EMPLOYABILITY DEVELOPMENT

Employability Development

Employability Development

Introduction

Historically, the majority of employability research and practice pertained to vocational rehabilitation or to the attractiveness and selection of job candidates. Employable individuals are able to demonstrate a fundamental level of functioning or skill to perform a given job, or an employable individual's skills and experience fit some predetermined set of job requirements. Conceptually, both streams emphasize the degree of person-job fit in terms of the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) required performing effectively on a job. Employability literature utilizing this fit perspective suggests that necessary KSAs are known and stable, which is incongruent with the highly uncertain employment environment and current employee-employer relationships.

As demands confronting employers rapidly change, their strategies morph, which necessitates that employees continually update their KSAs to execute these strategies. Thus, framing employability in terms of rigid KSAs is a liability to both employers and employees, in that it suggests that employees are valuable only to the extent that their current skill sets match their employers' current strategic objectives. Instead, the new employer-employee relationship requires organizations and the employees that populate them to be flexible and adapt strategies, services, products, knowledge, skills, abilities, and behaviours as needed to realize organizational and individual goals. In short, both employers and employees must adapt in order to compete successfully and avoid obsolescence. Therefore, rather than maintaining a traditional KSA perspective, it now seems reasonable and appropriate to frame (and measure) employability in terms of individual characteristics that foster active adaptability at work.

Mel Fugate, Angelo Kinicki, and Blake Ashforth's conceptualization of dispositional employability follows this lead and provides an interesting alternative to more traditional employability research and practice. They have defined employability as a multidimensional constellation of individual characteristics that predispose employees to proactively adapt to their work and career environments. Employability facilitates the identification and realization of job and career opportunities both within and between organizations. Conceived this way, employability is a disposition that captures individual characteristics that foster adaptive behaviours and positive employment outcomes, and it more accurately describes the action-oriented, proactive, and adaptive qualities that employers now widely espouse and seek. This perspective is also consistent with more current research that views employees as proactive rather than reactive agents. More employees now initiate change and create opportunities, rather than reacting to change after the fact or waiting for opportunities to present themselves (Chan, 2000, 42). Moreover, conceptualizing employability as a disposition seems appropriate, given the high level of uncertainty inherent in today's career landscape. According to social psychology, highly uncertain situations can be characterized as “weak situations,” and thus one can expect individual characteristics to be primary determinants of behaviour.

A dispositional perspective of employability also has the added benefit of being explicitly anchored in the work context, which overcomes a prevalent operational (measurement) shortcoming of previous research related to adaptability at work. Recent reviews of literature related to adaptability at work have revealed that researchers typically used broad dispositional measures as indicators of adaptability. For instance, research has shown that various measures of ...