Perceived employability and ability self among Finnish university students
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Perceived employability and ability self among Finnish university students Hannu Räty 1 & Ulla Hytti 2 & Kati Kasanen 1 & Katri Komulainen 1 & Päivi Siivonen 1 & Inna Kozlinska 3,4 Received: 22 September 2018 / Revised: 25 August 2019 / Accepted: 30 October 2019 # The Author(s) 2019
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 selfrepresentational and live-historical positions are part of the construction of students’ optimism regarding their employability. Keywords Perceptions of employability . University students . Perceptions of abilities . Ability self
Introduction 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 (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-01900451-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* Hannu Räty [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
H. Räty et al.
Nedeva 2010; Verhaest, Sellami and van der Velden 2017). However, 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. Therefore, our aim was to add new insight to the discussion of academic employability in terms of students’ perceptions of their abilities in particular; moreover, we wanted to develop a novel way to do the micro level analysis, i.e. to empirically scrutinise students’ “ability self”.
Employability and perceived abilities 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). The u
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