Employability

Professor Mantz Yorke of the University of Edinburgh defines Employability as "a set of achievements – skills, understandings and personal attributes – that make individuals more likely to gain employment and be successful in their chosen occupations, which benefits themselves, the workforce, the community and the economy."

Other Definitions of Employability

• (Hillage and Pollard, 1998): "Employability is the capability to move self-sufficiently within the labour market to realise potential through sustainable employment. For the individual, employability depends on the knowledge, skills and attitudes they possess, the way they use these assets and present them to employers and the context (personal circumstances and labour market environment) within which they seek work." They propose employability consists of four elements:
  • employability assets (knowledge, skills, attitudes)
  • deployment (career management skills)
  • presentation (job getting skills, CV, interview technique, etc)
  • personal circumstances (who you are, responsibility, labour market, etc).
• Anneleen Forrier; Luc Sels (2003): "Employability is the ability to maintain employment and make 'transitions' between jobs and roles within the same organization to meet new job requirements."
• Van der Heijde and Van der Heijden (2005): "Employability is the ability to obtain new employment if required, i.e. to be independent in the labour market by being willing and able to manage their own employment transitions between and within organisations. The continuously fulfilling, acquiring or creating of work through the optimal use of efforts."
• Erik Berntson (2008): "Employability is the ability to gain initial employment; hence the interest in ensuring that 'key competencies', careers advice and an understanding about the world of work are embedded in the education system." Berntson argues that employability refers to an individual's perception of his or her possibilities of getting new, equal, or better employment. Berntson's study differentiates employability into two main categories – actual employability (objective employability) and perceived employability (subjective employability).
• Lee Harvey, former Director of the Centre for Research and Evaluation at Sheffield Hallam University, defines employability "as the ability of a graduate to get a satisfying job", stating that job acquisition should not be prioritized over preparedness for employment to avoid pseudo measure of individual employability. Lee argues that employability is not a set of skills but a range of experiences and attributes developed through higher-level learning, thus employability is not a "product' but a process of learning.

Models of Employability

• Hillage and Pollard (1998, p. 2) suggest that: In simple terms, employability is about being capable of getting and keeping fulfilling work. More comprehensively employability is the capability to move self-sufficiently within the labour market to realise potential through sustainable employment. They propose that employability consists of four main elements.
  • The first of these, a person’s “employability assets”, consists of their knowledge, skills and attitudes.
  • The second, “deployment”, includes career management skills, including job search skills.
  • Thirdly, “presentation” is concerned with “job getting skills”, for example CV writing, work experience and interview techniques.
  • Finally, Hillage and Pollard (1998) also make the important point that for a person to be able to make the most of their “employability assets”, a lot depends on their personal circumstances (for example family responsibilities) and external factors (for example the current level of opportunity within the labour market).
• Bennett et al. (1999) proposed a model of course provision in higher education which included five elements:
  • (1) disciplinary content knowledge;
  • (2) disciplinary skills;
  • (3) workplace awareness;
  • (4) workplace experience; and
  • (5) generic skills.

This model goes some way towards including all the necessary elements to ensure a graduate achieves an optimum level of employability, but is still missing some vital elements

• The USEM account of employability (Yorke and Knight, 2004; Yorke and Knight, 2004) is probably the most well known and respected model in this field. USEM is an acronym for four inter-related components of employability:
  • (1) understanding;
  • (2) skills;
  • (3) efficacy beliefs; and
  • (4) metacognition

The authors suggest that behind the USEM model is:
... an attempt to put thinking about employability on a more scientific basis, partly because of the need to appeal to academic staff on their own terms by referring to research evidence and theory” (Knight and Yorke, 2004, p 37).
The USEM model forms part of a large body of research-based scholarly work on employability. However, this strength could also be perceived as a weakness, in that it does not assist in explaining to non-experts in the field, particularly the students themselves and their parents, exactly what is meant by employability.

• The Centre for Employability (CfE) at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) in the UK has been developing practical solutions to enhance the prospects of students and graduates for over ten years. As a consequence of the careers service origins of this unit, the main theoretical model that has underpinned this work has been the DOTS model (Law and Watts, 1977), which consists of: ... planned experiences designed to facilitate the development of:
  • Decision learning – decision making skills
  • Opportunity awareness – knowing what work opportunities exist and what their requirements are
  • Transition learning – including job searching and self presenting skills
  • Self awareness – in terms of interests, abilities, values, etc. (Watts, 2006, pp. 9-10).

The value of this model lies in its simplicity, as it allows individuals to organise a great deal of the complexity of career development learning into a manageable framework. However, the model has recently attracted some criticism. McCash (2006) argues that the model is over-reliant on a mechanistic matching of person and environment, and therefore underplays other critical issues such as social and political contexts. He also points out that there is an implication that failure to secure a “self-fulfilling” occupation can be presented, or experienced, as the fault of the unsuccessful individual. These criticisms overlook the fact that the elegant simplicity of the DOTS model is precisely why it has proved so enduring and popular. They also seem to suggest that students introduced to basic concepts of career development through DOTS would be incapable of developing and learning about more sophisticated analyses through this simple introductory structure