Perceived employability and ability self among Finnish university students

Hannu Räty,Katri Komulainen,Kati Kasanen,Ulla Hytti,Inna Kozlinska,Päivi Siivonen

doi:10.1007/s10212-019-00451-7

Abstract

Employability is an increasing concern for university students. Our survey set out to examine university students’ perceptions of their employability and the ways in which these perceptions relate to positions that subsequently connect students to working life: students’ self-representational position or “ability self”, and students’ life-historical positions such as chosen field of study, phase of degree and working life experience. The participants comprised a sample of students (N = 1819) from two Finnish universities, representing diverse fields of study. It was found that apart from the field of study, the perceived proximity to graduation and working life was associated with the perception of employability. Furthermore, a set of self-attributed capabilities was associated with students’ perceptions of employability, particularly extroversion, ambitious competitiveness, mental strength and the desired characteristics of a good employee; however, the attribution of academic skills showed opposing effects. It was concluded that both self-representational and live-historical positions are part of the construction of students’ optimism regarding their employability.

Highlights

Previous research in European countries has examined graduates’ labour market returns and outcomes and the way they are positioned in working life, as well as the way in which graduates manage the transition into the labour market (Fallows and Steven 2000; Boden and Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.Extended author information available on the last page of the articleNedeva 2010; Verhaest, Sellami and van der Velden 2017)
University students’ perceptions of their prospects acquire relevance in relation to the realities of the labour market, concerning concrete demand and employees’ expectations (Jackson 2008; Lowden et al 2011), a theme that we address while discussing the policy implications of our study
The relatively optimistic findings regarding students’ perceptions of their employability concur with a recent Finnish survey dealing with the views of young academically educated people in working life: even though about only 50% of them felt that their university education gave sufficient competences in the labour market, over 80% of them were satisfied with their academic degree in terms of their professional career (Kurlin 2018)

Summary

Introduction

Less scholarly attention has been paid to the relationship between university students’ interpretations of their abilities and their perceptions of their own employability—which represents, to use Tomlinson’s (2017) classification, “a micro level” analysis because it focuses on how employability is constructed at a personal level. In Finland, the unemployment rate among tertiary educated 25–64-year-olds was 5.9% in 2016, which was somewhat higher than that in other Nordic countries (OECD Data 2017). Shifting academic unemployment has encouraged and even obliged university students to (re)consider their prospects in the labour market. Among other things this entails a comparison of an individual’s own perceived abilities and related personal characteristics with the ability requirements expected in working life

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Conclusion