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. While it has been criticized for its lack of attention to power and inequality, it remains an important contribution to the field of criminology. Yet the position of graduates in the economy remains contested and open to a range of competing interpretations. Hinchliffe, G. and Jolly, A. 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. According to Keynes, the volume of employment in a country depends on the level of effective demand of the people for goods and services. Moreover, they will be more productive, have higher earning potential and be able to access a range of labour market goods including better working conditions, higher status and more fulfilling work. This paper will increase the understandings of graduate employability through interpreting its meaning and whose responsibility . 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. The consensus theory of employability states that enhancing graduates' employability and advancing their careers requires improving their human capital, specically their skill development (Selvadurai et al.2012). Over time, however, this traditional link between HE and the labour market has been ruptured. Wider critiques of skills policy (Wolf, 2007) have tended to challenge naive conceptualisations of skills, bringing into question both their actual relationship to employee practices and the extent to which they are likely to be genuinely demand-led. Article Leadbetter, C. (2000) Living on Thin Air, London: Penguin. Name one consensus theory and one conflict theory. The consensus theory emphasizes that the social order is through the shared norms, and belief systems of people. The concerns that have been well documented within the non-graduate youth labour market (Roberts, 2009) are also clearly resonating with the highly qualified. It is also considered as both a product (a set of skills that enable) and as a . 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. This paper aims to place the issue of graduate employability in the context of the shifting inter-relationship between HE and the labour market, and the changing regulation of graduate employment. (2005) study, it appears that some graduates horizons for action are set within by largely intuitive notions of what is appropriate and available, based on what are likely to be highly subjective opportunity structures. 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. 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. Cardiff School of Social Sciences Working Paper 118. Brooks, R. and Everett, G. (2008) The predominance of work-based training in young graduates learning, Journal of Education and Work 21 (1): 6173. For Beck and Beck-Germsheim (2002), processes of institutionalised individualisation mean that the labour market effectively becomes a motor for individualisation, in that responsibility for economic outcomes is transferred away from work organisations and onto individuals. The consensus theory of employment argues that technological innovation is the driving force of social change (Drucker, 1993, Kerr, 1973). The increasingly flexible and skills-rich nature of contemporary employment means that the highly educated are empowered in an economy demanding the creativity and abstract knowledge of those who have graduated from HE. 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. While some graduates have acquired and drawn upon specialised skill-sets, many have undertaken employment pathways that are only tangential to what they have studied. In the flexible and competitive UK context, employability also appears to be understood as a positional competition for jobs that are in scarce supply. Employability is a key concept in higher education. However, new demands on HE from government, employers and students mean that continued pressures will be placed on HEIs for effectively preparing graduates for the labour market. It appears that students and graduates reflect upon their relationship with the labour market and what they might need to achieve their goals. 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. Keynes' theory of employment is a demand-deficient theory. 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). 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. In contrast to conflict theories, consensus theories are those that see people in society as having shared interests and society functioning on the basis of there being broad consensus on its norms and values. of employability has been subjected to little conceptual examination. Little (2001) suggests, that it is a multi-dimensional concept, and there is a need to distinguish between the factors relevant to the job and preparation for work. Young, M. (2009) Education, globalisation and the voice of knowledge, Journal of Education and Work 22 (3): 193204. 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. Research has continually highlighted engrained employer biases towards particular graduates, ordinarily those in possession of traditional cultural and academic currencies and from more prestigious HEIs (Harvey et al., 1997; Hesketh, 2000). (2008) Graduate development in European employment: Issues and contradictions, Education and Training 50 (5): 379390. Google Scholar. 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). On the other hand, less optimistic perspectives tend to portray contemporary employment as being both more intensive and precarious (Sennett, 2006). Research in the field also points to increasing awareness among graduates around the challenges of future employability. 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 changing context is likely to form a significant frame of reference through which graduates understand the relationship between their participation in HE and their wider labour market futures. They also reported quite high levels of satisfaction among graduates on their perceived utility of their formal and informal university experiences. There are many different lists of cardinal accomplishments . For instance, non-traditional students who had studied at local institutions may be far more likely to fix their career goals around local labour markets, some of which may afford limited opportunities for career progression. Avoid the most common mistakes and prepare your manuscript for journal Argues that even employable people may fail to find jobs because of positional competition in the knowledge-driven economy. 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. (2009) Over-education and the skills of UK graduates, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 172 (2): 307337. poststructuralism, Positional Conflict Theory as well as liberalhumanist thought. 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! 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 traditional human and cultural capital that employers have always demanded now constitutes only part of graduates employability narratives. Moreover, in the context of flexible and competitive globalisation, the highly educated may find themselves forming part of an increasingly disenfranchised new middle class, continually at the mercy of agile, cost-driven flows in skilled labour, and in competition with contemporaries from newly emerging economies. This may further entail experiencing adverse labour market experiences such as unemployment and underemployment. (2005) Empowering participants or corroding learning: Towards a research agenda on the impact of student consumerism in higher education, Journal of Education Policy 20 (3): 267281. Book Wolf, A. The decline of the established graduate career trajectory has somewhat disrupted the traditional link between HE, graduate credentials and occupational rewards (Ainley, 1994; Brown and Hesketh, 2004). VuE*ce!\S&|3>}x`nbC_Y*o0HIS?vV7?& wociJZWM_ dBu\;QoU{=A*U[1?!q+ 5I3O)j`u_S ^bA0({{9O?-#$ 3? Wider structural changes have potentially reinforced positional differences and differential outcomes between graduates, not least those from different class-cultural backgrounds. For some graduates, HE continues to be a clear route towards traditional middle-class employment and lifestyle; yet for others it may amount to little more than an opportunity cost. 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). Lessons from a comparative survey, European Journal of Education 42 (1): 1134. Hassard, J., McCann, L. and Morris, J.L. 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. 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. European-wide secondary data also confirms such patterns, as reflected in variable cross-national graduate returns (Eurostat, 2009). 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). Kirton, G. (2009) Career plans and aspirations of recent black and minority ethnic business graduates, Work, Employment and Society 23 (1): 1229. 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). Learning and employability are clearly supportive constructs but this relationship appears to be under represented and lacks clarity. In sociology, consensus theory is a theory that views consensus as a key distinguishing feature of a group of people or society. Skills formally taught and acquired during university do not necessarily translate into skills utilised in graduate employment. In such labour market contexts, HE regulates more clearly graduates access to particular occupations. Collins, R. (2000) Comparative and Historical Patterns of Education, in M. Hallinan (ed.) Naidoo, R. and Jamieson, I. As Teichler (1999) points out, the increasing alignment of universities to the labour market in part reflects continued pressures to develop forms of innovation that will add value to the economy, be that through research or graduates. 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. Introduction. (1999) Higher education policy and the world of work: Changing conditions and challenges, Higher Education Policy 12 (4): 285312. Employability skills are sometimes called foundational skills or job-readiness skills. There have been some concerted attacks from industry concerning mismatches in the skills possessed by graduates and those demanded by employers (see Archer and Davison, 2008). Elias, P. and Purcell, K. (2004) The Earnings of Graduates in Their Early Careers: Researching Graduates Seven Years on. 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. Mason, G. (2002) High skills utilisation under mass higher education: Graduate employment in the service industries in Britain, Journal of Education and Work 14 (4): 427456. Strathdee, R. (2011) Educational reform, inequality and the structure of higher education in New Zealand, Journal of Education and Work 24 (1): 2749. 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). (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. 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. Moreover, this is likely to shape their orientations towards the labour market, potentially affecting their overall trajectories and outcomes. 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). Consensus Theory. (2010) Overqualifcation, job satisfaction, and increasing dispersion in the returns to graduate education, Oxford Economic Papers 62 (4): 740763. Reay, D., Ball, S.J. '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 relates largely to the ways in which they approach the job market and begin to construct and manage their individual employability, mediated largely through the types of work-related dispositions and identities that they are developing. 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). Morley (2001) however states that employability . For Brown and Hesketh (2004), however, graduates respond differently according to their existing values, beliefs and understandings. The consensus theory of employment and the conflict theory of employment present contradictory implications about highly skilled workers' opportunity cost for pursuing entrepreneurial activities in the knowledge economy. However, further significant is the potential degrading of traditional middle-class management-level work through its increasing standardisation and routinisation (Brown et al., 2011). Students in HE have become increasingly keener to position their formal HE more closely to the labour market. Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. They see society like a human body, where key institutions work like the body's organs to keep the society/body healthy and well.Social health means the same as social order, and is guaranteed when nearly everyone accepts the general moral values of their society. 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). Boden, R. and Nedeva, M. (2010) Employing discourse: Universities and graduate employability, Journal of Education Policy 25 (1): 3754. Consensus v. conflict perspectives -Consensus Theory In general, this theory states that laws reflect general agreement in society. It will further show that while common trends are evident across national context, the HElabour market relationship is also subject to national variability. Of skills that enable ) and as a key distinguishing feature of a theory views. Sociology, consensus theory is a demand-deficient theory employability narratives the economy remains contested and open a! A group of people employability are clearly supportive constructs but this relationship appears to be under represented and lacks.. 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