‘Think about what our industry stands for….’: exploring the impact of external factors on line manager perceptions of graduate employability

ABSTRACT

Increasing emphasis is being placed upon employer expectations in research on graduate employability, in response to the widely claimed gap between employer expectations and graduates’ understanding of these expectations. For graduates, being uncertain of their employer’s expectations may threaten the ease of their transition into the workplace and their job satisfaction, even leading to issues around graduate retention for employers. External influences on the graduate labour market such as differences in industry/sector level expectations and economic/political factors, can pose further complications. This paper presents a cross-industry analysis of employer expectations of graduates, drawing from four selected case study vignettes aimed at uncovering insights into these variances. Findings offer implications for policy makers and higher education providers around the design and delivery of a curriculum that appropriately prepares students for the graduate labour market, whilst also catering for industry-level expectations particularly in light of the UK’s forthcoming departure from the EU.     

German and UK higher education and graduate employment: the interface between systemic tradition and graduate views

This article presents a comparative analysis of the German and UK higher education systems and their relationship to graduate employment. It scrutinizes the complex interconnections between (1) higher education systems and traditions; (2) the role of higher education in the state, society and the economy; and (3) the views of graduates as expressed in interviews. We explore how far and in what ways opinions, expectations and experiences are shaped by (1) national traditions and culture and (2) current economic, social, political and educational developments. We find that today’s student expectations and perceptions are shaped and transformed by economic, political and social factors, including potent higher education beliefs dating back to earlier centuries, as illustrated by the reflections of graduates five years after graduation. The analysis explores the commonalities within each country grouping which lead to striking differences between the countries that transcend the mostly country‐independent disciplinary differences. The analysis has possible implications for the Bologna protocol and issues of European comparability.     

Massifying and internationalising higher education,changing labour markets and social mobility: challenges for education and urban governance

ABSTRACT

The major objective of this introductory article is to set the wider policy context for the present special issue with a particular focus to examine how the massification and internationalisation of higher education has taken place in Asia. More specifically, this introduction highlights the major arguments of articles being adopted in this issue. The contributions have been selected and gathered from presentations in various regional and international research events held in the last few years. Having experienced the growing pressure for enhancing their global competitiveness, governments in Asia are determined to expand their higher education systems to provide more learning opportunities for addressing pressing educational demand, putting additional resources to internationalising student experience and raising the research profile in order to quest for regional education hub and world-class university status. However, the rapid expansion of higher education has indeed created more university graduates than the labour market could fully absorb. It has become problematic when the global market currently experiences economic stagnation. This special issue sets out against such a political economy context to examine issues related to changing labour conditions, youth mobility and challenges for education and urban governance.     

Education,vocationalism and economic recovery: the case against witchcraft1

Abstract

The widening of access to higher education for mature students has been placed on the policy agenda by the government, in part as a response to demographic changes which will reduce the number of young graduates entering the labour market. This article examines the current position of students in the over 30 age group in UK universities with reference to their entrance qualifications, degree attainment and first destinations on leaving university. It compares the experience of men and women in this age group with young students in the conventional undergraduate population and questions whether a university degree is sufficient to overcome the barriers to the labour market experienced by older graduates. Finally it challenges the access model of equal opportunity implicit in the government's White Paper on Higher Education.     

‘Swallow your pride and fear’: the educational strategies of high-achieving non-traditional university students

Abstract

With more graduates, degree outcomes have a renewed significance for high-achieving students to stand out in a graduate crowd. In the United Kingdom, over a quarter of undergraduates now leave university with the highest grade – a ‘first-class’ degree – although students from non-traditional and underprivileged backgrounds are the least likely. This article explores the experiences of high-achieving non-traditional (HANT) university students. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 30 final-year students who are on course to achieve a first-class degree from working-class, minority ethnic and/or mature backgrounds, we examine their pathways to academic success through identity works and negotiations. We argue that early successes are crucial for students to re-evaluate their self-expectations as students who can achieve in higher education, while self-esteem, pride or fear can prevent students from maximising their available resources and opportunities. Implications for practice and policy are discussed, including the reflective advice from HANT students towards academic success.     

Exploring woman university physics students ‘doing gender’ and ‘doing physics’

This article explores what it can mean to be a woman physics student. A case study approach is used to explore how five women who are studying physics at a Swedish university simultaneously negotiate their doing of physics and their doing of gender. By conceptualising both gender and learning as aspects of identity formation, the analysis of the interviews with the five women offers insights into the nuances and complexities of how women relate to the gendered disciplinary culture of physics. This contrasts how research on gender and physics education has been predominantly concerned with comparisons of female and male students' attitudes and/or achievements. Furthermore, the analysis brings to the fore how it is not just the masculine connotations of physics that shape the experiences of the five women, but also the expectations on female physics students.     

Student expectations and graduate market performance in Egypt

This is an investigation of a series of issues pertaining to higher education in Egypt based on a sample of nearly 2,000 students and 1,700 university graduates in 1978. The main theme of the article is a comparison of student expectations and actual labour market performance. The results indicate that the relative structure of economic rewards is consistent with the operation of the forces of supply and demand. In particular, students' expectations of the labour market are in tune with the actual market conditions. The social demand for different fields of specialisation is closely linked to the expected economic rewards. A strong element of self-selection is in operation, many students follow highly undesirable subjects (such as agronomy) because of the availability of places. And as already documented in other studies, expected or actual unemployment following graduation is of extremely short duration.     

‘Non-traditional’ and ‘traditional’ students at a regional Finnish University: demanding customers and school pupils in need of support

ABSTRACT

This article explores university students’ constructions of the ideal student at present-day university, that emphasises student-as-consumer culture and employability rather than education as a virtue in itself. The research is based on thematic narrative accounts (n = 67) generated in a generalist field in one regional Finnish university. We apply a narrative-discursive approach to analyse how ‘traditional’ young students (n = 34) and ‘non-traditional’ mature students (n = 33) position themselves in relation to the ideal good student in a present-day university and in relation to their university studies. Moreover, we examine some of the consequences of such positionings for the students themselves. Our analysis indicates that the present-day university student is constructed in line with the ideal student of the neoliberal order and student-as-consumer culture. However, whereas mature students positioned themselves as customers and were comfortable with the demands of today’s university for self-directedness and self-responsibility, younger students positioned themselves as ‘school pupils’ and were critical about being left on their own without adequate support. The study suggests that the terms ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ make differences related to age and different kinds of student positionings visible and, thus, also possible to reconstruct the ideals and normalities of the present-day neoliberal university.     

Diverse Expectations and Access to Opportunities: is there a Graduate Labour Market?

Restructuring of the labour market has led to changing demand for skills and concern about potential mismatch between needs of employers and competences developed in higher education courses. This paper extends analysis of the Great Expectations survey of UK final-year undergraduates in 1996 to explore the development of skills and competences in different disciplinary areas and the anticipated career trajectories of students. A detailed assessment is undertaken of the extent to which respondents appear prepared, both in terms of the employment-related skills they consider they have developed as undergraduates and in their expectations, for the changes which have taken place in the labour market in the latter part of the twentieth century. While findings from transitional early careers need to be interpreted cautiously, it does appear that expectations varied less than emerging outcomes for this cohort in the vanguard of mass higher education. Subject and gender differences in expectations and outcomes were significant and 'non-traditional' graduates were more likely than others to report that they were experiencing difficulties in the transition from education to employment. The graduates themselves had a flexible approach to the labour market but it seems that employers may have more inflexible recruitment graduate practices. Further research is required but there is clearly a danger that wider access may not lead to correspondingly wider career opportunities.     

Enhancing Overseas Chinese Graduate Employability: The Case of Chinese Graduates with Finnish Academic Qualifications

This paper explores ways to enhance overseas Chinese graduate employability by taking Finnish-educated Chinese students/graduates as an example. In so doing, it understands that graduate employability development is a joint effort of multiple stakeholders including students, graduates, academics, program coordinators, employers, and policymakers. Accordingly, it provides arguments and suggestions for how to enhance the employability of these graduates in terms of the labor market context, employers’ beliefs and actions, the responsibilities of higher education institutions, and student/graduate commitment. It also points out two major challenges faced by overseas Chinese graduates as well as their educational providers, which are linked respectively to gaps between what graduates acquire in higher education and what is required in the labor market, as well as gaps from the employers’ perspective: areas where employers need to understand more about universities and catch up with new ideas generated by them.     

Manpower Forecasting and Rapid Labour Market Analysis: the demand for technical school graduates in Egypt

ABSTRACT

Debate about manpower forecasting has continued for 25 years or more. The investigation reported here is an attempt to add to the debate. It focusses on the provision of secondary technical education in Egypt and the demand for technical school graduates, especially graduates from courses in agriculture. Egypt's secondary school system is more strongly vocationally oriented than that in most other developing countries. The approach used in the investigation has two components: interviews with potential employers and interviews with secondary school graduates. The supply of graduates from agriculture schools is seen to be far greater than likely demand. Severe constraints on the effective working of the labour market are apparent.     

Gendered transitions,career identities and possible selves: the case of engineering graduates

This article, drawing upon the Paired Peers project, a longitudinal qualitative study (n = 90), examines how seven UK engineering graduates, four women and three men, construct their career identities during the transitionary period from university to work. It explores how gender and the occupational cultures that reside within the sector, and the wider sociocultural context, affect women’s careers identities, choices and trajectories. The longitudinal design, characteristics of the cohort and the theoretical framework of possible selves contribute to the originality of this empirical research. In this paper, we show how female graduates gradually adapted their occupational aspirations and career identities to fit with socio-cultural expectations and how they struggled to construct viable ‘engineering’ selves in the vital career identity development phase of their first years of employment when most female STEM graduates change careers.     

Aiming for better employment: a holistic analysis from admission to labour market

ABSTRACT

To address the changing needs of the labour market better, higher education institutions have increasingly aimed to enhance their teaching quality and the learning experiences of their students. Therefore, a key concept of the missions of contemporary educational institutions is to improve students’ employability after graduation. Although extensive initiatives have been undertaken, educational mismatch remains intensely debated and may seriously challenge the greater use of limited human resources in Taiwan. In this study, a vocational-oriented department (baking) of a local well-known university was chosen for a case study. A holistic approach from student admission to entry in the labour market is adopted to analyse student learning, teaching, curriculum planning, and structural and enterprise demands to estimate the extent to which these graduates fit the requirement of employers. Research findings indicate multiple gaps in skill formation, intended labour needs, and career ladders. These gaps bring profound implications to questions about strengthening the linkage or transitioning from higher education to the labour market.     

Evidencing student success and career outcomes among business and creative industries graduates

ABSTRACT

The teaching performance of higher education institutions is increasingly gauged by graduate employment outcomes. Measuring outcomes in full-time employment terms does not capture the complexities of underemployment, the rise of portfolio careers, the constraints of the labour market and graduate motivations for working arrangements that can allow greater flexibility and work-life balance. This study explores the career outcomes of Business and Creative Industries graduates using both traditional measures (full-time employment outcomes) and a suite of broader measures that examine career satisfaction, perceived employability, perceived career success, underemployment, and graduate motivations for seeking new roles. Findings confirm disciplinary differences in graduate experience, and raise some broad concerns about the quality of graduate employment, particularly given the lack of improvement in outcomes over time since course completion. Findings suggest graduates are optimistic about their career futures, despite unmet expectations – particularly on income.     

The co-construction of epistemological framing in clinical interviews and implications for research in science education

ABSTRACT

Science educators demonstrated that students’ framings – their expectations of what is going on – influence how they participate, and what science knowledge they reveal, in clinical interviews. This paper complements research that explores how interviewers are likely to affect student framings, by exploring how subtler interactions can lead students to change their framings, and thus their behaviour, in unexpected ways. We present data from interviews with two students, Sarah and Omar, as they reasoned about evaporation and condensation. Sarah demonstrated spontaneous changes in how she participated over the course of the interview, whereas Omar demonstrated subtler changes that existing methods may not capture. These changes affected the nature of scientific knowledge and reasoning demonstrated by each participant, but could not be fully explained by response to interviewer behaviour. We use the constructs of footing and positioning theory to examine how students participated during the interviews, and how this affected the ways they demonstrated knowledge and reasoning about the interview topic. In both cases, footing and positioning theory allowed us to better understand the dynamic ways students engage in the interview. This paper contributes new methods for analysing complex interview dynamics, and suggests situations for which such methods are necessary.     

Professional autonomy versus managerial control: The experience of teachers in an english primary school

This article examines the relationship between primary teachers' professional autonomy and the increasing managerial control over teachers' work. It considers how the education policies of successive Conservative and New Labour administrations in Britain have tightened central control over education undermining teacher discretion and directly impacting upon the labour process of the professionals concerned. The research was undertaken in an English primary school and data gathered in a variety of contexts including observations of the teachers in classrooms and the staff room, a governors/parents meeting, informal conversations and a series of semi-structured interviews with staff. The study explores how teachers make sense of the managerial culture in education, and how this is reconciled with their ideas about teaching and learning, and their professional interests and individual career aspirations. Structuration theory (Giddens, 1976, 1979, 1984) is used as a theoretical framework to explore whether there is conflict between teachers' professionalism and the new managerialism and examine how primary teachers make sense of this inextricable relationship.     

Is It worth Being ‘Traditional’ in An Era of Mass Individualization?

This article deals with the question of how the segmentation of higher education participation connects with the segmentation of the graduate labour market into jobs with different levels of quality. With data comprising educational and labour market histories of graduates with Master's degree from nine European countries, the author analyses how graduates with traditional higher education careers come off on the European labour market compared to those with non‐traditional educational careers. When examining the quality of the employment that graduates obtain early on in their career, three criteria are applicable: the job stability and the quality of the education‐job match to both the level of their studies and skills. The method used in the analysis is logistic regression. Results indicate that being a traditional/non‐traditional graduate does affect the odds of finding proper employment; however, whether the influence is positive or negative greatly varies with respect to gender; the number of graduates with the same type of educational career on the local market and the criteria used to evaluate the adequacy of the employment.     

A comparative institutional analysis on strategies that graduates use to show they are ‘employable’: a critical discussion on the cases of Australia,Japan, and Vietnam

ABSTRACT

Employability has become a key concept that has attracted the attention of scholars and industries in many countries. At the same time, this concept is highly fluid and vague because its nature is not evidenced by real employment and differences in the nature of labour markets from country to country. Thus, it would be more worthwhile to discuss strategies that graduates utilise while job hunting in order to show how employable they are, and then compare these strategies across countries. Therefore, in this study, the aim is to compare the strategic tendencies of graduates entering the labour markets in three countries: Australia, Japan, and Vietnam. To this end, a comparative institutional analysis is performed. Through the investigation, three types of strategy are identified. In Australia, as the market tends to consist of various competitors with different experiences, graduates must differentiate themselves from others. In Japan, the market consists of competitors from the same academic year cohort and employment tends to be more long term, so employment is seen more as a type of membership, where one must match the corporate culture. In Vietnam, as trust in universities is low in terms of their training programmes and little support is provided, university students utilise their human networks for entry into the labour market and demonstrate their capacity for growth during a probation period.     

Managing the link between higher education and the labour market: perceptions of graduates in Greece and Cyprus

Abstract

The paper investigates the experience of employed higher education graduates in two countries with high rates of graduate unemployment. It examines the employment experience of graduates and their perceptions regarding the contribution of higher education to their employment and career prospects. Qualitative research was used to collect information from 58 university graduates in two Southern European countries, Greece and Cyprus. Respondents provided information on the skills and competencies acquired through higher education and utilised in the world of work. In both countries, modest links were reported between jobs and graduates’ field of study, as well as between knowledge and non-knowledge-based competencies acquired through higher education, and the requirements of the graduates’ jobs. The findings are used as the basis for suggestions that can enhance graduate employability and contribute to the management of the link between higher education and the labour market.     

Bachelor Graduates on the Labour Market. A Cross‐national Comparison of the Employers' Viewpoint

One of the most vehemently discussed questions in the process of restructuring traditional long study programmes according to the Bachelor/Master model is how to develop first cycle curricula and degrees which are a meaningful preparation for a following Master programme as well as for the labour market—as stressed in the Bologna Declaration. It remains to be seen for which occupational levels undergraduate programmes will prepare and how these new degrees will be assessed on the labour markets in different countries in Europe. The article focuses on the employers' viewpoint, giving an overview of the assessment of Bachelor degrees in four countries: Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands and Norway. As it is a very early stage to provide in‐depth analyses because so far there are hardly any Bachelor graduates on the labour markets, the article illustrates from a more analytical perspective what factors might influence their transition to the world of work and the development of their further careers.