Abstract
Sustainable Development Goals defined that quality education and youth employment are two inter-related indicators that reflect the economic growth. It is important to conduct early assessment of graduate employability to better equip them with necessary knowledge and skills to increase their chance of achieving more sustainable future in their career path. This study aims to develop and validate an instrument termed as the Graduate Employability Instrument to measure the employability attributes among the undergraduate students. This involved five stages of scale development. The technical analyses are done according to the accepted standards in psychometric testing comprising exploratory factor analysis, reliability analysis and confirmatory factor analyses. Total 425 Malaysian undergraduate students were involved in the study. The findings supported the main proposed model with 33 items grouped in 7 constructs; work and career resilience, human and social capital, teamwork, conscientiousness, critical thinking, academic, and leadership. This study contributed in measuring self-perceived employability of undergraduate students, which reflected the dimensions of strengths in the higher education institution studied towards preparing youth to fit in the competitive working environment. This can be used for continuous programmer improvements and intervention plans to improve the quality of education and resolve youth unemployment issues.
Highlights
Employability is determined by the assets an individual possesses, in terms of knowledge, skills, attitudes (Hillage & Polland, 1998; Mason, Williams & Cranmer, 2006) and commercial understanding (Mason, et al, 2006)
This study focuses on the development of a Graduate Employability Instrument (GEI) to measure undergraduate students’ employability
A total of 425 Malaysian undergraduate students from one of the Higher Education Institution (HEI) participated in this study using the final version of the Graduate Employability Instrument (GEI)
Summary
Employability is determined by the assets an individual possesses, in terms of knowledge, skills, attitudes (Hillage & Polland, 1998; Mason, Williams & Cranmer, 2006) and commercial understanding (Mason, et al, 2006) These assets, referred as “work readiness” by Mason et al (2006), are important for fresh graduates as a determining factor to the success of their carrier paths. Employers currently are more interested in employing graduates who have certain identified employability skills and qualities, in addition to expertise in the respective fields (DEST, 2002) They are searching for candidates who do not possess only basic academic skills, and higher order thinking skills such as good reasoning, analytical, critical and creative thinking, effective decision making and problem solving. Higher education institutions should strive get to know which dimensions to strengthen in order to best increase the student’s employability
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