Graduate employability in double challenge of post-covid labor market and digital transformation: The role of graduate’s capitals, 4.0 skills, attributes and perceived labor market

Abstract

The economy is experiencing double disruption with the emergence of Covid-19 and businesses’ urgent demand for digital transformation. These create challenges for new graduate students in equipping themselves with the necessary capitals, skills, attributes, and psychological preparedness to deal with the current situation’s instability and meet the criteria of recruiters. Therefore, this paper is one of the first attempts to validate the importance of all the above-mentioned determinants on graduate employability in a relatively comprehensive framework and provide fresh evidence to Today world’s employability taking 4.0 skills and psychological capital into account. The study firstly aims at exploring the role of various types of graduates’ capitals, a set of 4.0 skills, individual attributes, and Today world’s perceived labor market on graduates’ perceived employability. Then the paper also investigates whether perceived employability and currently perceived labor market matter for actual employability. By employing PLS-SEM to analyze the primary data collected from the sample of 350 recent graduates in Ho Chi Minh city, the study finds that human capital, individual behaviors and attributes, social capital, and 4.0 skills all have a favorable impact on perceived employability. Besides, the substantial effects of perceived employability and today world’s labor market perception on graduate actual employability have also been found. The paper also provides some implications for students and managerial level of universities/institutions on how to improve graduates’ employability in Today world’s labor market.