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. Similar to the Bowman et al. Tomlinson, M. (2007) Graduate employability and student attitudes and orientations to the labour market, Journal of Education and Work 20 (4): 285304. The study explores differences in the implicit employability theories of those involved in developing employability (educators) and those selecting and recruiting higher education (HE) students and graduates (employers). '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. . This review has shown that the problem of graduate employability maps strongly onto the shifting dynamic in the relationship between HE and the labour market. Sennett, R. (2006) The Culture of New Capitalism, Yale: Yale University Press. The inter-relationship between HE and the labour market has been considerably reshaped over time. Young, M. (2009) Education, globalisation and the voice of knowledge, Journal of Education and Work 22 (3): 193204. For such students, future careers were potentially a significant source of personal meaning, providing a platform from which they could find fulfilment, self-expression and a credible adult identity. Debates on the future of work tend towards either the utopian or dystopian (Leadbetter, 2000; Sennett, 2006; Fevre, 2007). 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. Even those students with strong intrinsic orientations around extra-curricula activities are aware of the need to translate these into marketable, value-added skills. This tends to be reflected in the perception among graduates that, while graduating from HE facilitates access to desired employment, it also increasingly has a limited role (Tomlinson, 2007; Brooks and Everett, 2009; Little and Archer, 2010). This paper analyses the barriers to work faced by long- and short-term unemployed people in remote rural labour markets. (2000) Recruiting a graduate elite? 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. Learning and employability are clearly supportive constructs but this relationship appears to be under represented and lacks clarity. Applying a broad concept of 'employability' as an analytical framework, it considers the attributes and experiences of 190 job seekers (22% of the registered unemployed) in two contiguous travel-to-work areas (Wick and Sutherland) in the northern Highlands of Scotland. Smart et al. 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 A common theme has been state-led attempts to increasingly tighten the relationship and attune HE more closely to the economy, which itself is set within wider discourse around economic change. 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. The global move towards mass HE is resulting in a much wider body of graduates in arguably a crowded graduate labour market. Employers propensities towards recruiting specific types of graduates perhaps reflects deep-seated issues stemming from more transactional, cost-led and short-term approaches to developing human resources (Warhurst, 2008). Leadbetter, C. (2000) Living on Thin Air, London: Penguin. HE has traditionally helped regulate the flow of skilled, professional and managerial workers. 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). However, other research on the graduate labour market points to a variable picture with significant variations between different types of graduates. 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). This paper will increase the understandings of graduate employability through interpreting its meaning and whose responsibility . of employability has been subjected to little conceptual examination. Hinchliffe, G. and Jolly, A. The New Right argues that liberal left politicians and welfare policies have undermined the . Morley (2001) however states that employability . Summary. In countries where training routes are less demarcated (for instance those with mass HE systems), these differences are less pronounced. 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 . Chapter 2 is to refute the Classical theory of employment and unemployment on both empirical and logical grounds. Future research directions on graduate employability will need to explore the way in which graduates employability and career progression is managed both by graduates and employers during the early stages of their careers. The expansion of HE and changing economic demands is seen to engender new forms of social conflict and class-related tensions in the pursuit for rewarding and well-paid employment. Less positively, their research exposed gender disparities gap in both pay and the types of occupations graduates work within. 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. 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. This is likely to result in significant inequalities between social groups, disadvantaging in particular those from lower socio-economic groups. Holmes, L. (2001) Graduate employability: The graduate identity approach, Quality in Higher Education 7 (1): 111119. consensus theory of employability. Again, graduates respond to the challenges of increasing flexibility, individualisation and positional competition in different ways. 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. The purpose of this paper is to adopt the perspective of personal construct theory to conceptualise employability. 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. (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. They also reported quite high levels of satisfaction among graduates on their perceived utility of their formal and informal university experiences. A further policy response towards graduate employability has been around the enhancement of graduates skills, following the influential Dearing Report (1997). 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. The consensus theory emphasizes that the social order is through the shared norms, and belief systems of people. HE systems across the globe are evolving in conjunction with wider structural transformations in advanced, post-industrial capitalism (Brown and Lauder, 2009). and Soskice, D.W. (2001) Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 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. Purpose. 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). Brooks, R. and Everett, G. (2009) Post-graduate reflections on the value of a degree, British Educational Research Journal 35 (3): 333349. This has coincided with the movement towards more flexible labour markets, the overall contraction of management forms of employment, an increasing intensification in global competition for skilled labour and increased state-driven attempts to maximise the outputs of the university system (Harvey, 2000; Brown and Lauder, 2009). Employability also encompasses significant equity issues. 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 . As Brown et al. Value consensus assumes that the norms and values of society are generally agreed and that social life is based on co-operation rather than conflict. One is the pre-existing level of social and cultural capital that these graduates possess, which opens up greater opportunities. (2007) Does higher education matter? 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.. Boden, R. and Nedeva, M. (2010) Employing discourse: Universities and graduate employability, Journal of Education Policy 25 (1): 3754. The changing HEeconomy dynamic feeds into a range of further significant issues, not least those relating to equity and access in the labour market. In Europe, it would appear that HE is a more clearly defined agent for pre-work socialisation that more readily channels graduates to specific forms of employment. According to Benson, Morgan and Fillipaios (2013) social skills and inherent personality traits are deemed as more important than technical skills or a His theory is thus known as demand-oriented approach. Perhaps increasingly central to the changing dynamic between HE and the labour market has been the issue of graduate employability. Graduates appear to be valued on a range of broad skills, dispositions and performance-based activities that can be culturally mediated, both in the recruitment process and through the specific contexts of their early working lives. Individual employability is defined as alumnus being able . Wilton, N. (2008) Business graduates and management jobs: An employability match made in heaven? Journal of Education and Work 21 (2): 143158. 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. Handbook of the Sociology of Education, New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. Hesketh, A.J. Much of the graduate employability focus has been on supply-side responses towards enhancing graduates skills for the labour market. On the other hand, less optimistic perspectives tend to portray contemporary employment as being both more intensive and precarious (Sennett, 2006). Such graduates are therefore likely to shy away, or psychologically distance themselves, from what they perceive as particular cultural practices, values and protocols that are at odds with their existing ones. 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