Policy responses have tended to be supply-side focused, emphasising the role of HEIs for better equipping graduates for the challenges of the labour market. 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. Little, B. Brown, P. and Lauder, H. (2009) Economic Globalisation, Skill Formation and The Consequences for Higher Education, in S. Ball, M. Apple and L. Gandin (eds.) Such issues may be compounded by a policy climate of heavy central planning and target-setting around the coordination of skills-based education and training. 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). The relationship between HE and the labour market has traditionally been a closely corresponding one, although in sometimes loose and intangible ways (Brennan et al., 1996; Johnston, 2003). Continued training and lifelong learning is one way of staying fit in a job market context with shifting and ever-increasing employer demands. Moreover, in terms of how governments and labour markets may attempt to coordinate and regulate the supply of graduates leaving systems of mass HE. Purpose. This may be largely due to the fact that employers have been reasonably responsive to generic academic profiles, providing that graduates fulfil various other technical and job-specific demands. However, there are concerns that the shift towards mass HE and, more recently, more whole-scale market-driven reforms may be intensifying class-cultural divisions in both access to specific forms of HE experience and subsequent economic outcomes in the labour market (Reay et al., 2006; Strathdee, 2011). 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. Moreover, there is evidence of national variations between graduates from different countries, contingent on the modes of capitalism within different countries. Less positively, their research exposed gender disparities gap in both pay and the types of occupations graduates work within. volume25,pages 407431 (2012)Cite this article. The strengths of consensus theory are that it is a more objective approach and that it is easier to achieve agreement. This is further reflected in pay difference and breadth of career opportunities open to different genders. As HE's role for regulating future professional talent becomes reshaped, questions prevail over whose responsibility it is for managing graduates transitions and employment outcomes: universities, states, employers or individual graduates themselves? Employability is a product consisting of a specific set of skills, such as soft, hard, technical, and transferable. A Social Cognitive Theory. Holmes, L. (2001) Graduate employability: The graduate identity approach, Quality in Higher Education 7 (1): 111119. Consensus v. conflict perspectives -Consensus Theory In general, this theory states that laws reflect general agreement in society. 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. Perhaps increasingly central to the changing dynamic between HE and the labour market has been the issue of graduate employability. [PDF] Graduate Employability Skills: Differences between the Private and 02 May 2015 Education is vital in the knowledge economy as the commodity of . Keynes' theory of employment is a demand-deficient theory. 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. This paper analyses the barriers to work faced by long- and short-term unemployed people in remote rural labour markets. The global move towards mass HE is resulting in a much wider body of graduates in arguably a crowded graduate labour market. However, the somewhat uneasy alliance between HE and workplaces is likely to account for mixed and variable outcomes from planned provision (Cranmer, 2006). 229240. (eds.) Brennan, J., Kogan, M. and Teichler, U. 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. 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. Brown, P. and Hesketh, A.J. (2008) Graduate development in European employment: Issues and contradictions, Education and Training 50 (5): 379390. The new UK coalition government, working within a framework of budgetary constraints, have been less committed to expansion and have begun capping student numbers (HEFCE, 2010). (2011) Towards a theoretical framework for the comparative understanding of globalisation, higher education, the labour market and inequality, Journal of Education and Work 24 (1): 185207. Archer, L., Hutchens, M. and Ross, A. What this has shown is that graduates see the link between participation in HE and future returns to have been disrupted through mass HE. In countries where training routes are less demarcated (for instance those with mass HE systems), these differences are less pronounced. (2006) showed that students choices towards studying at particular HEIs are likely to reflect subsequent choices. It appears that the wider educational profile of the graduate is likely to have a significant bearing on their future labour market outcomes. Boden, R. and Nedeva, M. (2010) Employing discourse: Universities and graduate employability, Journal of Education Policy 25 (1): 3754. At one level, there has been an optimistic vision of the economy as being fluid and knowledge-intensive (Leadbetter, 2000), readily absorbing the skills and intellectual capital that graduates possess. Teichler, U. Again, graduates respond to the challenges of increasing flexibility, individualisation and positional competition in different ways. The neo-Weberian theorising of Collins (2000) has been influential here, particularly in examining the ways in which dominant social groups attempt to monopolise access to desired economic goods, including the best jobs. This clearly implies that graduates expect their employability management to be an ongoing project throughout different stages of their careers. The final aim is to logically distinguish . 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. 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. The purpose of this study is to explain the growth and popularity of consensus theory in present day sociology. 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. Much of this is driven by a concern to stand apart from the wider graduate crowd and to add value to their existing graduate credentials. Needless to say, critics of supply-side and skills-centred approaches have challenged the somewhat simplistic, descriptive and under-contextualised accounts of graduate skills. 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. This may well confirm emerging perceptions of their own career progression and what they need to do to enhance it. The theory of post war consensus has been used by political historians and political scientists to explain and understand British political developments in the era between 1945 and 1979. Individuals therefore need to proactively manage these risks (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002). This is likely to be carried through into the labour market and further mediated by graduates ongoing experiences and interactions post-university. Skills formally taught and acquired during university do not necessarily translate into skills utilised in graduate employment. These changes have had a number of effects. The challenge, it seems, is for graduates to become adept at reading these signals and reframing both their expectations and behaviours. 'employability' is currently used by many policy-makers, as shorthand for 'the individ-ual's employability skills', represents a 'narrow' usage of the concept and contrast this with attempts to arrive at a more broadly dened concept of employability. It appears that students and graduates reflect upon their relationship with the labour market and what they might need to achieve their goals. Kirton, G. (2009) Career plans and aspirations of recent black and minority ethnic business graduates, Work, Employment and Society 23 (1): 1229. The construction of personal employability does not stop at graduation: graduates appear aware of the need for continued lifelong learning and professional development throughout the different phases of their career progression. Morley, L. and Aynsley, S. (2007) Employers, quality and standards in higher education: Shared values and vocabularies or elitism and inequalities? Higher Education Quarterly 61 (3): 229249. As Little and Archer (2010) argue, the relative looseness in the relationship between HE and the labour market has traditionally not presented problems for either graduates or employers, particularly in more flexible economies such as the United Kingdom. Research done by Brooks and Everett (2008) and Little (2008) indicates that while HE-level study may be perceived by graduates as equipping them for continued learning and providing them with the dispositions and confidence to undertake further learning opportunities, many still perceive a need for continued professional training and development well beyond graduation. (2010) Overqualifcation, job satisfaction, and increasing dispersion in the returns to graduate education, Oxford Economic Papers 62 (4): 740763. In effect, individuals can no longer rely on their existing educational and labour market profiles for shaping their longer-term career progression. Research done over the past decade has highlighted the increasing pressures anticipated and experienced by graduates seeking well-paid and graduate-level forms of employment. and Leathwood, C. (2006) Graduates employment and discourse of employability: A critical analysis, Journal of Education and Work 18 (4): 305324. 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 terms of social class influences on graduate labour market orientations, this is likely to work in both intuitive and reflexive ways. conventional / consensus perspective that places . 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. In addition, the human development theory and the human capital theory come to the forefront whenever employability is considered. Ainley, P. (1994) Degrees of Difference, London: Lawrence Washart. Much of this is likely to rest on graduates overall staying power, self-efficacy and tolerance to potentially destabilising experiences, be that as entrepreneurs, managers or researchers. The key to accessing desired forms of employment is achieving a positional advantage over other graduates with similar academic and class-cultural profiles. Dearing, R. (1997) The Dearing Report: Report for the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education: Higher Education in the Learning Society, London: HMSO. Warhurst, C. (2008) The knowledge economy, skills and government labour market intervention, Policy Studies 29 (1): 7186. According to Benson, Morgan and Fillipaios (2013) social skills and inherent personality traits are deemed as more important than technical skills or a 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. Hassard, J., McCann, L. and Morris, J.L. (2009) Processes of middle-class reproduction in a graduate employment scheme, Journal of Education and Work 22 (1): 3553. 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