Southampton Education School, University of Southampton, Building 32, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK, You can also search for this author in Harvey, L., Moon, S. and Geall, V. (1997) Graduates Work: Organisational Change and Students Attributes, Birmingham: QHE. Moreover, individual graduates may need to reflexively align themselves to the new challenges of labour market, from which they can make appropriate decisions around their future career development and their general life courses. Increasingly, individual graduates are no longer constrained by the old corporate structures that may have traditionally limited their occupational agility. Over time, however, this traditional link between HE and the labour market has been ruptured. This is likely to result in significant inequalities between social groups, disadvantaging in particular those from lower socio-economic groups. The traditional human and cultural capital that employers have always demanded now constitutes only part of graduates employability narratives. This clearly implies that graduates expect their employability management to be an ongoing project throughout different stages of their careers. Thus, graduates who are confined to non-graduate occupations, or even new forms of employment that do not necessitate degree-level study, may find themselves struggling to achieve equitable returns. 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. The theory of employability can be difficult to identify; there can be many factors that contribute to the idea of being employable. 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. While some of these graduates appear to be using their extra studies as a platform for extending their potential career scope, for others it is additional time away from the job market and can potentially confirm that sense of ambivalence towards it. It is clear that more coordinated occupational labour markets such as those found in continental Europe (e.g., Germany, Holland and France) tend to have a stronger level of coupling between individuals level of education and their allocation to specific types of jobs (Hansen, 2011). This is then linked to research that has examined the way in which students and graduates are managing the transition into the labour market. . 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. As Brown et al. Holden, R. and Hamblett, J. The review has also highlighted the contested terrain around which debates on graduates employability and its development take place. 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). (2007) Round and round the houses: The Leitch review of skills, Local Economy 22 (2): 111117. The theory rests on the assumption that Conservative governments in this time period made an accommodation with the social democratic policy . 2.2.2 Consensus Theory of Employability The consensus view of employability is rooted in a particular world-view which resonates with many of the core tenets of neo-liberalism. Much of the graduate employability focus has been on supply-side responses towards enhancing graduates' skills for the labour market. The theory of employability refers to the concept that an individual's ability to secure and maintain employment is not solely dependent on their technical skills and job-specific knowledge, but also on a set of broader personal attributes and characteristics. Becker, G. (1993) Human Capital: Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education (3rd edn), Chicago: Chicago University Press. 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. 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. Accordingly, there has been considerable government faith in the role of HE in meeting new economic imperatives. Elias, P. and Purcell, K. (2004) The Earnings of Graduates in Their Early Careers: Researching Graduates Seven Years on. 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. For Brown and Hesketh (2004), however, graduates respond differently according to their existing values, beliefs and understandings. A consensus theory is one which believes that the institutions of society are working together to maintain social cohesion and stability. 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. Consensus Theory. This is further raising concerns around the distribution and equity of graduates economic opportunities, as well as the traditional role of HE credentials in facilitating access to desired forms of employment (Scott, 2005). A range of key factors seem to determine graduates access to different returns in the labour market that are linked to the specific profile of the 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. While in the main graduates command higher wages and are able to access wider labour market opportunities, the picture is a complex and variable one and reflects marked differences among graduates in their labour market returns and experiences. 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). 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'. the consensus and the conflict theory on graduate employability . consensus theory of employability. 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. 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). A Social Cognitive Theory. 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. Even those students with strong intrinsic orientations around extra-curricula activities are aware of the need to translate these into marketable, value-added skills. These concerns may further feed into students approaches to HE more generally, increasingly characterised by more instrumental, consumer-driven and acquisitive learning approaches (Naidoo and Jamieson, 2005). The New Right argument is that a range of government policies, most notably those associated with the welfare state, undermined the key institutions that create the value consensus and ensure social solidarity. Less positively, their research exposed gender disparities gap in both pay and the types of occupations graduates work within. 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 final aim is to logically distinguish . 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. Brown, Hesketh and Williams (2002) concur that the . This again is reflected in graduates anticipated link between their participation in HE and specific forms of employment. Consensus theories posit that laws are created using group rational to determine what behaviors are deviant and/or criminal to protect society from harm. 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. Employability is sometimes discussed in the context of the CareerEDGE model. 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 . (2007) The transition from higher education into work: Tales of cohesion and fragmentation, Education + Training 49 (7): 516585. 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 social cognitive career theory (SCTT), based on Bandura's (2002) General social cognitive theory, suggests that self-perceived employability affects an individual's career interest and behavior, and that self-perceived employability is a determinant of an individual's ability to find a job (lvarez-Gonzlez et al., 2017). 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. 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. There are many different lists of cardinal accomplishments . (2003) The Future of Higher Education, London: HMSO. 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. 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). (eds.) 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. Graduate Employability: A Review of Conceptual and Empirical Themes, Managing the link between higher education and the labour market: perceptions of graduates in Greece and Cyprus, Graduate employability as a professional proto-jurisdiction in higher education, Employability-related activities beyond the curriculum: how participation and impact vary across diverse student cohorts, Employability in context: graduate employabilityattributes expected by employers in regional Vietnam and implications for career guidance. 2.1 Theoretical Debate on Employability This section examines the contemporary consensus and conflict theory of employability of graduates (Brown et al. Structural Functionalism/ Consensus Theory. In the flexible and competitive UK context, employability also appears to be understood as a positional competition for jobs that are in scarce supply. 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. 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? Archer, W. and Davison, J. Introduction The theory of employability can be difficult to identify; there can be many factors that contribute to the idea of being employable. Introduction. Moreau, M.P. (2003) The shape of research in the field of higher education and graduate employment: Some issues, Studies in Higher Education 28 (4): 413426. In effect, market rules dominate. 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. 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. 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). Argues that even employable people may fail to find jobs because of positional competition in the knowledge-driven economy. The issue of graduate employability tends to rest within the increasing economisation of HE. These negotiations continue well into graduates working lives, as they continue to strive towards establishing credible work identities. This is likely to be carried through into the labour market and further mediated by graduates ongoing experiences and interactions post-university. Under consensus theory the absence of conflict is seen as the equilibrium . there is insufficient rigour in applying the framework to managerial, organisational and strategic issues. Leadbetter, C. (2000) Living on Thin Air, London: Penguin. This article attempts to provide a conceptual framework on employability skills of business graduates based on in-depth reviews. The transition from HE to work is perceived to be a potentially hazardous one that needs to be negotiated with more astute planning, preparation and foresight. [PDF] Graduate Employability Skills: Differences between the Private and 02 May 2015 Education is vital in the knowledge economy as the commodity of . For Brown and Hesketh ( 2004 ), however, this traditional link HE... 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