The Careers Guy

Years ago, working as a Careers Advisor in a University careers service, myself and some colleagues were discussing what we could do to help increase the employability of our students and graduates.

We jumped straight to task, discussing the interventions we could arrange or deliver that could raise our stakeholders employability; placements, CV workshops, skills audits etc.

Part way through the meeting, I just stopped and said “what do we even mean by employability?…” It was a simple question, but it seemed to stump us all. Each of us, intrinsically, knew what we were talking about when we spoke of employability. We seemed to share an unspoken agreement that we were all working in the same direction. We had, after all, mostly suggested the same interventions.

When we each tried to explain to each other what each of us thought it was, each mentioned something slightly different.

“It’s what makes you able to do a job well!” one said, “It’s that trait you have which makes you attractive to employers” another commented. “It’s a collection of Knowledge, Understandings, Skills, Attributes and Behaviours [KUSAB] that help you beat the competition to the job” said another.

The common denominator between all of our understandings of employability, was that employability was something unique to each individual. Your employability was your employability, and my employability is my employability. Employability was something not only that you could nurture, but you had responsibility for nurturing.

I didn’t recognize at the time that what we were all advocating for what Brown et al describe as a a kind of “possessive individualism” (Brown, Hesketh, & Williams, 2003) Meaning that your employability is something that you manage and possess yourself, individually.

It say uneasily with me at the time. My experience working in recruitment, my research into inequalities in the labour market, and my anti-discrimination activist background were screaming at me “but some workers are discriminated against!”

For the time being, my understanding was that employability was something you held yourself, and that external factors, like a racist, or disablist hiring manager, were aberrations. These were things that happened externally to your employability.

This approach to understanding employability isn’t new. Back in the 1960’s, American economist Gary Becker was espousing Human Capital Theory (HCT) as a way for individuals to increase their employment prospects through education and skills development. (Becker, 1964)

The influence of Becker in Higher Education employability circles is huge, and felt to this day. To the extent that HCT is seen as the orthodox approach to understanding Graduate Employability in the UK. (AdvanceHE, 2021)

Whilst working outside of the Higher Education (HE) bubble however, the approach had been completely different. I’d worked on numerous European Social Fund (ESF) under the banner of Building Better Opportunties (BBO) projects working specifically to help those with “barriers to employment.”

The view of employability was a world apart from Higher Education. Barriers to employment included things like: being over the age of 55, living in a remote or rural area, not having access to healthcare, being disabled or being a member of an ethnic minority etc.

Each client took part in an extensive and broad needs assessment, where before we spoke of CV’s, cover letters, or professional branding, we discussed their housing situation, their mental health, and whether they had support networks in place, amongst other things.

I have fond memories of supporting people into work, sometimes after decades of unemployment where, rather than starting with CVs, we moved them out of abusive living situations, we bought them e-bikes so they commute further, we helped rehome their pets so they could move into assisted housing, we helped them secure legal representation for family court hearings against abusive exes, and sometimes, just spoke to them about their hobbies to increase their confidence speaking to strangers, so that 6 months later, they could successfully interview for a job.

This holistic approach to employability was successful. It turned peoples lives around.

The contrast between this and my work in the HE sector was stark. The chances of employment in this context, was situated in an individuals environment, as much as it was in their qualifications and skills. At the time I didn’t appreciate that this took place in the context of a broad rethinking of employability, with routes in researchers such as McQuaid, who for nearly 20 years now, have been reconceptualising employability to take into consideration broader social and environmental concerns when talking about someone’s employability, including labour market conditions.

To paraphrase McQuaid, if 10 neurosurgeons apply for one neurosurgery vacancy, only one of them is getting the job. Has the “employability” of the other 9 been found lacking?

Similarly, during the Covid-19 Panemic, 500,000 people left the labour market and created something of a dire-situation for recruiters.

This tight labour market has contributed to a near historic low level of unemployment meaning that some people, who in “regular times” would find themselves “unemployable”, have found themselves gainfully employed, because, in grotesque terms, the labour market is desperate enough to give people a try that they wouldn’t normally take a risk on.

Their employability has increased, because the market conditions have dictated so.

Excitingly, employability research is expanding into an area I’m passionate about. Public transit, and its impact on the employability of citizens is being examined, and showing the impact this has on marginalised workers, such as the disabled. This is welcome new research, and when I discuss this with friends and colleagues, comes across as an obvious impactor on one’s employability.

In community settings, and on ESF funded projects working with the general population, careers and employability has used broadly holistic approaches, and has been highly effective.

Research is also moving in a positive direction, looking at broad impactors, like transport, or gendered violence, on peoples employability.

Unfortunately however, within the HE sector, where Human Capital Theory and possessive individualistic approaches to employability reign supreme, this holistic approach is not the norm.

The discourse around graduate employability is dominated predominantly by talk of the impact of placements, of years abroad, of short term work experience projects.

At Staffordshire University, where I work, I feel we’re one of the more forward thinking Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) when it comes to Employability. Our Employability Framework (full disclosure: I was one of the authors) cements the idea that people place themselves and their understanding of their employability within society as a whole.

Across the UK however, conversations with colleagues at other HEIs, and the discourse in the literature, is decades behind. It’s exactly this situation that my PhD is researching.

I’m investigating the differences between conceptualisations of employability inside and outside of higher education, and through critical policy discourse analysis, attempting to find out how higher education came to be so far behind the curve, in comparison to colleagues outside of HE.

Bibliography

AdvanceHE. (2021). Employability: a review of the literature 2016 – 2021. London: AdvanceHE.

Bastiaanssen, Jeroen. Johnson, Daniel. Lucas, Karen. (2021) Does better job acessibility help people gain employment? The role of public transport in Great Britain. in Urban Studies. Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00420980211012635

Becker, G. (1964). Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education. New York: Columbia University Press

Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee (2023) Post-pandemic economic growth: UK labour markets – Report summary. Available at: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5803/cmselect/cmbeis/306/summary.html

Brown, P., Hesketh, A., & Williams, S. (2003). Employability in a Knowledge-Driven Economy. Journal of Education and Work.

Economic Development Directive. (2023) Definitions: employment status/barriers/social inclusion and poverty target groups. In European Social Fund: participant guidance. Available at: https://www.gov.scot/publications/european-social-fund-participant-guidance-2/pages/definitions/

Ecorys UK. (2022) Building Better Opportunities Evaluation Report 2022. London: Ecorys UK: available at: https://buildingbetteropportunities.org.uk/sites/default/files/2022-08/BBO-Evaluation-report-2022.pdf

Tessier, Alexandra (2023) The impact of transportation on the employment of people with disabilities: a scoping review. In Transport Reviews. Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01441647.2023.2229031

McQuaid, R., & Lindsay, C. D. (2005). The Concept of Employability. Urban Studies, 197 – 219.