Expanding the Notion of Employability

1
Expanding the Notion of Employability

• Professor Simon McGrath

2
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

3
Dominant Account of Employability

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

4
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

5
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

6
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)

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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?

8
Rethinking Educations 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