Reworking Employability

Professor Simon McGrath

Historical Background

• Commonly seen as a new notion of the past 25 years (but cf. Beveridge 1909)

• 3 part story• 1. Decline of manufacturing and rise of services

• 2. Rise of Neoliberalism and fall of the welfare state

• 3. Discourse of lifelong learning and the boundaryless career

Dominant Account of Employability

• Personalised account of employability as the individual’s ability to gain and maintain a job and to obtain a new one as circumstances dictate

Dominant Account of Educational Providers’ Role in Promoting Employability

• Educational providers must reshape their curriculum and pedagogy in order to focus more sharply on the knowledge, skills and attitudes that will promote their learners’ employability

New Context for Vocational Providers

• This reorientation has been taking place in the context of:

• the collapse of apprenticeship

• the rise of new, larger and more diverse student bodies

• a new governance model that stresses the

centrality of business voices

• a new focus on performance and its management

The Deficit Model of Employability

• Employability has typically been about individual deficits, particularly in soft skills and attitudes

• A recent employer survey in England found that employers rated the following as the 5 greatest skills needs:

• literacy• numeracy• enthusiasm• commitment• timekeeping (Lanning, Martin, Villeneuve-Smith 2008)

Expanding the Notion of Employability

• Clearly, these are important

• However, it is important to ask further questions of employability

• What does employability amount to in a context of mass youth unemployment?

• How important are employability skills as opposed to other factors such as gender, race, poverty, caring responsibilities, transport availability/affordability?

Rethinking Education’s Role

• Educational accounts of employability have tended to focus too narrowly on the set of KSA to be imparted

• Need to think of this as one of 3 domains:

Employability Skills

Institutional Dimension

Economic, Political, Cultural Context

The Project

• Funded by the Department for Business,

Innovation and Skills, UK and managed by the British Council as part of the Educational Partnerships with Africa Programme

• Seven partners:• Coastal KZN College• Northlink College• West Nottinghamshire College• University of KwaZulu-Natal• University of Nottingham• University of the Western Cape• MerSETA

Methodology

• Funding to build partnerships

• Selected ‘beacon’ colleges to examine above average practice

• Institutional visits supported by• Prior and subsequent data gathering

• Interviews and focus groups

• Site visits

• Seminars

Lenses on Employability

Staff

Employers Policy

Institution

Students

Students

• Internalisation of individualised discourse through a focus on skills and attitudes

• Little recognition of the structural features of the employment landscape or of the importance of social capital

Staff

• Access• Epistemological access

• Disciplinary knowledge

• Trade knowledge

• Relational access• Social networks

• Bridging and bonding capital

• Modelling• behaviour

• employer expectations• e.g., punctuality, dress codes, health and

safety

• The employable college• Going beyond the ordinary• Specialisation and beacon status• Negotiating boundaries• Colleges as spaces

• combining theory and practice• disposition building

• Simulating work experience• The data problem

Institutions

• Specific versus general skills

• Fragile relationships

Employers

• Funding opportunities and constraints

• The ambitions and limitations of joined-up policy

• Regional and national resources

• Curriculum reform• N for Nostalgia

Policy

1. Educational account of individual employability is important but insufficient, as is the contextual account of the social sciences

2. Educational institutions are a key third dimension of employability

3. Colleges are developing social capital, dispositions and habitus

Key Findings

4. The vocational dimension to teaching and learning shouldn’t be forgotten

5. Importance of the notion of being an employable college

6. Centrality of leadership in this

7. More work needed on college-employer relations

8. Need to go beyond employability to notions such as capability and social justice

Key Findings (2)