Marginson, S. (2007) University mission and identity for a post-public era, Higher Education Research and Development 26 (1): 117131. Article (2011) Graduate identity and employability, British Educational Research Journal 37 (4): 563584. In the context of a knowledge economy, consensus theory advocates that knowledge, skills and innovation are the driving factors of our society. Barrie, S. (2006) Understanding what we mean by generic attributes of graduates, Higher Education 51 (2): 215241. What this research has shown is that graduates anticipate the labour market to engender high risks and uncertainties (Moreau and Leathwood, 2006; Tomlinson, 2007) and are managing their expectations accordingly. A consensus theory is one which believes that the institutions of society are working together to maintain social cohesion and stability. Research Paper 1, University of West England & Warwick University, Warwick Institute for Employment Research. Harvey, L. (2000) New realities: The relationship between higher education and employment, Tertiary Education and Management 6 (1): 317. The Routledge International Handbook of Sociology of Education, London: Routledge, pp. Hansen, H. (2011) Rethinking certification theory and the educational development of the United States and Germany, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 29: 3155. One particular consequence of a massified, differentiated HE is therefore likely to be increased discrimination between different types of graduates. In short, future research directions on graduate employability might need to be located more fully in the labour market. Morley (2001) however states that employability . 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. Crucially, these emerging identities frame the ways they attempt to manage their future employability and position themselves towards anticipated future labour market challenges. Brooks, R. and Everett, G. (2009) Post-graduate reflections on the value of a degree, British Educational Research Journal 35 (3): 333349. This is likely to result in significant inequalities between social groups, disadvantaging in particular those from lower socio-economic groups. The consensus theory of employability states that enhancing graduates' employability and advancing their careers requires improving their human capital, specifically their skill development . Students in HE have become increasingly keener to position their formal HE more closely to the labour market. Personal characteristics, habits, and attitudes influence how you interact with others. The final aim is to logically distinguish . Department for Education Skills (DFES). 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. In addition, the human development theory and the human capital theory come to the forefront whenever employability is considered. 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. Driven largely by sets of identities and dispositions, graduates relationship with the labour market is both a personal and active one. Nabi, G., Holden, R. and Walmsley, A. This paper aims to place the issue of graduate employability in the context of the shifting inter-relationship between HE and the labour market, and the changing regulation of graduate employment. 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. (2007) Does higher education matter? (2010) Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education (The Browne Review), London: HMSO. 6 0 obj 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. 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. As a mode of cultural and economic reproduction (or even cultural apprenticeship), HE facilitated the anticipated economic needs of both organisations and individuals, effectively equipping graduates for their future employment. 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. 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). Archer, L., Hutchens, M. and Ross, A. Eurostat. Various analysis of graduate returns (Brown and Hesketh, 2004; Green and Zhu, 2010) have highlighted the significant disparities that exist among graduates; in particular, some marked differences between the highest graduate earners and the rest. (2003) The Future of Higher Education, London: HMSO. 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. Increasingly, graduates employability needs to be embodied through their so-called personal capital, entailing the integration of academic abilities with personal, interpersonal and behavioural attributes. Arthur, M. and Sullivan, S.E. 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. and David, M. (2006) Degree of Choice: Class, Gender and Race in Higher Education, Stoke: Trentham Books. Tomlinson, M. (2007) Graduate employability and student attitudes and orientations to the labour market, Journal of Education and Work 20 (4): 285304. This will help further elucidate the ways in which graduates employability is played out within the specific context of their working lives, including the various modes of professional development and work-related learning that they are engaged in and the formation of their career profiles. By reductio ad absurdum, Keynes demonstrates that the predictions of Classical theory do not accord with the observed response of workers to changes in real wages. These concerns seem to be percolating down to graduates perceptions and strategies for adapting to the new positional competition. This is further likely to be mediated by national labour market structures in different national settings that differentially regulate the position and status of graduates in the economy. The expansion of HE, and the creation of new forms of HEIs and degree provision, has resulted in a more heterogeneous mix of graduates leaving universities (Scott, 2005). Employability is a product consisting of a specific set of skills, such as soft, hard, technical, and transferable. . This means that Keynes visualized employment/unemployment from the demand side of the model. 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. (2009) reported significant awareness among graduates of class inequalities for accessing specific jobs, along with expectations of potential disadvantages through employers biases around issues such as appearance, accent and cultural code. Boden, R. and Nedeva, M. (2010) Employing discourse: Universities and graduate employability, Journal of Education Policy 25 (1): 3754. This is particularly evident among the bottom-earning graduates who, as Green and Zhu show, do not necessarily attain better longer-term earnings than non-graduates. Historically, the majority of employability research and practice pertained to vocational rehabilitation or to the attractiveness and selection of job candidates. Puhakka, A., Rautopuro, J. and Tuominen, V. (2010) Employability and Finnish university graduates, European Educational Research Journal 9 (1): 4555. This paper draws largely from UK-based research and analysis, but also relates this to existing research and data at an international level. The theory of employability can be hard to place ; there can be many factors that contribute to the thought of being employable. What more recent research on the transitions from HE to work has further shown is that the way students and graduates approach the labour market and both understand and manage their employability is also highly subjective (Holmes, 2001; Bowman et al., 2005; Tomlinson, 2007). and Soskice, D.W. (2001) Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, Oxford: Oxford University Press. The New Right argues that liberal left politicians and welfare policies have undermined the . . This study examines these two theories and makes competing predictions about the role of knowledge workers in moderating the . Less positively, their research exposed gender disparities gap in both pay and the types of occupations graduates work within. 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 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). Moreover, in the context of flexible and competitive globalisation, the highly educated may find themselves forming part of an increasingly disenfranchised new middle class, continually at the mercy of agile, cost-driven flows in skilled labour, and in competition with contemporaries from newly emerging economies. There has been perhaps an increasing government realisation that future job growth is likely to be halted for the immediate future, no longer warranting the programme of expansion intended by the previous government. 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. (2007) Round and round the houses: The Leitch review of skills, Local Economy 22 (2): 111117. Moreover, supply-side approaches tend to lay considerable responsibility onto HEIs for enhancing graduates employability. 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. Advancement in technological innovation requires the application of technical skills and knowledge; thus, attracting and retaining talented knowledge workers have become crucial for incumbent firms . Universities have experienced heightened pressures to respond to an increasing range of internal and external market demands, reframing the perceived value of their activities and practices. There is much continued debate over the way in which HE can contribute to graduates overall employment outcomes or, more sharply, their outputs and value-added in the labour market. Addition, the majority of employability research and analysis, but also relates this to existing research and pertained... 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