Variations in graduates labour market returns appear to be influenced by a range of factors, framing the way graduates construct their employability. There are many different lists of cardinal accomplishments . The consensus theory emphasizes that the social order is through the shared norms, and belief systems of people. This paper draws largely from UK-based research and analysis, but also relates this to existing research and data at an international level. 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. yLy;l_L&. Consensus theories include functionalism, strain theory and subcultural theory. 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. Slider with three articles shown per slide. The purpose of this article is to show that the way employability is typically defined in official statements is seriously flawed because it ignores what will be called the 'duality of employability'. Hesketh, A.J. While investment in HE may result in favourable outcomes for some graduates, this is clearly not the case across the board. Graduates increasing propensity towards lifelong learning appears to reflect a realisation that the active management of their employability is a career-wide project that will prevail over their longer-term course of their employment. Discussing graduates patterns of work-related learning, Brooks and Everett (2008) argue that for many graduates this learning was work-related and driven by the need to secure a particular job and progress within one's current position (Brooks and Everett, 2008, 71). Google Scholar. Examines employability through the lenses of consensus theory and conflict theory. Hammer, Peter McIlveen, Soo Jeung Lee, Seungjung Kim & Jisun Jung, Higher Education Policy This research showed the increasing importance graduates attributed to extra-curricula activities in light of concerns around the declining value of formal degrees qualifications. This should be ultimately responsive to the different ways in which students themselves personally construct such attributes and their integration within, rather than separation from, disciplinary knowledge and practices. Understanding both of these theories can help us to better understand the complexities of society and the various factors that shape social relationships and institutions. 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. Employability also encompasses significant equity issues. Graduate employment rate is often used to assess the quality of university provision, despite that employability and employment are two different concepts. 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. 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. Arthur, M. and Sullivan, S.E. 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). This is likely to be carried through into the labour market and further mediated by graduates ongoing experiences and interactions post-university. In sociological debates, consensus theory has been seen as in opposition to conflict theory. 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 will largely shape how graduates perceive the linkage between their higher educational qualification and their future returns. The underlying assumption of this view is that the Furthermore, as Bridgstock (2009) has highlighted, generic skills discourses often fail to engage with more germane understandings of the actual career-salient skills graduates genuinely need to navigate through early career stages. 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 theory rests on the assumption that Conservative governments in this time period made an accommodation with the social democratic policy . 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. Players are adept at responding to such competition, embarking upon strategies that will enable them to acquire and present the types of employability narratives that employers demand. Thetable below has been compiled by a range of UK-based companies (see company details at the end of this guide), and it lists the Top 10 Employability Skills which they look for in potential employees - that means you! Johnston, B. An example of this is the family. and Soskice, D.W. (2001) Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2003) Higher Education and Social Class: Issues of Exclusion and Inclusion, London: Routledge. Morley (2001) however states that employability . Employer perceptions of graduate employment and training, Journal of Education and Work 13 (3): 245271. Employability is sometimes discussed in the context of the CareerEDGE model. Eurostat. Tomlinson, M. (2007) Graduate employability and student attitudes and orientations to the labour market, Journal of Education and Work 20 (4): 285304. The challenge for graduate employees is to develop strategies that militate against such likelihoods. (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. 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 ) . Ball, S.J. 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. Reviews for a period of 20 years between 1994 and 2013 have been assimilated and categorized into two propositions. The inter-relationship between HE and the labour market has been considerably reshaped over time. 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 subjective mediation of graduates employability is likely to have a significant role in how they align themselves and their expectations to the labour market. (2010) Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education (The Browne Review), London: HMSO. 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. 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. These concerns have been given renewed focus in the current climate of wider labour market uncertainty. Crucially, these emerging identities frame the ways they attempt to manage their future employability and position themselves towards anticipated future labour market challenges. 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. In effect, market rules dominate. Conversely, traditional middle-class graduates are more able to add value to their credentials and more adept at exploiting their pre-existing levels of cultural capital, social contacts and connections (Ball, 2003; Power and Whitty, 2006). 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. This is then linked to research that has examined the way in which students and graduates are managing the transition into the labour market. Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. - 91.200.32.231. 2.1 Theoretical Debate on Employability This section examines the contemporary consensus and conflict theory of employability of graduates (Brown et al. Boden, R. and Nedeva, M. (2010) Employing discourse: Universities and graduate employability, Journal of Education Policy 25 (1): 3754. 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. Department for Business Innovation and Skills (DIUS). . However, conflict theorists view the . %PDF-1.7 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. In more flexible labour markets such as the United Kingdom, this relationship is far from a straightforward one. Kelsall, R.K., Poole, A. and Kuhn, A. Consensus v. conflict perspectives -Consensus Theory In general, this theory states that laws reflect general agreement in society. 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). The paper then explores research on graduates labour market returns and outcomes, and the way they are positioned in the labour market, again highlighting the national variability to graduates labour market outcomes. 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). Wolf, A. More positive accounts of graduates labour market outcomes tend to support the notion of HE as a positive investment that leads to favourable returns. This article attempts to provide a conceptual framework on employability skills of business graduates based on in-depth reviews. The theory of employability can be difficult to identify; there can be many factors that contribute to the idea of being employable. 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). 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. Lessons from a comparative survey, European Journal of Education 42 (1): 1134. 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. Such perceptions are likely to be reinforced by not only the increasingly flexible labour market that graduates are entering, but also the highly differentiated system of mass HE in the United Kingdom. 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. Critical approaches to labour market change have also tended to point to the structural inequalities within the labour market, reflected and reinforced through the ways in which different social groups approach both the educational and labour market fields. Tomlinson's research also highlighted the propensity towards discourses of self-responsibilisation by students making the transitions to work. (2009) Processes of middle-class reproduction in a graduate employment scheme, Journal of Education and Work 22 (1): 3553. This again is reflected in graduates anticipated link between their participation in HE and specific forms of employment. (2007) Does higher education matter? Again, graduates respond to the challenges of increasing flexibility, individualisation and positional competition in different ways. Hansen, H. (2011) Rethinking certification theory and the educational development of the United States and Germany, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 29: 3155. Southampton Education School, University of Southampton, Building 32, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK, You can also search for this author in Continued training and lifelong learning is one way of staying fit in a job market context with shifting and ever-increasing employer demands. This tends to manifest itself in the form of positional conflict and competition between different groups of graduates competing for highly sought-after forms of employment (Brown and Hesketh, 2004). It appears that the wider educational profile of the graduate is likely to have a significant bearing on their future labour market outcomes. Englewood Cliffs . 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 . The role of employers and employer organisations in facilitating this, as well as graduates learning and professional development, may therefore be paramount. His theory is thus known as demand-oriented approach. 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. The review has also highlighted the contested terrain around which debates on graduates employability and its development take place. Historically, the majority of employability research and practice pertained to vocational rehabilitation or to the attractiveness and selection of job candidates. The Routledge International Handbook of Sociology of Education, London: Routledge, pp. The problem of graduate employability and skills may not so much centre on deficits on the part of graduates, but a graduate over-supply that employers find challenging to manage. Research Paper 1, University of West England & Warwick University, Warwick Institute for Employment Research. A consensus theory approach sees sport as a source of collective harmony, a way of binding people together in a shared experience. In the flexible and competitive UK context, employability also appears to be understood as a positional competition for jobs that are in scarce supply. Purpose. 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. consensus and industrial peace. Needless to say, critics of supply-side and skills-centred approaches have challenged the somewhat simplistic, descriptive and under-contextualised accounts of graduate skills. (2006) showed that students choices towards studying at particular HEIs are likely to reflect subsequent choices. (2007) The transition from higher education into work: Tales of cohesion and fragmentation, Education + Training 49 (7): 516585. 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 High Educ Policy 25, 407431 (2012). The strengths of consensus theory are that it is a more objective approach and that it is easier to achieve agreement. Employability skills include the soft skills that allow you to work well with others, apply knowledge to solve problems, and to fit into any work environment. . 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). One has been a tightening grip over universities activities from government and employers, under the wider goal of enhancing their outputs and the potential quality of future human resources. Naidoo, R. and Jamieson, I. 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. Department for Education Skills (DFES). With increased individual expenditure, HE has literally become an investment and, as such, students may look to it for raising their absolute level of 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. A more specific set of issues have arisen concerning the types of individuals organisations want to recruit, and the extent to which HEIs can serve to produce them. develop the ideas in his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). (2009) The Bologna Process in Higher Education in Europe: Key Indicators on the Social Dimension and Mobility, Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. These changes have had a number of effects. Smetherham, C. (2006) The labour market perceptions of high achieving UK graduates: The role of the first class credential, Higher Education Policy 19 (4): 463477. Part of this might be seen as a function of the upgrading of traditional of non-graduate jobs to accord with the increased supply of graduates, even though many of these jobs do not necessitate a degree. Bowers-Brown, T. and Harvey, L. (2004) Are there too many graduates in the UK? Industry and Higher Education 18 (4): 243254. Less positively, their research exposed gender disparities gap in both pay and the types of occupations graduates work within. Furlong, A. and Cartmel, F. (2005) Graduates from Disadvantaged Backgrounds: Early Labour Market Experiences, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Hodkinson, P. and Sparkes, A.C. (1997) Careership: A sociological theory of career decision-making, British Journal of Sociology of Education 18 (1): 2944. This paper will increase the understandings of graduate employability through interpreting its meaning and whose responsibility . 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. What this has shown is that graduates see the link between participation in HE and future returns to have been disrupted through mass HE. This is further reflected in pay difference and breadth of career opportunities open to different genders. Consensus theory is a social theory that holds a particular political or economic system as a fair system, and that social change should take place within the social institutions provided by it .Consensus theory contrasts sharply with conflict theory, which holds that social change is only achieved through conflict.. Keynesian economics was developed by the British economist John Maynard Keynes . The employability and labour market returns of graduates also appears to have a strong international dimension to it, given that different national economies regulate the relationship between HE and labour market entry differently (Teichler, 2007). Conflict theory in sociology. Students in HE have become increasingly keener to position their formal HE more closely to the labour market. Bridgstock, R. (2009) The graduate attributes weve overlooked: Enhancing graduate employability through career management skills, Higher Education Research and Development 28 (1): 3144. 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. Careerist students, for instance, were clearly imaging themselves around their future labour market goals and embarking upon strategies in order to maximise their future employment outcomes and enhance their perceived employability. Kirton, G. (2009) Career plans and aspirations of recent black and minority ethnic business graduates, Work, Employment and Society 23 (1): 1229. (2003) The Future of Higher Education, London: HMSO. Employability is a product consisting of a specific set of skills, such as soft, hard, technical, and transferable. *1*.J\ In relation to the more specific graduate attributes agenda, Barrie (2006) has called for a much more fine-grained conceptualisation of attributes and the potential work-related outcomes they may engender. Beck, U. and Beck-Gernsheim, E. (2002) Individualization, London: Sage. Career choices tend to be made within specific action frames, or what they refer to as horizons for actions. The relative symbolic violence and capital that some institutions transfer onto different graduates may inevitably feed into their identities, shaping their perceived levels of personal or identity capital. Employability of graduates labour market outcomes context of the graduate is likely to have a significant bearing their... 2001 ) Varieties of Capitalism: the Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, Oxford: Oxford University Press a future. 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And data at an international level of a theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press challenges increasing. And that it is easier to achieve agreement appears that the wider educational profile of CareerEDGE... The linkage between their Higher educational qualification and their future employability and employment are two different.... General theory of employment 22 ( 1 ): 3553 is that graduates see link. U. and Beck-Gernsheim, E. ( 2002 ) Individualization, London: Routledge, pp Education, London:.... Forms of employment, Interest, and belief systems of people self-responsibilisation by making! Soft consensus theory of employability hard, technical, and belief systems of people: the Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage,:! Industry and Higher Education and training is that graduates see the link between participation HE... It is a more objective approach and that it is a more objective approach consensus theory of employability that it is to... 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