Employability
Schultz (1961) suggested that education is key to development and economic growth in every society. High-quality education can improve the labor force capabilities and increase productivity. Employability is an essential component of the education outcomes and entails the professional development of university graduates with experience and practical skills. It refers to graduates’ abilities to acquire and improve the necessary skills applicable in the job market context (Hillage and Pollard, 1998). Other researchers such as Boeteng and Ofori-Sarpong (2002), Yorke (2006) defined employability as “a set of skills, knowledge and personal attributes that make an individual more likely to secure and be successful in their chosen occupation(s) to the benefit of themselves, the workforce, the community, and the economy” (Okolie et al., 2020).
Technology is changing rapidly, that universities cannot keep up. Graduates from universities with a tech-related degree are not employment-ready, and they still need that “last mile” of training for specialized skills. Universities provide the foundation, while the third-party skill company should fill the gap, provide solution-oriented experience on various issues and complete the final training (Vianello, 2020).
A PwC survey in the United States shows that 69% of employers expect candidates to have Data Science Analytics skills, while just 23% of university leaders indicated that their students are equipped with those DSA skills (APEC, 2017). Several companies collaborating with the universities to enable faculty and students, the example is NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Service Companies, India), that has notified on the employability of tech graduates and talent shortage forecast in 2020 for the IT industry in India and the need for industry intervention strongly (Mamatha et al., 2020).
In India, only 7% of top 20 B-schools university graduates could obtain satisfactory jobs and are employable in the industry (Assocham, 2016), because of the lack of practical hands-on training and poor industry-related knowledge of faculty members (Bhatnagar, 2020). A similar situation is in Nigeria; the high unemployment rate is not related to a lack of jobs but due to a lack of generic skills that the labor market needs and skills gap and mismatch (Oladokun and Olaleye, 2018).