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ОСНОВНОЙ РАЗДЕЛ
УДК 331.1
Adizov B.I.
Ph.D. student, on an internship at Valencia Polytechnic University
Valencia, Spain
Home-university: Bukhara State University, Bukhara, Uzbekistan THE CONCEPT OF EMPLOYABILITY AND EMPLOYABILITY SKILLS: CHANGING IN DEMAND FOR GRADUATES EMPLOYABILITY SKILLS BY PERIODS
Abstract. The present paper is a review paper in nature attempt to articulate views of researchers on the concepts of employability, on employability skills, employer's perspectives on employability skills. And also discussed in detail the role of employment skills for employment in the present time. This article also discusses in detail the skills whose skills (or skill sets) are more needed by employers who are required, expected or valued by employers in a rapidly transforming labor market.
Keywords: employer, employment, employability, employability skills.
Introduction. Until now, the education system in most countries of the world has encouraged students for how much they know, and, accordingly, training was aimed at accumulating knowledge. Now there is a departure from the era of industrialization, which you quite rightly described as the era of conveyor labor, when people were hired to work so that they repeatedly perform relatively simple repetitive actions every day.
Now all these routine operations can be performed automatically thanks to robotization and digital technologies. This means that people now need to be taught not what they had been taught before; you need to teach them the ability to think, independently obtain information and critically evaluate it, and not just to accumulate and memorize. Very soon, educational institutions will be forced to move from the old, "industrial" curriculum to a training system that will allow them training personnel for an innovative economy and information society. Accordingly, approaches to teaching, will also change - today, thanks to the Internet and information technologies, students of schools and universities sometimes have much more knowledge in some areas than their teachers.
Therefore, teachers from knowledge transmitters will become teachers-organizers. For many of today's teachers, this transformation will be very difficult. Curricula in the post-industrial era should be aimed at developing critical thinking, communication skills, creative ingenuity and interaction skills, since the ability to build interpersonal relationships is most in demand in this era.
In the era of high technology and automation of a significant number of processes familiar to us, to remain a sought-after specialist, new skills and abilities are required. The key skills that determined literacy in the industrial age were reading, writing and arithmetic. In the 21st century, accents are shifted toward
critical thinking, interpersonal and communication skills, and creative work. Many researchers are curious about this, although this is perhaps not so much a skill as a quality, a personal characteristic of a person.
The concept of Employability
"Employability" is a long-standing yet contested concept (Gazier, 1998) that has come to the forefront of policy and theoretical debates at local, regional, national and international levels relatively recently.
Employability refers to a new graduate possessing a set of skills and/or competencies that allow him or her to compete and secure employment, whether in formal employment, self-employment or any career (Harvey, 2003). Besides the skills, employment also includes various attributes and experiences reached from higher level training, where necessary knowledge and skills at lower levels are important (Harvey, 2001). According to Hillage and Pollard (1998), employability is about being capable of getting and keeping fulfilling work. More comprehensively, employability is the capability to move self-sufficiently within the labour market to realize potential through sustainable employment.
In turn, Datta, Pellissery and Bino (2007) believe that employment means having a job and being employed means having the qualities necessary to save work, a smooth transition from one job to another and advancement in different workplaces. While employers view employability as the skills looked for in new employees, HEF s view employability as the skills and attributes demanded of their graduates to enable them to be more employable and more able to cope with change (Hager, 1996).
Taking into account the wide range of employment approaches, we try to group these discussions highlighting some key features.
Firstly, employers are at the center of discussions about the employability of graduates. It is argued that it is employers transform employability into employment, and graduates should receive education and training to acquire skills that match the needs of employers (Harvey 2001; Brown et al. 2003). This review assumes that employability is primarily a matter of individual skills (Moreau and Leathwood 2006), and, therefore, HE providers cannot ignore it but must pay attention, should adapt and respond to the demands of the environment of the labor market. Secondly, graduate employability is commonly defined as the ability to access a job, maintain it, or find another one (Hillage and Pollard 1998). Once again, it is assumed that employability depends on factors such as the characteristics of people and their willingness to work that affect the likelihood of getting a job (McQuaid and Lindsay 2005). McQuade and Lindsay designate this view as supply-side conformity, emphasizing skill-based solution; this entails that HE has a professional mission (Grubb and Lazerson 2005) in a context where graduation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for employment (Sin and Neave 2016).
Employability Skills
Prior to defining and explaining the concept of employability skills, we would like to dwell on the essence of the understanding of skills itself.
"Skill" is widely regarded as a focus for analytical research and as a core
object for policy interventions in the modern global high-technology era. A substantive body of evidence shows that different skill levels have large economic effects for individuals, employers, regions and whole national economies. However, among sociologists there is no consensus on the meaning of the concept of skill. When economists, sociologists and psychologists discuss skill they often appear to be talking about different things. When translating, scholars in different languages have still another take on the matter. Dialogue and discussion between disciplines and cultures are rare, so similarities and differences are not made transparent or not resolved. Disciplinary segmentation permits conceptual and semantic differences to persist; and outsiders to academic discourse hear different approaches, depending on whom they are listening to. Unfortunately, the scope for confusion does not end at the library door.
Since our discussion is examining in the fields of economics, the concept of employability and we will limit ourselves to this area.
One of this aspect of employability is the possession of employability skills. Employment skills are those basic skills that are necessary to obtain, maintain and achieve success in work.
The first attempt to distinguish between the types of skills evaluated in the labor market was made by Becker (1964). He made a distinction between general skills that are useful in almost all workplaces and specific skills that are required by a single employer.
According to (Hillage and Pollard, 1998), employability skills comprise their knowledge (i.e. what they know), skills (what they do with what they know) and attitudes (how they do it). And they detailed these skills:
• baseline skills: such as basic skills and essential personal attributes (such as reliability and integrity)
• intermediate skills: such as occupational specific skills (at all levels), generic or key skills (such as communication and problem solving) and key personal attributes (such as motivation and initiative), and
• high-level skills: involving skills which help contribute to organizational performance (such as team working, self-management, commercial awareness, etc.).
Come from the literatures on the types of skills graduates are required to have. Andrews and Higson (2008), making distinctions between the soft and hard skills associated with a particular field of education, they emerged three significant themes out of their research, each one focusing on different components of graduate employability:
- Business Specific Issues (Hard skills);
- Interpersonal Competencies (Soft skills);
- Work Experience and Work-Based Learning.
Branine (2008) suggests two types of skills such as person-oriented rather skills and job-oriented skills. Employers seek person-oriented rather than job-oriented skills. The author insists that most employers are looking for attitude, personality, and transferable skills in applicants rather than a type or level of
qualification.
Generic skills are given various labels in the literature, namely key skills (Washer 2007), key competencies (Wiek et al. 2011), core skills (Bennett et al. 1999), generic competencies (Warn and Tranter 2001), transferable skills (Bridges 1993), employability skills (Harvey 2001), and survival skills (Kumar and Jain 2010). Employability skills are those that allow access to a job and the ability to maintain it (Harvey 2001); and survival skills are those skills that graduates need at school to help them become high-performance workers and therefore survive in the labour market (Kumar and Jain 2010).
Olivier et al. (2014) gathered the skills required by employers into six parts:
- Foundation skills (written and oral communication, problem solving, and critical analysis);
- Adaptive capacity (the ability to adapt to new situations and foreign workplaces, learn autonomously, develop new ideas, and innovate)
- Team working and interpersonal skills;
- IT skills;
- Employability skills (coping with pressure and stress, being flexible and adaptable, and meeting deadlines);
- Technical- and domain-specific skills.
Chiu and Chuang (2016) divide the required skills into four categories:
- know (professional knowledge and application capabilities);
- attitude (positive working attitudes and teamwork abilities);
- learn (aggressive and active learning);
- career (career management skills).
By the categories of required skills that graduates can use and which skills are more required by employers, we will consider the methodological options and the set of skills that employers require, expect or assess.
Researchers use a range of methods to identify the set of skills that employers value most. These methods attempt to incorporate different features of the concept of competence in the empirical analysis (Suleman 2017) (Table 1).
Table 1. Classification of methods to assess employability skills
Supervised
Unsupervised
Direct Analysis of hiring criteria by asking employers or graduates (Humburg and van der Velden 2015; Braun and Brachem 2015)
Expectations (Kavanagh and Drennan 2008) Indirect Employability skills assessed through: Employers' perceptions (Hesketh 2(X)0) Utilisation of skills (Allen and van der Velden 2001)
Monetary value of skills (Chill and Chuang 2016)
Analysis of hiring criteria through job advertisements or interviews on market requirements (Bennett 2002; Hayton et al,
2005)
Expectations (Cheong et al. 2016) Interviews with stakeholders about the quality of graduates (Hayton et al. 2005)
Source: Suleman F. The employability skills of higher education graduates: insights into conceptual frameworks and methodological options. Springer
Science+Business Media B.V. High Educ. 2017. 76(5). P. 269.
The scientist studies collecting some of methods from different researchers and classifies skills as supervised and unsupervised, direct and indirect methods. While some researchers in these studies use catalogs of different skills, others concentrate on one skill.
Let us look on to the behavior of employers, today in such a rapidly changing world which skills (or skill sets) are more needed by employers that employers demand, expect or value.
The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) ( established in 1956, NACE is a professional association of more than 9,100 career professionals; more than 3,400 university relations and hiring specialists; and nearly 300 business solution providers that serve this community, Bethlehem, PA, USA) has compiled a list of the top 20 skills requested by employers (2007). These skills in rank order are as follows:
Table 2. A list of the top 20 skills requestec by employers.
Rank Skills Rank Skills
1 Analytical Skills 11 Leadership And Management Skills
2 Communication Skills 12 Motivation/Initiative
3 Computer Skills 13 Organizational And Time Management Skills
4 Creativity 14 Real Life Experiences
5 Detail-Oriented 15 Self-Confidence
б Risk-Taker 1б Strong Work Ethic
7 Flexibility/Adaptability 17 Tactfulness
8 Friendly 18 Teamwork Skills
9 Honesty/Integrity 19 Technical Skills
10 Interpersonal Skills 20 Well-Mannered/Polite
Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/
256048757_Higher_Education_and_ Employability-A_Review
Of course, 12 years ago, these skills were considered important for potential employees to have and apply them at work. And what do today's NACE research results show? We continue the analysis, we will consider changes in the requested skills by employers by year and by attributes. According to a new survey report from NACE, university students who are conducting their job search and want to
impress employers with their resumes should emphasize their abilities to solve
problems, work as part of a team and communication skills (written) (Table 3.).
Table 3. Attributes employers seek on a candidate's resume (in 2016 and 2018)_
2018 2016
% OF % OF
ATTRIBUTE RESPO NDEN TS ATTRIBUTE RESPO NDEN TS
Problem-solving skills 82.9% Leadership 80.1%
Ability to work in a team 82.9% Ability to work in a team 78.9%
Communication skills (written) 80.3% Communication skills (written) 70.2%
Leadership 72.6% Problem-solving skills 70.2%
Strong work ethic 68.4% Communication skills (verbal) 68.9%
Analytical/quantitative skills 67.5% Strong work ethic 68.9%
Communication skills (verbal) 67.5% Initiative 65.8%
Initiative 67.5% Analytical/quantitative skills 62.7%
Detail-oriented 64.1% Flexibility/adaptability 60.9%
Flexibility/adaptability 60.7% Technical skills 59.6%
Technical skills 59.8% Interpersonal skills (relates well to others) 58.4%
Interpersonal skills (relates well to others) 54.7% Computer skills 55.3%
Computer skills 48.7% Detail-oriented 52.8%
Organizational ability 48.7% Organizational ability 48.4%
Strategic planning skills 39.3% Friendly/outgoing personality 35.4%
Creativity 29.1% Strategic planning skills 26.7%
Friendly/outgoing personality 27.4% Creativity 23.6%
Tactfulness 22.2% Tactfulness 20.5%
Entrepreneurial skills/risk-taker 19.7% Entrepreneurial skills/risk-taker 18.6%
Fluency in a foreign language 4.3% Fluency in a foreign language N/A
Source: A survey report from NACE. https://www.naceweb.org/about-us/press/2017/the-key-attributes-employers-seek-on-students-resumes/ Table 4. Influence of Attributes
ATTRIBUTE 2018 AVERAGE INFLUENCE RATING* 2017 AVERAGE INFLUENCE RATING* 2016 AVERAGE INFLUENCE RATING* 2015 AVERAGE INFLUENCE RATING*
Has completed an internship with your organization 4.6 N/A N/A N/A
Has internship experience in your industry 4.4 N/A N/A N/A
Major 3.8 4.0 4.0 3.9
Has held a leadership position 3.7 3.9 3.9 3.9
Has general work experience 3.7 N/A N/A N/A
Has no work experience 3.4 N/A N/A N/A
High GPA (3.0 or above) 3.4 3.6 3.5 3.6
Has been involved in extracurricular activities (clubs, sports, student 3.3 3.6 3.6 3.6
government, etc.)
School attended 2.8 2.9 2.9 2.8
Has done volunteer work 2.7 2.6 2.8 2.8
Is fluent in a foreign language 2.2 2.1 2.2 2.4
Has studied abroad 2.2 2.0 2.0 2.1
Source: A survey report from NACE (2018), *5-point scale where 1=No influence at all; 2=Not much influence; 3=Somewhat of an influence; 4=Very much influence; 5=Extreme influence.
https://www.naceweb.org/career-development/trends-and-predictions/job-outlook-2016-attributes-employers-want-to-see-on-new-college-graduates-resumes/
Data for the survey were collected from NACE's employer members. A total of 201 NACE employer members participated in the survey—a 20.5 percent response rate.
According to the result of the survey, if in 2016 employers were looking for more required skills, such as Leadership and Ability to work in a team, in 2018 they were most interested in problem-solving skills and Ability to work in a team. This is the second consecutive year that the largest percentage of employers will search for these attributes on students' resumes.
Following problem-solving skills and teamwork abilities, written communication skills, leadership, and a strong work ethic are also highly valued attributes that employers want to see evidence of on resumes.
Besides employers also provided insight into the influence of attributes when deciding between two otherwise equally qualified candidates. In 2018, NACE added four attributes—all related to work experience—to the original list that had been used in the past. During the past surveys, it turned out that the student's major to be the deciding factor between two otherwise equally qualified candidates, the most influential factors are whether the candidate completed an internship with the hiring organization and whether the candidate has internship experience within the hiring organization 's industry (Table 4.).
Additionally, general work experience and no work experience are found to be more of a deciding factor than a candidate's high GPA (3.0 or above), involvement in extracurricular activities, school attended, and volunteer work. The only other attribute that held its ground with the addition of the new attributes is leadership. It continues to follow immediately after the student's major in terms of influence.
Conclusion. The aforementioned analyzed kinds of literature enable us to more clearly understand the concept of employment and classify the employability skills. And also about the role of the university in improving the employability skills
and employment of new graduates in the modern labor market.
Taking into account the wide range of employment approaches, we tried to group these discussions highlighting some key features: Firstly, employers are at the center of discussions about the employability of graduates. Secondly, graduate employability is commonly defined as the ability to access a job, maintain it, or find another one.
In general, even though graduate employability issues are considered to be of great importance, little consensus has been reached in the research on employability skills, and, in fact, uncertainty has increased rather than decreased. While this is due in part to it results from a lack of understanding of the employers' role in the skill acquisition process.
Socio-economic development of society and growing competition among enterprises and organizations require changes in the appearance of modern staff, which results in continuous improvement the ability of graduates to enter the labor market. Graduates must constantly develop and hone their employability skills in accordance with the needs and at the discretion of the employer.
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