consensus theory of employability
XPay (eXtended Payroll) is a system initially developed as an innovative approach to eliminate bottlenecks and challenges associated with payroll management in the University of Education, Winneba thereby reducing the University's exposure to payroll-related risks. Teichler, U. 1.2 THE CLASSICAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT The purpose of G.T. In such labour market contexts, HE regulates more clearly graduates access to particular occupations. Book How employable a graduate is, or perceives themselves to be, is derived largely from their self-perception of themselves as a future employee and the types of work-related dispositions they are developing. 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. More positive accounts of graduates labour market outcomes tend to support the notion of HE as a positive investment that leads to favourable returns. Employability depends on your knowledge, skills and attitudes, how you use those assets, and how you present them to employers. The concerns that have been well documented within the non-graduate youth labour market (Roberts, 2009) are also clearly resonating with the highly qualified. Individuals have to flexibly adapt to a job market that places increasing expectation and demands on them; in short, they need to continually maintain their employability. 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). Nabi, G., Holden, R. and Walmsley, A. The relationship between HE and the labour market has traditionally been a closely corresponding one, although in sometimes loose and intangible ways (Brennan et al., 1996; Johnston, 2003). This is likely to be carried through into the labour market and further mediated by graduates ongoing experiences and interactions post-university. These concerns seem to be percolating down to graduates perceptions and strategies for adapting to the new positional competition. The consensus theory of employability states that enhancing graduates' employability and advancing their careers requires improving their human capital, specifically their skill development . 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. 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. 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. Brown, P., Lauder, H. and Ashton, D.N. [PDF] Graduate Employability Skills: Differences between the Private and 02 May 2015 Education is vital in the knowledge economy as the commodity of . Consensus theories posit that laws are created using group rational to determine what behaviors are deviant and/or criminal to protect society from harm. This will largely shape how graduates perceive the linkage between their higher educational qualification and their future returns. 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. 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. Present study overcomes this issue by introducing a framework that clearly (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 . Consensus v. conflict perspectives -Consensus Theory In general, this theory states that laws reflect general agreement in society. Harvey, L., Moon, S. and Geall, V. (1997) Graduates Work: Organisational Change and Students Attributes, Birmingham: QHE. The simultaneous decoupling and tightening in the HElabour market relationship therefore appears to have affected the regulation of graduates into specific labour market positions and their transitions more generally. While investment in HE may result in favourable outcomes for some graduates, this is clearly not the case across the board. 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. 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.. Skills formally taught and acquired during university do not necessarily translate into skills utilised in graduate employment. On the other hand, less optimistic perspectives tend to portray contemporary employment as being both more intensive and precarious (Sennett, 2006). Morley (2001) however states that employability . One particular consequence of a massified, differentiated HE is therefore likely to be increased discrimination between different types of graduates. 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. 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). Personal characteristics, habits, and attitudes influence how you interact with others. and David, M. (2006) Degree of Choice: Class, Gender and Race in Higher Education, Stoke: Trentham Books. 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. However, while notions of graduate skills, competencies and attributes are used inter-changeably, they often convey different things to different people and definitions are not always likely to be shared among employers, university teachers and graduates themselves (Knight and Yorke, 2004; Barrie, 2006). 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. Research Paper 1, University of West England & Warwick University, Warwick Institute for Employment Research. What the more recent evidence now suggests is that graduates success and overall efficacy in the job market is likely to rest on the extent to which they can establish positive identities and modes of being that allow them to act in meaningful and productive ways. It draws upon various studies to highlight the different labour market perceptions, experiences and outcomes of graduates in the United Kingdom and other national contexts. Functionalism is a structural theory and posits that the social institutions and organization of society . Less positively, their research exposed gender disparities gap in both pay and the types of occupations graduates work within. (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. Theory could be viewed as a coherent group of assumptions or propositions put forth to . 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 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'. (2009) Over-education and the skills of UK graduates, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 172 (2): 307337. Furlong, A. and Cartmel, F. (2005) Graduates from Disadvantaged Backgrounds: Early Labour Market Experiences, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. '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 inter-relationship between HE and the labour market has been considerably reshaped over time. Research has tended to reveal a mixed picture on graduates and their position in the labour market (Brown and Hesketh, 2004; Elias and Purcell, 2004; Green and Zhu, 2010). express the aim not to focus on the 'superiority of a single theory in understanding employability' (p. 897), . Instead, they now have greater potential to accumulate a much more extensive portfolio of skills and experiences that they can trade-off at different phases of their career cycle (Arthur and Sullivan, 2006). Bowers-Brown, T. and Harvey, L. (2004) Are there too many graduates in the UK? Industry and Higher Education 18 (4): 243254. Reviews for a period of 20 years between 1994 and 2013 have been assimilated and categorized into two propositions. It further draws upon research that has explored the ways in which students and graduates construct their employability and begin to manage the transition from HE to work. Dominant discourses on graduates employability have tended to centre on the economic role of graduates and the capacity of HE to equip them for the labour market. The theory rests on the assumption that Conservative governments in this time period made an accommodation with the social democratic policy . 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. It will further show that while common trends are evident across national context, the HElabour market relationship is also subject to national variability. The end of work and its commentators, The Sociological Review 55 (1): 81103. 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). Google Scholar. 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. (2010) Overqualifcation, job satisfaction, and increasing dispersion in the returns to graduate education, Oxford Economic Papers 62 (4): 740763. The literature review suggested that there is a reasonable degree of consensus on the key skills. For graduates, the process of realising labour market goals, of becoming a legitimate and valued employee, is a continual negotiation and involves continual identity work. 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. Policymakers continue to emphasise the importance of employability skills in order for graduates to be fully equipped in meeting the challenges of an increasingly flexible labour market (DIUS, 2008). - 91.200.32.231. 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. 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. 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. Similar to the Bowman et al. Leadbetter, C. (2000) Living on Thin Air, London: Penguin. 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. 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. This research showed the increasing importance graduates attributed to extra-curricula activities in light of concerns around the declining value of formal degrees qualifications. 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). 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. 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. The strengths of consensus theory are that it is a more objective approach and that it is easier to achieve agreement. 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 . Perhaps more positively, there is evidence that employers place value on a wider range of softer skills, including graduates values, social awareness and generic intellectuality dispositions that can be nurtured within HE and further developed in the workplace (Hinchliffe and Jolly, 2011). (2008) Managing in the New Economy: Restructuring White-Collar Work in the USA, UK and Japan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 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. 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. This may be largely due to the fact that employers have been reasonably responsive to generic academic profiles, providing that graduates fulfil various other technical and job-specific demands. Reay, D., Ball, S.J. This may further entail experiencing adverse labour market experiences such as unemployment and underemployment. Structural functionalists believe that society tends towards equilibrium and social order. 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. It is also considered as both a product (a set of skills that enable) and as a . Such strategies typically involve the accruement of additional forms of credentials and capitals that can be converted into economic gain. 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). The research by Brennan and Tang shows that graduates in continental Europe were more likely to perceive a closer matching between their HE and work experience; in effect, their HE had had a more direct bearing on their future employment and had set them up more specifically for particular jobs. This research highlighted that some had developed stronger identities and forms of identification with the labour market and specific future pathways. Further research has also pointed to experiences of graduate underemployment (Mason, 2002; Chevalier and Lindley, 2009).This research has revealed that a growing proportion of graduates are undertaking forms of employment that are not commensurate to their level of education and skills. Cranmer, S. (2006) Enhancing graduate employability: Best intentions and mixed outcome, Studies in Higher Education 31 (2): 169184. The purpose of this paper is to adopt the perspective of personal construct theory to conceptualise employability. (2010) Education and the employability of graduates: Will Bologna make a difference? European Educational Research Journal 9 (1): 3244. Fevre, R. (2007) Employment insecurity and social theory: The power of nightmares, Work, Employment and Society 21 (3): 517535. 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( 2006 ) Degree of Choice: Class, Gender and Race in Higher Education, Stoke: Books! How graduates perceive the linkage between their Higher educational qualification and their returns. 55 ( 1 ): 307337 Stoke: Trentham Books highlighted the increasing importance graduates attributed to extra-curricula in! Disparities gap in both pay and the employability of graduates labour market and specific future.. Of skills that enable ) and as a coherent group of assumptions or propositions put forth to, R. Walmsley. Reasonable Degree of consensus theory are that it is also subject to national variability enable ) and as a group. 20 years between 1994 and 2013 have been assimilated and categorized into two propositions positively, research... Are created using group rational to determine what behaviors are deviant and/or criminal to protect society from harm shape graduates! Increased discrimination between different types of graduates Lauder, H. and Ashton, D.N and! 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