Employability is a matrix of person, context, and relationships

Employability is not a shopping list of knowledge, and cognitive and behavioural skills; or the probability of getting a job; or owned by government or industry.  Employability is person-centred; context-sensitive; and relational.

Employability is Person-Centred

Employability is a psychological construct comprising a mixture of dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations, and personally definitive life stories that are meaningful to identity construction, among social relationships, and within economic contexts related to work.

As a construct, employability is an intangible notion but one that can be observed via peoples personalized expression in traits, adaptations, and stories in context. In other words, their personalities, characteristics such as self-efficacy, and personal narratives of their working lives.

• Dispositional traits are relatively stable feature of a person are associated with specific behaviours.  Conscientiousness, for example, is a dispositional trait that is observed as a person’s active dedication to tasks and high levels of productivity in work.

• Characteristic adaptations are relatively flexible and can be learned and developed over time and with experience.  Self-efficacy, for example, is an adaptation that comprises a person’s beliefs about ability to perform a certain task.  Self-efficacy can be learned by quality experiential learning, observational learning, persuasion, and positive emotional experiences.

• Life stories are the definitive quality of an individual.  No one person has the same life stories; these are the quintessential narratives that make a person a truly indivisible individual.  A person’s life stories engage their past, present, and future, and, moreover, these stories are created in relation to past, present, and future with other people in a variety of contexts.

The themes within a person’s stories make meaning from traits, adaptations, and experiences in the world.  Dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations, and life stories underpin an individual’s employment-related contemplation, decision-making, and actions toward attaining and maintaining a desired volume and type of work.

Employability is Context-Sensitive

Employability is context-sensitive and can be understood within a turbulent confluence of factors that influence any given individual’s chances of working. An individual may enjoy great opportunities in one context but very few in another context, at another time, or another place.

For example, a person who is qualified to practice a profession or trade in one country may not be in another.  Employability affects a person’s volition to engage with the new context.

In the context of a manufacturing plant redesign and restructure, a person trained in the mechanical operation of one machine requires the conscientiousness, self-efficacy, and meaningful reasons to actively engage in learning activities that enable the transfer of present expertise to another machine requiring additional expertise.

Employability may motivate an individual to acquire certain items on the shopping list of knowledge and skills that are in demand and, thereby, increase the probability of employment.  Thus, employability is reflected in an individual’s contemplation, decision, and actions to evolve as a person by acquiring additional knowledge and skills.

Employability is not the knowledge and skills per se; it is the propensity to understand their personal value and act toward their acquisition for deployment in a specific context.

Context and access to resources in context, such as knowledge or finances, may foster or inhibit a person’s employability.  For example, knowing how to acquire and critically appraise information about the world of work, including job market requirements, is dependent on knowledge of context.

Furthermore, discovering information about affordable training and being able to afford it may be attractive to one person who recognises the potential to personally benefit from the training; but, the same training may be inappropriate to the aspirations and volition of another person.

Employability is reflected in an individual’ characteristic adaptations and narratives that inform knowing the difference between what is appropriate and inappropriate training and, if choice is available, making an informed and meaningful decision and taking actions that benefit the individual.

Inappropriate training is that which is irrelevant to an individual’s aspirations and goals that distinguish personal narratives.

Consider, for example, those workplaces in which staff are directed to take mandatory training in some particular topic that is essentially irrelevant to the person’s aspirations and goals, and failure to complete the training results in penalties such as withholding salary increments.

Also consider those governments which direct unemployed people to take on training with little relevance to their aspirations and goals, and instead merely soaks up precious time and resources needed for pursuing relevant opportunities, and then these governments impose financial restraints on the person for not completing the training such as reduction in family welfare payments.

In these situations, there is no choice.  Being compelled to participate in training by force of withholding salary increments or unemployment allowance is not a choice—it is conscription—and does little to enhance an individual’s sense of employability or support its development.

Employability is Relational

Work is done by people, with people, and for people. At every transaction of work there is a relational moment.  People do work in organizations, small and global, and an organization is a relational matrix. People work to provide for their families and their communities.

The ostensibly lonely solo consultant tapping away at a keyboard is producing something for someone. Thus, work and employability cannot be conceived of meaningfully without understanding the relational context.  An individual’s personally meaningful narratives about work are inevitably about oneself and another.

As an intrinsically relational activity, the meaningfulness of work is embedded in distal, broad spectrum cultures and discourses at the national level and proximal, micro-cultures and discourses within organizations and families.

Employment and employability–two ostensibly simple concepts–take on vastly different meanings and actions in different discourses.  The economist who is embedded in political institutions, endowed with power to create policies that affect the lives of individuals, cannot understand and talk about employment and employability in any other discourse than that which empowers them: economics.

This language of economics extends into the realm of human resources practitioners whose recruitment mechanisms reify the items typical on the employability skills shopping list: communication, teamwork, problem solving, etc.  Educational institutions propagate this discourse in their own terms, such as graduate attributes, with synonymous meanings and equivalent intents.

An individual has little choice but to learn this discourse and perform with alacrity.  They must engage with the discourse; to do otherwise would cast them as an unrecognisable outsider unable to relate to others.  Unable to imbue themselves in a given organisational culture by relational means (networking), their attempts to secure employment will leave them inexorably dispirited.

To this endeavour, “employability”, an individual must bring all their psychological resources: dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations, and definitive narratives.  Knowledge and skills alone will not suffice; employability is often more effort than ability within a relational context of time and place.

This article was written by Allison Creed of the University of Melbourne, and Peter McIlveen of the University of Southern Queensland.  Professor Peter McIlveen leads the Australian Collaboratory for Career, Employability, and Learning for Living (ACCELL), a multidisciplinary research team focused on adaptive capacity and career development learning, and the psychology of working. Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

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