A new approach in measuring graduate employability skills

Abstract

Globalization makes graduate recruitment for an organization becomes more complex because employers believe that a holistic workforce is the key success of an organization. Currently, although graduates are said to possess specific skills but they still lack of employability skills, and this lead to increment of training cost either by government or even employers. Therefore, graduate level of employability skills should be evaluated before entering work market. In this study, a valid and reliable instrument embedding a new approach of measuring employability skills was developed using Situational Judgment Test (SJT). The instrument comprises of twelve (12) items measuring communication skill, professional ethics and morality, entrepreneurial skill, critical thinking in problem solving and personal quality. Instrument’s validity was achieved through expert opinion and the reliability (in terms of stability) was based on the Chi-Square for homogeneity test. Generally, the instrument is beneficial to graduates, employers, government agencies, university, and workforce recruitment agencies when evaluating the level of employability skills.