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Business Cooperation - Improving The Working Life Relevance of Higher Education
Abstract
Education programmes should provide students
with the skills for working life. This is important not only for
students, but also for companies. Skills refers, in addition to
competence in a specific area, to general competencies, working
life practices in common use and, for example, knowledge of
software used in the business world. It is even more important
to take into account the needs of working life when teaching
adult students, who often study alongside work with the aim of
progressing in their careers. In spring 2019, Kokkola University
Consortium Chydenius conducted a survey targeting information
and communication technology (ICT) companies in its local area.
The results highlighted the attitude of the job seeker in the
recruitment phase. The employers valued qualifications, but still
emphasized the ability to work independently as well as social
and teamwork skills as the most important things. This survey
provides a good starting point for taking into account the needs
of the business world when developing education. This paper
reviews the results of the survey and discusses how education
providers and students can take them into account in their own
activities.
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In recent decades, a growing body of literature has emerged to illustrate the strong pressure on higher education institutions to prepare graduates for the world of work. This paper examines studies that attempt to incorporate the concept of employability skills in the empirical analysis. It thus focuses on the conceptual discussion and methodological options to show how researchers cope empirically with the assumptions associated with employability skills. This literature survey offers a taxonomy of methods that distinguishes between direct and indirect, as well as supervised and unsupervised, methods for the collection of data on skills. Although the underlying premise of the available research is that higher education institutions and policymakers should be provided with information on employability skills, the studies examined in this paper suggest that the identification of those skills is an impossible endeavour. Agreement is only found on some cognitive, technical, and relational skills. More importantly, it is argued that the supply-side approach overlooks economic and social processes that might affect employability. The problem of graduates’ employability transcends higher education institutions’ provision of useful and matched skills.
Fundamental changes in the nature of UK Higher Education have led to an increased emphasis on the notion of Higher Education (HE) investment ‘paying off’ for individuals and society with graduate labour market outcomes increasingly being used to evaluate and demonstrate the value of this investment. For example, one of the four UK Performance Indicators (UKPIs) for HE is the employment of graduates (HESA 2016), some however, question the appropriateness of this as a goal of HE, arguing that there is a need for universities to emphasise the importance of university education beyond employability and ‘pay cheques’ (Redmond 2014). This is not a new debate and given the increased cost, both economic and social, of HE to individuals and society, graduate employability is an increasingly high-stakes issue. We argue that the significant focus on labour market outcomes as a proxy measure of the value of higher education – by individuals, policy makers and institutions – makes a critical reconsideration of graduate employability timely. We examine existing conceptualisations of graduate employability and consider the value of applying alternative theoretical perspectives to provide a more nuanced approach to conceptualising graduate employability, allowing us to move beyond the dominant perspectives of graduate employability that over-emphasise individual agency.
Malaysia has made significant progress in advancing access to education over the last two decades, having achieved the education goals of the UN's Millennium Development Goals. Unfortunately, this has not been accompanied by quality improvement, with reports of ‘unemployable’ graduates a frequent refrain. This paper reports on a study of Malaysian employers’ perceptions of the country's graduates that finds a much more nuanced picture. While employers view Malaysian graduates as far from ideal, these graduates come with several strengths such as familiarity with local conditions, willingness to work hard, and lower hiring costs relative to foreign graduates. Not all Malaysian located graduates are ranked alike qualitatively; those enrolled in transnational private education are rated better than those from public universities. Major policy implications arising from this state of affairs are discussed.
Allocating the right person to a task or job is a key issue for improving quality and performance of achievements, usually addressed using the concept of “competences”. Nevertheless, providing an accurate assessment of the competences of an individual may be in practice a difficult task. We suggest in this paper to model the uncertainty on the competences possessed by a person using a possibility distribution, and the imprecision on the competences required for a task using a fuzzy constraint, taking into account the possible interactions between competences using a Choquet integral. As a difference with comparable approaches, we then suggest to perform the allocation of persons to jobs using a robust optimisation approach, allowing to minimise the risk taken by the decision maker. We first apply this framework to the problem of selecting a candidate within n for a job, then extend the method to the problem of selecting c candidates for j jobs (c ⩾ j) using the leximin criterion.
This paper uses the REFLEX dataset to test the hypothesis that the generally observed negative impacts of overeducation and overskilling on both job satisfaction and earnings can be attributed to under-utilisation in specific job related skills. We find that the penalties to both forms of mismatch are insensitive to the inclusion of controls for overskilling in a wide range of job specific competencies. The research suggests that the problem of mismatch relates to an inability for fully utilise general or innate ability as opposed to specific areas of acquired learning. The analysis suggests the problem of mismatch can only be effectively addressed by raising general levels of job quality within economies and this, in turn, presents serious challenges for policy.
Purpose
– This paper seeks to examine the changes in the methods of graduate recruitment and selection that have been used by UK‐based organisations and to establish the reasons for the main changes and developments in the process of attracting and recruiting graduates.
Design/methodology/approach
– Data were collected through the use of a structured questionnaire. Questionnaires were sent to 700 UK‐based employers selected from the Prospects Directory, the Graduate Employment and Training (GET) Directory and the Times Top 100 Graduate Recruiters. The response rate was just over 50 per cent and the data were analysed by using the statistical analysis software SPSS. The variables used were organisation size, recruitment methods, selection methods, cost, skills and reasons for the use of methods.
Findings
– The analysis has shown that all employers, regardless of organisation size or activity type, tend to use more sophisticated, objective and cost‐effective methods of recruitment and selection than before. The process of graduate recruitment and selection in the UK has become more person‐related than job‐oriented because many employers are more interested in the attitudes, personality and transferable skills of applicants than the type or level of qualification acquired. Although some of the usual methods such as interviewing remain popular, there is a greater variety of ways by which graduates are attracted to and selected for their first jobs.
Originality/value
– The findings of this study are expected to be useful for employers considering the introduction of new graduate recruitment programmes and for those wishing to improve their existing ones as well as for institutions of higher education to reconsider the type of knowledge and skills they provide in order to prepare their students for the real world of work.
Labor market rewards based on competencies are analyzed using a sample of young European higher education (HE) graduates. Estimates of monetary rewards are obtained from conventional earnings regressions, while estimates total rewards are based on job satisfaction and derived through ordered probit regressions. Results for income show that jobs with higher participative and methodological competency requirements are better paid. The results also show that higher requirements in terms of competencies increase graduates' job satisfaction.
Recent shifts in education and labour market policy have resulted in universities being placed under increasing pressure to produce employable graduates. However, contention exists regarding exactly what constitutes employability and which graduate attributes are required to foster employability in tertiary students. This paper argues that in the context of a rapidly changing information- and knowledge-intensive economy, employability involves far more than possession of the generic skills listed by graduate employers as attractive. Rather, for optimal economic and social outcomes, graduates must be able to proactively navigate the world of work and self-manage the career building process. A model of desirable graduate attributes that acknowledges the importance of self-management and career building skills to lifelong career management and enhanced employability is presented. Some important considerations for the implementation of effective university career management programs are then outlined.
The purpose of this study is to analyze the influence of employability skills on wage compensation for female college graduates in Taiwan. We find that employability skills can explain some variation in wage compensation whether we include conventional human capital variables or not. For example, the career management skills category exhibits a consistent and significant influence on wage compensation and could raise the earnings level by 5–6 percent. In addition, employability skills have more diverse effects on wage compensation across various occupations, while conventional human capital variables are shown to have more consistent effects on wage compensation across occupations.
Recent developments in higher education have seen a strong emphasis placed on making graduates ‘job ready’ for their work in the professions. A driver of this agenda has been the many mass-scale surveys conducted with business and industry about the abilities and general employability of graduates. This Australian-based study is focused on perceptions and attitudes around one such ability – professional writing skills. ‘Discourse-based interviews' were conducted with managers and supervisors from a range of professional areas. Their responses were most interesting, and served, among other things, to challenge some of the emerging ideas about ‘job readiness’ in current debates about the directions of higher education.
Graduate employability is a key issue for Higher Education. In this two-part study student employability skills have been evaluated from the perspective of sandwich students and graduates in biomolecular science, and their employers. A strong correlation was found between employer and sandwich student/graduate perceptions of the relative priorities amongst employability skills. Skills such as enthusiasm, dependability and team-working scored higher than subject knowledge skills, whilst commercial awareness, negotiation and networking were given lowest priority. Furthermore, the lowest ranked skills were those that sandwich students/graduates were assessed to be least proficient in. Overall skills of new graduate employees were rated less highly by their employers than by the graduates themselves. In the second part of the study an employability skills profile was compiled and distributed to biomolecular science students at levels 1, 2 and 3, as part of personal development planning. Level 3 students rated themselves more highly than level 1 and level 2 students in subject knowledge, most core skills and personal qualities, except tolerance to stress. Implications of this study, including the value of student self-assessment of their skills and utility of the profile to underpin personal development planning and inform graduate recruitment processes, are discussed and recommendations made.
2016 Good Practice Report-Work Integrated Learning (WIL)
- J Sachs
- A Rowe
- M Wilson
J. Sachs, A. Rowe, and M. Wilson, 2016 Good Practice Report-Work
Integrated Learning (WIL). Department of Education and Training,
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2016 Good Practice Report-Work Integrated Learning (WIL)
- sachs