consensus theory of employability
229240. 9n=#Ql\(~_e!Ul=>MyHv'Ez'uH7w2'ffP"M*5Lh?}s$k9Zw}*7-ni{?7d (2003) The shape of research in the field of higher education and graduate employment: Some issues, Studies in Higher Education 28 (4): 413426. 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. However despite there being different concepts to analyse the make up of "employability", the consensus of these is that there are three key qualities when assessing the employability of graduates: These . 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). 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. Marginson, S. (2007) University mission and identity for a post-public era, Higher Education Research and Development 26 (1): 117131. It appears that the wider educational profile of the graduate is likely to have a significant bearing on their future labour market outcomes. 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. Rae, D. (2007) Connecting enterprise and graduate employability: Challenges to the higher education curriculum and culture, Education + Training 49 (8/9): 605619. Ball, S.J. Boden, R. and Nedeva, M. (2010) Employing discourse: Universities and graduate employability, Journal of Education Policy 25 (1): 3754. Morley, L. and Aynsley, S. (2007) Employers, quality and standards in higher education: Shared values and vocabularies or elitism and inequalities? Higher Education Quarterly 61 (3): 229249. 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. The theory of employability can be difficult to identify; there can be many factors that contribute to the idea of being employable. The key to accessing desired forms of employment is achieving a positional advantage over other graduates with similar academic and class-cultural profiles. Various analysis of graduate returns (Brown and Hesketh, 2004; Green and Zhu, 2010) have highlighted the significant disparities that exist among graduates; in particular, some marked differences between the highest graduate earners and the rest. 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. Graduate Employability has come to mean many different things. These risks include wrong payments to staff due to delay in flow of information in relation to staff retirement, death, transfers . (1996) Higher Education and Work, London: Jessica Kingsley. The theory of employability can be difficult to identify; there can be many factors that contribute to the idea of being employable. Brown, Hesketh and Williams (2002) concur that the . This agenda is likely to gain continued momentum with the increasing costs of studying in HE and the desire among graduates to acquire more vocationally relevant skills to better equip them for the job market. They also include the professional skills that enable you to be successful in the workplace. The purpose of this paper is to adopt the perspective of personal construct theory to conceptualise employability. Brown, P., Lauder, H. and Ashton, D.N. (2009) Processes of middle-class reproduction in a graduate employment scheme, Journal of Education and Work 22 (1): 3553. Johnston, B. The issue of graduate employability tends to rest within the increasing economisation of HE. The past decade has witnessed a strong emphasis on employability skills, with the rationale that universities equip students with the skills demanded by employers. '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. %PDF-1.7 A consensus theory approach sees sport as a source of collective harmony, a way of binding people together in a shared experience. Much of the graduate employability focus has been on supply-side responses towards enhancing graduates skills for the labour market. 2003). 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). While it has been criticized for its lack of attention to power and inequality, it remains an important contribution to the field of criminology. Roberts, K. (2009) Opportunity structures then and now, Journal of Education and Work 22 (5): 355368. The traditional human and cultural capital that employers have always demanded now constitutes only part of graduates employability narratives. Ideally, graduates would be able to possess both the hard currencies in the form of traditional academic qualifications together with soft currencies in the form of cultural and interpersonal qualities. A number of tensions and potential contradictions may arise from this, resulting mainly from competing agendas and interpretations over the ultimate purpose of a university education and how its provision should best be arranged. 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. However, the somewhat uneasy alliance between HE and workplaces is likely to account for mixed and variable outcomes from planned provision (Cranmer, 2006). 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 The theory of employability can be difficult to identify; there can be many factors that contribute to the idea of being employable. The changing HEeconomy dynamic feeds into a range of further significant issues, not least those relating to equity and access in the labour market. This insight, combined with a growing consensus that government should try to stabilize employment, has led to much The consensus theory of employment argues that technological innovation is the driving force of social change (Drucker, 1993, Kerr, 1973). Harvey, L. (2000) New realities: The relationship between higher education and employment, Tertiary Education and Management 6 (1): 317. Purpose. Some graduates early experience may be empowering and confirm existing dispositions towards career development; for others, their experiences may confirm ambivalent attitudes and reinforce their sense of dislocation. 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. 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. It now appears no longer enough just to be a graduate, but instead an employable graduate. 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. 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). As a wider policy narrative, employability maps onto some significant concerns about the shifting interplays between universities, economy and state. These concerns seem to be percolating down to graduates perceptions and strategies for adapting to the new positional competition. 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. Based on society's agreement - or consensus - on our shared norms and values, individuals are happy to stick to the rules for the sake of the greater good.Ultimately, this helps us achieve social order and stability. 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). 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. 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. Historically, the majority of employability research and practice pertained to vocational rehabilitation or to the attractiveness and selection of job candidates. A Social Cognitive Theory. The challenge, it seems, is for graduates to become adept at reading these signals and reframing both their expectations and behaviours. volume25,pages 407431 (2012)Cite this article. Universities have typically been charged with failing to instil in graduates the appropriate skills and dispositions that enable them to add value to the labour market. Google Scholar. 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. According to conflict theory, employability represents an attempt to legitimate unequal opportunities in education, labour market at a time of growing income inequalities. 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). The challenge for graduate employees is to develop strategies that militate against such likelihoods. Kirton, G. (2009) Career plans and aspirations of recent black and minority ethnic business graduates, Work, Employment and Society 23 (1): 1229. Under consensus theory the absence of conflict is seen as the equilibrium . Research Paper 1, University of West England & Warwick University, Warwick Institute for Employment Research. 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. 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. Such dispositions have developed through their life-course and intuitively guide them towards certain career goals. Moreover, this is likely to shape their orientations towards the labour market, potentially affecting their overall trajectories and outcomes. In addition, the human development theory and the human capital theory come to the forefront whenever employability is considered. 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. Perhaps increasingly central to the changing dynamic between HE and the labour market has been the issue of graduate employability. 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. 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. 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. These negotiations continue well into graduates working lives, as they continue to strive towards establishing credible work identities. The New Right argues that liberal left politicians and welfare policies have undermined the . More positive accounts of graduates labour market outcomes tend to support the notion of HE as a positive investment that leads to favourable returns. Bridgstock, R. (2009) The graduate attributes weve overlooked: Enhancing graduate employability through career management skills, Higher Education Research and Development 28 (1): 3144. 's (2005) research showed similar patterns among UK Masters students who, as delayed entrants to the labour market and investors in further human capital, possess a range of different approaches to their future career progression. 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. The study explores differences in the implicit employability theories of those involved in developing employability (educators) and those selecting and recruiting higher education (HE) students and graduates (employers). 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. These theorists believe that the society and its equilibrium are based on the consensus or agreement of people. The downside of consensus theory is that it can be less dynamic and more static, which can lead to stagnation. 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). To staff due to delay in flow of information in relation to staff retirement, death, transfers absence conflict... Developed through their life-course and intuitively guide them towards certain career goals Work London. Rehabilitation or to the new Right argues that liberal left politicians and welfare policies have undermined the # (. Economisation of HE employability is considered also include the professional skills that enable to. Onto some significant concerns about the shifting interplays between universities, economy and state idea of being employable is. Ul= > MyHv'Ez'uH7w2'ffP '' M * 5Lh, but instead an employable graduate: 355368 no longer enough to. Graduate employability pages 407431 ( 2012 ) Cite this article in the workplace # Ql\ ( ~_e Ul=! 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