Functionalism is a structural theory and posits that the social institutions and organization of society . 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. Graduate Employability has come to mean many different things. This means that Keynes visualized employment/unemployment from the demand side of the model. 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. Slider with three articles shown per slide. 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. 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. Scott, P. (2005) Universities and the knowledge economy, Minerva 43 (3): 297309. 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). These attributes, sometimes referred to as "employability skills," are thought to be . Thus, graduates successful integration in the labour market may rest less on the skills they possess before entering it, and more on the extent to which these are utilised and enriched through their actual participation in work settings. Department for Business Innovation and Skills (DIUS). Individuals therefore need to proactively manage these risks (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002). A consensus theory approach sees sport as a source of collective harmony, a way of binding people together in a shared experience. The underlying assumption of this view is that the 229240. Fugate and Kinicki (2008, p.9) describe career identity as "one's self-definition in the career context."Chope and Johnson (2008, p. 47) define career identity in a more scientific manner where they state that "career identity reflects the degree to which individuals define themselves in terms of a particular organisation, job, profession, or industry". The problem has been largely attributable to universities focusing too rigidly on academically orientated provision and pedagogy, and not enough on applied learning and functional skills. 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. This contrasts with more flexible liberal economies such as the United Kingdom, United States and Australia, characterised by more intensive competition, deregulation and lower employment tenure. As a wider policy narrative, employability maps onto some significant concerns about the shifting interplays between universities, economy and state. Strangleman, T. (2007) The nostalgia for the permanence of work? Englewood Cliffs . 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). and David, M. (2006) Degree of Choice: Class, Gender and Race in Higher Education, Stoke: Trentham Books. What such research shows is that young graduates entering the labour market are acutely aware of the need to embark on strategies that will provide them with a positional gain in the competition for jobs. 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. Department for Education Skills (DFES). (1972) Graduates: The Sociology of an Elite, London: Methuen. In terms of social class influences on graduate labour market orientations, this is likely to work in both intuitive and reflexive ways. (2003) The Future of Higher Education, London: HMSO. 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). This study has been supported by related research that has documented graduates increasing strategies for achieving positional advantage (Smetherham, 2006; Tomlinson, 2008, Brooks and Everett, 2009). 213240. Theory could be viewed as a coherent group of assumptions or propositions put forth to . However, there are concerns that the shift towards mass HE and, more recently, more whole-scale market-driven reforms may be intensifying class-cultural divisions in both access to specific forms of HE experience and subsequent economic outcomes in the labour market (Reay et al., 2006; Strathdee, 2011). This may well confirm emerging perceptions of their own career progression and what they need to do to enhance it. 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. 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. Despite the limitations, the model is adopted to evaluate the role of education stakeholders in the Nigerian HE. Employability skills include the soft skills that allow you to work well with others, apply knowledge to solve problems, and to fit into any work environment. starkly illustrate, there is growing evidence that old-style scientific management principles are being adapted to the new digital era in the form of a Digital Taylorism. 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. 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 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 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. Compelling evidence on employers approaches to managing graduate talent (Brown and Hesketh, 2004) exposes this situation quite starkly. The research by Archer et al. Bowman et al. Present study overcomes this issue by introducing a framework that clearly However, further significant is the potential degrading of traditional middle-class management-level work through its increasing standardisation and routinisation (Brown et al., 2011). 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. 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. Roberts, K. (2009) Opportunity structures then and now, Journal of Education and Work 22 (5): 355368. They construct their individual employability in a relative and subjective manner. 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 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. Rae, D. (2007) Connecting enterprise and graduate employability: Challenges to the higher education curriculum and culture, Education + Training 49 (8/9): 605619. Players are adept at responding to such competition, embarking upon strategies that will enable them to acquire and present the types of employability narratives that employers demand. Continued training and lifelong learning is one way of staying fit in a job market context with shifting and ever-increasing employer demands. 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. Personal characteristics, habits, and attitudes influence how you interact with others. The Varieties of Capitalism approach developed by Hall and Soskice (2001) may be useful here in explaining the different ways in which different national economies coordinate the relationship between their education systems and human resource strategies. In countries where training routes are less demarcated (for instance those with mass HE systems), these differences are less pronounced. 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. 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). (2007) Does higher education matter? Structural Functionalism/ Consensus Theory. Moreover, this is likely to shape their orientations towards the labour market, potentially affecting their overall trajectories and outcomes. 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. Hammer, Peter McIlveen, Soo Jeung Lee, Seungjung Kim & Jisun Jung, Higher Education Policy (2010) From student to entrepreneur: Towards a model of entrepreneurial career-making, Journal of Education and Work 23 (5): 389415. Young, M. (2009) Education, globalisation and the voice of knowledge, Journal of Education and Work 22 (3): 193204. These changes have had a number of effects. Such strategies typically involve the accruement of additional forms of credentials and capitals that can be converted into economic gain. Smart, S., Hutchings, M., Maylor, U., Mendick, H. and Menter, I. Handbook of the Sociology of Education, New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 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. 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. 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 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. In the context of a knowledge economy, consensus theory advocates that knowledge, skills and innovation are the driving factors of our society. Becker, G. (1993) Human Capital: Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education (3rd edn), Chicago: Chicago University Press. 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. Employability. Consensus theories include functionalism, strain theory and subcultural theory. consensus and industrial peace. (2009) Processes of middle-class reproduction in a graduate employment scheme, Journal of Education and Work 22 (1): 3553. This research highlighted that some had developed stronger identities and forms of identification with the labour market and specific future pathways. 9n=#Ql\(~_e!Ul=>MyHv'Ez'uH7w2'ffP"M*5Lh?}s$k9Zw}*7-ni{?7d 2003) and attempts to seek integrate them by formulating a model of explanatory form together with the existing empirical literature. (2000) Recruiting a graduate elite? French sociologist and criminologist Emile . According to conflict theory, employability represents an attempt to legitimate unequal opportunities in education, labour market at a time of growing income inequalities. Kupfer, A. 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). (2006) The evolution of the boundaryless career concept: Examining the physical and psychological mobility, Journal of Vocational Behavior 69 (1): 1929. Name one consensus theory and one conflict theory. 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. (2007) Round and round the houses: The Leitch review of skills, Local Economy 22 (2): 111117. Yet the position of graduates in the economy remains contested and open to a range of competing interpretations. It is also considered as both a product (a set of skills that enable) and as a . *1*.J\ What their research illustrates is that these graduates labour market choices are very much wedded to their pre-existing dispositions and learner identities that frame what is perceived to be appropriate and available. 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