Abstract
This chapter outlines the fundamental perspective of employability, considering push and pull factors that stimulate graduates to establish their careers. Employability is about graduates' readiness, their ability to land their first job, keep it, and find a new one, if necessary, as well as their flexibility in terms of skills, knowledge, and attitude to the demands of the economy. The responsibility for establishing prosperous professions increasingly falls on the shoulders of employees. Employment relations are more unpredictable than in the past due to the status of the job market today. The literature addresses two kinds of self-perceived employability: the first is structural, and the second is personal. The current study outlined external factors that affect graduates' judgements of their structural self-perceived employability are labelled as push factors. The person's perception of their own employability is dependent on their own characteristics, skills, and attitudes are discussed as pull factors.
TopIntroduction
Background
The current chapter has the main emphasis on issues, trends, and challenges of graduates' employability. The progressive and challenging circumstances stimulate graduates to build resources to survive and sustain in a dynamic environment. The challenges are labeled as internal or pull factors that stimulate graduates to be well-equipped with personal skills and capabilities that help them to respond the challenging situations, However, trends are push factors to include all external elements that drive graduates to learn the expertise to compete in contemporary organizations. Although external factors do emerge in student feedback and fundamentally impact both the individual and the institution, this chapter primarily focuses on internal resources as pull factors and external influences as push factors that fallouts the transformation of resources into capabilities. We start by reviewing the most important ideas currently being studied on graduate employability and highlighting the key traits of productive graduates. We start by reviewing the most important ideas currently being studied on graduate employability and highlighting the key traits of productive graduates.
The ideology of push and pull factors to investigate the graduate’s readiness to work is not distinctive as this term has already been used by different researchers in diverse perspective. The research on 702 Dutch health care and welfare professionals has explored individual and organizational aspects as push and pull factors affecting employability orientation and turnover intention (Nauta et al., 2009). Similarly, the research on university students uses the push-pull factor theory to investigate foreign students' decisions to study in Finland or leave the country after graduation (Nikou, Kadel, & Gutema, 2023). This research follows the same philosophical line in its investigation of the pull and push factors that affect graduates' employment. Pull factors are the graduate's own resources that are essential to their employability, while push factors are the external factors that stimulate employability.
The rapid advancement of technology has significantly impacted how businesses operate and considered the expertise required in the job market. The shift towards a knowledge-based economy has highlighted the importance of continuous learning and adaptability in the workforce. This is mostly due to the fact that we are in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution, which has made artificial intelligence and big data ubiquitous among both the general public and academic institutions (Nuis, Segers, & Beausaert, 2023). Therefore, jobs are dynamic and new positions are appearing quickly, frequently displacing older ones. The skill sets that graduates are expected to possess are affected by this, and it becomes more difficult for educational institutions to equip their students with the necessary employability skills (Eimer, Bohndick, & Open, 2023).
The massive number of learners require career guidance in light of the following factors: a dramatic increase in the number of students enrolled in higher education programs in the world; a dizzying array of academic majors and concentrations; a job market that is always shifting due to rapid technological, social, and economic advancements; and the small percentage of students who opt to pursue a career in science after graduation. This anticipation is reasonable regardless of ideological factors. Without compromising the essential features of a comprehensive and long-lasting education, the variety of perspectives provides a solid basis for reflectively discussing the connection between university education and future application (Petruzziello et al., 2023).
Organizations overwhelm highly skilled graduates and appreciate their exceptional adaptive behaviors. Graduate employability has evolved into a key component of universities' educational, social, and economic goals in the competitive twenty-first-century higher education market. Though typically seen through the narrower lens of graduate employment outcomes, rather as more comprehensive, lifelong ideas of professions and employability success, policymakers throughout the world have placed employability at the center of educational changes (Divan, Knight, Bennett, Bell, & Management, 2019). As soon as students graduate from college and begin looking for work, they have to gain knowledge, skills, and talents as well as other qualities valued by existing and forthcoming employers. Due to the growing number of graduates produced by higher educational institutions each year, graduate employability continues to be a problem on a national level (Jain, Goel, Sinha, & Dhir, 2021; M. K. U. Rahman & Haleem, 2018). Employers have been worried for a long time about graduates’ capacity to function in a contemporary workplace (Cai, 2013; Jain et al., 2021; Marwan, 2020). This concern predates the current significant growth in higher education and the corresponding worries about the qualifications and skills of graduates in the new globalization, which were raised in low-rated educational institutions (Brown, Hesketh, & Williams, 2004; Marwan, 2020).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Wellbeing: A focus on enhancing an individual's physical, mental, and social states, thereby offering them health and prosperity, benefiting themselves and their employer.
Self-Efficacy: The belief of a person in his or her ability to carry out tasks to achieve set performance criteria. It is also a person’s confidence in having control over his behavior, life, motivations, and social environment.
Organizations: Working individuals having a common goal in a particular setup.
Push Factors: External or uncontrollable factors that drive graduate attention to seek employment.
Career Shock: An unexpected occurrence that impacts an individual’s career positively, neutrally, or negatively.
Pre-Career Shock: The experience of a chance event by an individual during their university education as they seek to transition from university into the labor market.
Chance Event: The occurrence of a circumstance that had not previously been foreseen.
Career Awareness: An ongoing learning process whereby an individual has the opportunity to acquire an understanding of the job opportunities available, explore career pathways, and identify the resources required to meet their desires through the support of career counseling.
Future of Work: A projection of how forces of change will impact work, workers, and the workplace in the years ahead.
Graduate Employability: The capability of higher education alums to perform at a level to undertake a job role that requires a university degree.
Psychological Capital: A set of resources, for instance, hope, optimism, resilience, and self-efficacy, that can be utilized by a person to bring improvement to his performance at the workplace.
Employability: Employability is the capacity to go from formal education or training to a first job (an aspect of employability that is especially relevant in Pakistan given the issue of recent graduate unemployment).
Pull Factors: The internal drive that stimulates graduates to get employment.
Career: Having connected to identification while leaving a lasting impression of the continued relationship to their job.