Nabi, G., Holden, R. and Walmsley, A. Mass HE may therefore be perpetuating the types of structural inequalities it was intended to alleviate. 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. . 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. Collins, R. (2000) Comparative and Historical Patterns of Education, in M. Hallinan (ed.) (2003) Class Strategies and the Education Market: The Middle Classes and Social Advantage, London: Routledge. Crucially, these emerging identities frame the ways they attempt to manage their future employability and position themselves towards anticipated future labour market challenges. Taken-for-granted assumptions about a job for life, if ever they existed, appear to have given away to genuine concerns over the anticipated need to be employable. Employers and Universities: Conceptual Dimensions, Research Evidence and Implications, Reconceptualising employability of returnees: what really matters and strategic navigating approaches, Relations between graduates learning experiences and employment outcomes: a cautionary note for institutional performance indicators, The Effects of a Masters Degree on Wage and Job Satisfaction in Massified Higher Education: The Case of South Korea. In the United Kingdom, for example, state commitment to public financing of HE has declined; although paradoxically, state continues to exert pressures on the system to enhance its outputs, quality and overall market responsiveness (DFE, 2010). 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. The extent to which future work forms a significant part of their future life goals is likely to determine how they approach the labour market, as well as their own future employability. His theory is thus known as demand-oriented approach. Research into university graduates perceptions of the labour market illustrates that they are increasingly adopting individualised discourses (Moreau and Leathwood, 2006; Tomlinson, 2007; Taylor and Pick, 2008) around their future employment. Employability skills are sometimes called foundational skills or job-readiness skills. Overall, consensus theory is a useful perspective for understanding the role of crime in society and the ways in which it serves as a means of defining and enforcing social norms and values. 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. The inter-relationship between HE and the labour market has been considerably reshaped over time. More positive accounts of graduates labour market outcomes tend to support the notion of HE as a positive investment that leads to favourable returns. 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. Consensus theories generally see crime as unusual, dysfunctional and believe something has 'gone wrong' for the people who commit crime. It appears that the wider educational profile of the graduate is likely to have a significant bearing on their future labour market outcomes. Hodkinson, P. and Sparkes, A.C. (1997) Careership: A sociological theory of career decision-making, British Journal of Sociology of Education 18 (1): 2944. Tomlinson, M. (2008) The degree is not enough: Students perceptions of the role of higher education credentials for graduate work and employability, British Journal of Sociology of Education 29 (1): 4961. 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 also the case for working-class students who were prone to pathologise their inability to secure employment, even though their outcomes are likely reflect structural inequalities. (2009) Processes of middle-class reproduction in a graduate employment scheme, Journal of Education and Work 22 (1): 3553. 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. 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. 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. The perspective gained much currency in the mid 20th century in the works of Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons, for whom . consensus and industrial peace. This paper analyses the barriers to work faced by long- and short-term unemployed people in remote rural labour markets. Little, B. and Archer, L. (2010) Less time to study, less well prepared for work, yet satisfied with higher education: A UK perspective on links between higher education and the labour market, Journal of Education and Work 23 (3): 275296. 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. 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. Brown and Hesketh's (2004) research has clearly shown the competitive pressures experienced by graduates in pursuit of tough-entry and sought-after employment, and some of the measures they take to meet the anticipated recruitment criteria of employers. Ainley, P. (1994) Degrees of Difference, London: Lawrence Washart. Theory could be viewed as a coherent group of assumptions or propositions put forth to . % Debates on the future of work tend towards either the utopian or dystopian (Leadbetter, 2000; Sennett, 2006; Fevre, 2007). 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 Wolf, A. The development of mass HE, together with a range of work-related changes, has placed considerably more attention upon the economic value and utility of university graduates. 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. Savage, M. (2003) A new class paradigm? British Journal of Sociology of Education 24 (4): 535541. Consensus theories include functionalism, strain theory and subcultural theory. Marginson, S. (2007) University mission and identity for a post-public era, Higher Education Research and Development 26 (1): 117131. explains that employability influences three theories: Talcott Parson's Consensus Theory that is linked to norms and shared beliefs of the society; Conflict theory of Karl Marx, who elaborated how the finite resources of the world drive towards eternal conflict; and Human Capital Theory of Becker which is Even those students with strong intrinsic orientations around extra-curricula activities are aware of the need to translate these into marketable, value-added skills. Various stakeholders involved in HE be they policymakers, employers and paying students all appear to be demanding clear and tangible outcomes in response to increasing economic stakes. The theory of employability can be hard to place ; there can be many factors that contribute to the thought of being employable. 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. Examines employability through the lenses of consensus theory and conflict theory. Keynes' theory of employment is a demand-deficient theory. 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 ) . Graduates are therefore increasingly likely to see responsibility for future employability as falling quite sharply onto the shoulders of the individual graduate: being a graduate and possessing graduate-level credentials no longer warrants access to sought-after employment, if only because so many other graduates share similar educational and pre-work profiles. Longitudinal research on graduates transitions to the labour market (Holden and Hamblett, 2007; Nabi et al., 2010) also illustrates that graduates initial experiences of the labour market can confirm or disrupt emerging work-related identities. 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). 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. 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. Johnston, B. Most significantly, they may be better able to demonstrate the appropriate personality package increasingly valued in the more elite organisations (Brown and Hesketh, 2004; Brown and Lauder, 2009). Such changes have inevitably led to questions over HE's role in meeting the needs of both the wider labour market and graduates, concerns that have largely emanated from the corporate world (Morley and Aynsley, 2007; Boden and Nedeva, 2010). Hassard, J., McCann, L. and Morris, J.L. Becker, G. (1993) Human Capital: Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education (3rd edn), Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hammer, Peter McIlveen, Soo Jeung Lee, Seungjung Kim & Jisun Jung, Higher Education Policy Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate the slides or the slide controller buttons at the end to navigate through each slide. 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). '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. 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). Morley (2001) however states that employability . 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. Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content: Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. 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. 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. the consensus and the conflict theory on graduate employability . 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. 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. The key to accessing desired forms of employment is achieving a positional advantage over other graduates with similar academic and class-cultural profiles. 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). This insight, combined with a growing consensus that government should try to stabilize employment, has led to much 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. Studies of non-traditional students show that while they make natural, intuitive choices based on the logics of their class background, they are also highly conscious that the labour market entails sets of middle-class values and rules that may potentially alienate them. Barrie, S. (2006) Understanding what we mean by generic attributes of graduates, Higher Education 51 (2): 215241. Department for Business Innovation and Skills (DIUS). (employment, marriage, children) that strengthen social bonds -Population Heterogeneity Stability in criminal offending is due to an anti-social characteristic (e., low self-control) that reverberates . 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). Teichler, U. Book . Accordingly, there has been considerable government faith in the role of HE in meeting new economic imperatives. Compelling evidence on employers approaches to managing graduate talent (Brown and Hesketh, 2004) exposes this situation quite starkly. 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. 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. Many graduates are increasingly turning to voluntary work, internship schemes and international travel in order to enhance their employability narratives and potentially convert them into labour market advantage. According to Benson, Morgan and Fillipaios (2013) social skills and inherent personality traits are deemed as more important than technical skills or a Google Scholar. 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. (2011) The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs and Incomes, Oxford: Oxford University Press. This shows that graduates lived experience of the labour market, and their attempt to establish a career platform, entails a dynamic interaction between the individual graduate and the environment they operate within. The traditional human and cultural capital that employers have always demanded now constitutes only part of graduates employability narratives. European-wide secondary data also confirms such patterns, as reflected in variable cross-national graduate returns (Eurostat, 2009). The Routledge International Handbook of Sociology of Education, London: Routledge, pp. In addition, the human development theory and the human capital theory come to the forefront whenever employability is considered. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative, Over 10 million scientific documents at your fingertips, Not logged in The evidence suggests that some graduates assume the status of knowledge workers more than others, as reflected in the differential range of outcomes and opportunities they experience. 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! 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. 2003). Moreover, in terms of how governments and labour markets may attempt to coordinate and regulate the supply of graduates leaving systems of mass HE. Skills formally taught and acquired during university do not necessarily translate into skills utilised in graduate employment. - 91.200.32.231. Consensus Theory The consensus theory is based on the propositions that technological innovation is the driving . Bowman, H., Colley, H. and Hodkinson, P. (2005) Employability and Career Progression of Fulltime UK Masters Students: Final Report for the Higher Education Careers Services Unit, Leeds: Lifelong Learning Institute. Overall, it was shown that UK graduates tend to take more flexible and less predictable routes to their destined employment, with far less in the way of horizontal substitution between their degree studies and target employment. (2007) Does higher education matter? (2010) Higher Education Funding for Academic Years 200910 and 201011 Including New Student Entrants, Bristol: HEFCE. Over time, however, this traditional link between HE and the labour market has been ruptured. Avoid the most common mistakes and prepare your manuscript for journal (2010) Overqualifcation, job satisfaction, and increasing dispersion in the returns to graduate education, Oxford Economic Papers 62 (4): 740763. Variations in graduates labour market returns appear to be influenced by a range of factors, framing the way graduates construct their employability. Despite the limitations, the model is adopted to evaluate the role of education stakeholders in the Nigerian HE. Fevre, R. (2007) Employment insecurity and social theory: The power of nightmares, Work, Employment and Society 21 (3): 517535. 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). Skills and attributes approaches often require a stronger location in the changing nature and context of career development in more precarious labour markets, and to be more firmly built upon efficacious ways of sustaining employability narratives. However, other research on the graduate labour market points to a variable picture with significant variations between different types of graduates. Employment relations is the study of the regulation of the employment relationship between employer and employee, both collectively and individually, and the determination . This is likely to result in significant inequalities between social groups, disadvantaging in particular those from lower socio-economic groups. 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. Indeed, there appears a need for further research on the overall management of graduate careers over the longer-term course of their careers. Roberts, K. (2009) Opportunity structures then and now, Journal of Education and Work 22 (5): 355368. Career choices tend to be made within specific action frames, or what they refer to as horizons for actions. This has illustrated the strong labour market contingency to graduates employability and overall labour market outcomes, based largely on how national labour markets coordinate the qualifications and skills of highly qualified labour. 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. The prominence is on developing critical and reflective skills, with a view to empowering and enhancing the learner. Purpose. Graduates are perceived as potential key players in the drive towards enhancing value-added products and services in an economy demanding stronger skill-sets and advanced technical knowledge. These two theories are usually spoken of as in opposition based on their arguments. The different orientations students are developing appear to be derived from emerging identities and self-perceptions as future employees, as well as from wider biographical dimensions of the student. 6 0 obj consensus theory of employability. x[[s~_1o:GC$rvFvuVJR+9E 4IV[uJUCF_nRj 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. For much of the past decade, governments have shown a commitment towards increasing the supply of graduates entering the economy, based on the technocratic principle that economic changes necessitates a more highly educated and flexible workforce (DFES, 2003) This rationale is largely predicated on increased economic demand for higher qualified individuals resulting from occupational changes, and whereby the majority of new job growth areas are at graduate level. Google Scholar. They found that a much higher proportion of female graduates work within public sector employment compared with males who attained more private sector and IT-based employment. Learning and employability are clearly supportive constructs but this relationship appears to be under represented and lacks clarity. 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). 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. Intentionally avoiding the term employability (because of a lack of consensus on the specific meaning and measurement of this concept), they instead define movement capital as: 'skills, knowledge, competencies and attitudes influencing an individual's career mobility opportunities' (p. 742). 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. 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. 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. Tomlinson, M. (2007) Graduate employability and student attitudes and orientations to the labour market, Journal of Education and Work 20 (4): 285304. One particular consequence of a massified, differentiated HE is therefore likely to be increased discrimination between different types of graduates. A consensus theory approach sees sport as a source of collective harmony, a way of binding people together in a shared experience. While they were aware of potential structural barriers relating to the potentially classed and gendered nature of labour markets, many of these young people saw the need to take proactive measures to negotiate theses challenges. The paper explores some of the conceptual notions that have informed understandings of graduate employability, and argues for a broader understanding of employability than that offered by policymakers. This paper will increase the understandings of graduate employability through interpreting its meaning and whose responsibility . The challenge for graduate employees is to develop strategies that militate against such likelihoods. 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. For other students, careers were far more tangential to their personal goals and lifestyles, and were not something they were prepared to make strong levels of personal and emotional investment towards. 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. 2.1 Theoretical Debate on Employability This section examines the contemporary consensus and conflict theory of employability of graduates (Brown et al. Maria Eliophotou Menon, Eleftheria Argyropoulou & Andreas Stylianou, Ly Thi Tran, Nga Thi Hang Ngo, Tien Thi Hanh Ho, David Walters, David Zarifa & Brittany Etmanski, Jason L. Brown, Sara J. 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. French sociologist and criminologist Emile . It appears that students and graduates reflect upon their relationship with the labour market and what they might need to achieve their goals. The strengths of consensus theory are that it is a more objective approach and that it is easier to achieve agreement. 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. This also extends to subject areas where there has been a traditionally closer link between the curricula content and specific job areas (Wilton, 2008; Rae, 2007). Harvey, L. (2000) New realities: The relationship between higher education and employment, Tertiary Education and Management 6 (1): 317. Structural Functionalism/ Consensus Theory. and Leathwood, C. (2006) Graduates employment and discourse of employability: A critical analysis, Journal of Education and Work 18 (4): 305324. (eds.) 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