (2010) Employability and Finnish university graduates, European Educational Research Journal 9 (1): 4555. At another level, changes in the HE and labour market relationship map on to wider debates on the changing nature of employment more generally, and the effects this may have on the highly qualified. 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). These negotiations continue well into graduates working lives, as they continue to strive towards establishing credible work identities. The final aim is to logically distinguish . There are two key factors here. Thus, a significant feature of research over the past decade has been the ways in which these changes have entered the collective and personal consciousnesses of students and graduates leaving HE. Much of the graduate employability focus has been on supply-side responses towards enhancing graduates' skills for the labour market. The problem of managing one's future employability is therefore seen largely as being up to the individual graduate. 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. Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content: Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. A further policy response towards graduate employability has been around the enhancement of graduates skills, following the influential Dearing Report (1997). This is perhaps further reflected in the degree of qualification-based and skills mismatches, often referred to as vertical mismatches. 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. . The relatively stable and coherent employment narratives that individuals traditionally enjoyed have given way to more fractured and uncertain employment futures brought about by the intensity and inherent precariousness of the new short-term, transactional capitalism (Strangleman, 2007). The differentiated and heterogeneous labour market that graduates enter means that there is likely to be little uniformity in the way students constructs employability, notionally and personally. Strangleman, T. (2007) The nostalgia for the permanence of work? PubMedGoogle Scholar, Tomlinson, M. Graduate Employability: A Review of Conceptual and Empirical Themes. Personal characteristics, habits, and attitudes influence how you interact with others. The increasingly flexible and skills-rich nature of contemporary employment means that the highly educated are empowered in an economy demanding the creativity and abstract knowledge of those who have graduated from HE. Furlong, A. and Cartmel, F. (2005) Graduates from Disadvantaged Backgrounds: Early Labour Market Experiences, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. What this has shown is that graduates see the link between participation in HE and future returns to have been disrupted through mass HE. Johnston, B. Over time, however, this traditional link between HE and the labour market has been ruptured. This is then linked to research that has examined the way in which students and graduates are managing the transition into the labour market. Keynesian economics was developed by the British economist John Maynard Keynes . What has perhaps been characteristic of more recent policy discourses has been the strong emphasis on harnessing HE's activities to meet changing economic demands. Far from neutralising such pre-existing choices, these students university experiences often confirmed their existing class-cultural profiles, informing their ongoing student and graduate identities and feeding into their subsequent labour market orientations. 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 . It further draws upon research that has explored the ways in which students and graduates construct their employability and begin to manage the transition from HE to work. They also include the professional skills that enable you to be successful in the workplace. This will largely shape how graduates perceive the linkage between their higher educational qualification and their future returns. Summary. Much of the graduate employability focus has been on supply-side responses towards enhancing graduates skills for the labour market. What such research has shown is that the wider cultural features of graduates frame their self-perceptions, and which can then be reinforced through their interactions within the wider employment context. The consensus theory emphasizes that the social order is through the shared norms, and belief systems of people. The past decade has witnessed a strong emphasis on employability skills, with the rationale that universities equip students with the skills demanded by employers. 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. In the flexible and competitive UK context, employability also appears to be understood as a positional competition for jobs that are in scarce supply. (2010) Higher Education Funding for Academic Years 200910 and 201011 Including New Student Entrants, Bristol: HEFCE. Keynes' theory of employment is a demand-deficient theory. The theory of employability can be hard to place ; there can be many factors that contribute to the thought of being employable. Findings from previous research on employability from the demand side vary. 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). In all cases, as these researchers illustrate, narrow checklists of skills appear to play little part in informing employers recruitment decisions, nor in determining graduates employment outcomes. (2006) The evolution of the boundaryless career concept: Examining the physical and psychological mobility, Journal of Vocational Behavior 69 (1): 1929. Southampton Education School, University of Southampton, Building 32, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK, You can also search for this author in 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. 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. Little, B. and Leathwood, C. (2006) Graduates employment and discourse of employability: A critical analysis, Journal of Education and Work 18 (4): 305324. (2008) Higher Education at Work High Skills: High Value, London: HMSO. x[[s~_1o:GC$rvFvuVJR+9E 4IV[uJUCF_nRj 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. Marginson, S. (2007) University mission and identity for a post-public era, Higher Education Research and Development 26 (1): 117131. Continued training and lifelong learning is one way of staying fit in a job market context with shifting and ever-increasing employer demands. (2008) Graduate Employability: The View of Employers, London: Council for Industry and Higher Education. Consensus theories generally see crime as unusual, dysfunctional and believe something has 'gone wrong' for the people who commit crime. Mason, G. (2002) High skills utilisation under mass higher education: Graduate employment in the service industries in Britain, Journal of Education and Work 14 (4): 427456. The New Right argues that liberal left politicians and welfare policies have undermined the . The strengths of consensus theory are that it is a more objective approach and that it is easier to achieve agreement. In sociology, consensus theory is a theory that views consensus as a key distinguishing feature of a group of people or society. 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). Moreover, there is evidence of national variations between graduates from different countries, contingent on the modes of capitalism within different countries. Again, graduates respond to the challenges of increasing flexibility, individualisation and positional competition in different ways. Introduction. the consensus and the conflict theory on graduate 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. (2003) and Reay et al. Employment relations is the study of the regulation of the employment relationship between employer and employee, both collectively and individually, and the determination . 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. The problem has been largely attributable to universities focusing too rigidly on academically orientated provision and pedagogy, and not enough on applied learning and functional skills. Collins, R. (2000) Comparative and Historical Patterns of Education, in M. Hallinan (ed.) Moreover, supply-side approaches tend to lay considerable responsibility onto HEIs for enhancing graduates employability. 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. Research has continually highlighted engrained employer biases towards particular graduates, ordinarily those in possession of traditional cultural and academic currencies and from more prestigious HEIs (Harvey et al., 1997; Hesketh, 2000). The subjective mediation of graduates employability is likely to have a significant role in how they align themselves and their expectations to the labour market. In more flexible labour markets such as the United Kingdom, this relationship is far from a straightforward one. In countries where training routes are less demarcated (for instance those with mass HE systems), these differences are less pronounced. French sociologist and criminologist Emile . The underlying assumption of this view is that the Perhaps significantly, their research shows that graduates occupy a broad range of jobs and occupations, some of which are more closely matched to the archetype of the traditional graduate profession. 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. 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. The inter-relationship between HE and the labour market has been considerably reshaped over time. ( consensus theory of employability. influence how you interact with others Education research and Information this will largely shape how graduates the! 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