By M. Baslé, J.-M. Dubois. Training and Employment, n° 105, 2013, 4p.
Long sheltered from unemployment, science students today have to give some thought to preparing for their entry into working life. The French Science Insert project, selected from among the projects funded by the Fonds d’expérimentation pour la jeunesse/Fund for Experimental Youth Projects, is equipping them with the tools they require for this purpose. The method adopted to evaluate the project, the so-called double difference method, can be used to show that the awareness-raising measures developed in the course of the project are appropriate.
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By Tom Klassen. The transition from school to work can be less stressful with more realistic expectations and more preparation.Spring and summer bring equal measures of jubilation and despair to hundreds of thousands of university graduates across Canada. The joy comes from completing a post-secondary degree after years of study; the misery from discovering that there are no jobs. Taxpayers blame politicians for wasting money on funding universities; politicians pressure universities to better prepare graduates for the labour market. Universities reply that their role is not to produce job-ready workers for employers, but rather to educate. Read more...

David Willetts's suggestion (People over 60 should go back to higher education, 21 February) identifies only one function of education: preparing people for entering or remaining in employment. The weaknesses of his proposal are exposed by Michele Hanson (New tricks, 23 February). But his reductionist proposal also ignores that at its best education is concerned with promoting an open and critical mind, contributing to personal, intellectual and cultural development and to the potential role we can play as citizens. For many years, open-entry education for people of all ages and backgrounds was an important provision of universities, made under various guises, namely extramural education, adult education, continuing education and lifelong learning. Courses attended by students of mixed social and formal educational backgrounds addressed two kinds of educational disadvantage: vertical disadvantage, which faces those who have not had the benefits of higher education; and horizontal disadvantage, where graduates lack knowledge of a particular field because of earlier specialisation. Read more...

Universities, government, media – we're all in thrall to the employability agenda, says Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, but do we need wider public debate about its origins and meaning?
Academic research, even the sort that looks at issues closest to 'real life', often remains distanced from public debate. Academic voices, in particular those stimulating critical reimagination, are hardly heard. But we need to encourage the media, and ultimately the public, to look more critically at employability – a theme that is discussed from a variety of angles, but is put under little critical scrutiny today.
The concept of employability – or at least the one most familiar to us – appeared in the 1980s. It was introduced by corporations, marketed as a response to the need to be flexible in the face of global competition, adapting to the unstable economic environment. Companies, it has been claimed, could no longer offer job security to employees and introduced 'employability' instead, as the new psychological contract. As such, it forms part of 'the new spirit of capitalism' (outlined by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in 2005), substituting a lifelong career in one organisation by a career of numerous temporary projects which promise to make individuals employable to take up further short-term projects.
Employability was met with suspicion even within mainstream business schools, and was considered a concept that employees, even HR managers, would not buy into. Clearly it was not an equal substitute for job security. Yet, it gained the upper hand. Employability was taken up by governments who joined hands with the business world, and, not being able to influence labour demand, they built the whole government policy around labour supply – or employability. Read more...

By Dr Brendan Barker. With the rapid globalisation of business and the advent of increasingly borderless careers, the graduates who will be most employable are those who demonstrate an understanding of the wider world around them and an ability to operate across cultures. Spending a period of time working in another country permits students to develop global employability skills and attributes which they will come to rely on in their future work.
The University of Dundee is embarking on a programme which will provide students with a valuable insight into the different working culture of one the world’s fastest emerging economies – India. This new programme will simultaneously provide students with a postgraduate qualification. This new initiative has evolved from the University’s current Scottish Internship Graduate Certificate (SIGC) which offers students the opportunity to gain work experience while enhancing their employability skills. SIGC is an eight-month course and central to the course is a six-month quality internship with a Scottish employer. Read more...

By Paul Hacking. A major impact of the economic slowdown has been the decreasing numbers of graduates working with large-sized employers. In the UK, for example, less than 10% of graduates in their first job are on a graduate scheme with a major employer. In addition to this, jobless rates among those with higher education qualifications for the period 2008–2010 have increased in every EU country except Germany. So how can universities respond to a changing graduate labour market to improve the employability of graduates?
The evidence that internships improve the employability of graduates is overwhelming. Internships are believed to improve the student’s self-confidence and help to develop a broader range of life-skills such as self-awareness, decision making and networking. So should higher education institutions do more to expand and develop internship opportunities? Traditionally, an internship has involved a full-time placement with a company for a period of 6 to 12 months or undertaking a 12-week work experience programme in the summer break. However, this is not a realistic goal for most university students given the higher numbers now in higher education. Read more...

By Caroline Scheepmaker. Many graduates are struggling to find work due to increasing competition and fewer openings for new recruits. Concurrently, companies say that they cannot find graduates with the ‘right’ skills. Have universities lost track of the market and are they producing graduates that are not in demand? Just what can be done to bridge this divide?
Higher education is being asked to deliver graduates with the skills to maximise their career potential in an ever changing and globalising work environment, to the advantage of the (corporate) world. But it cannot be a mere case of ‘producing’ what employers ask for. Most employers are unable to articulate what exactly that entails, and the global market is too diverse to know it all anyway. Read more...

Higher education institutions are increasingly being expected to deliver graduates that can immediately step into the workplace and contribute fresh ideas and knowledge that will help to drive countries towards economic prosperity. Graduates are expected to transform themselves from the relative comfort and routine of student life to the diverse challenges of the workplace; preferably, in the first week of the job (assuming they actually find one). Read more...