A longitudinal study of determinants of perceived employability

Abstract

Employability is highly important to individuals in coping with job insecurity. Although many employability models have been developed, few studies have tested determinants of employability empirically. This longitudinal study aims to analyze core determinants of perceived employability. These were tested using a sample of 465 employees (time 1) taken from four companies in Switzerland and surveyed at three points in time. In order to include data from all participants, we used multilevel analysis (level 1: time, level 2: person). Results showed that education, support for career and skill development, current level of job‐related skills, and willingness to change jobs were significant predictors of perceived employability. Contrary to our hypotheses, willingness to develop new competencies, opportunity awareness, and self‐presentation skill failed to predict perceived employability. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Searching for a Job on the Contemporary Labour Market: The Role of Dispositional Employability

“…For example, Kirves, Kinnunen, & De Cuyper (2014) confirmed the positive relationship between optimism and perceived employability among temporary and permanent employees. Wittekind, Raeder and Grote (2010) demonstrated that a willingness to change jobs significantly predicted perception of one's employment possibilities. Maslić Seršić and Tomas (2015) found that dispositional employability related positively to perceived employability above and beyond the conceptually similar construct of core self-evaluations.…”

Deliberately Casual? Workers' Agency, Health, and Nonstandard Employment Relations in Australia

“…(25) However, the inequities of nonstandard employment are often exacerbated because those workers tend to have lower education, be in low skill occupations and lack the previously mentioned resources. (26)(27)(28) Consequently, some researchers have advocated for a greater recognition of the political, social and labour market contexts determining relationships between employment and health. (11,29,30) …”

Students’ perceptions of competencies by the end of a masters’ degree

“…According to this view, we can antecipate that the development of competencies will be related to their subjective employability (Tomlinson, 2007) or perceived employability (Rothwell, Herbert, & Rothwell, 2008;Wittekind, Raeder, & Grote, 2010), designations that integrate the idea of "self-belief" about chances of success in finding a job. Indeed, employability has been defined as a complex and multifaceted concept (Forrier & Sels, 2003;Fugate, Kinicki, & Ashforth, 2004;Rothwell et al, 2008), which includes internal factors, such as vocational or job-related knowledge and skills, and mastery of job search (Hillage & Pollard, 1998) along with the potential to learn (Lane, Puri, Cleverly, Wylie, & Rajan, 2000), and also, external factors, such as the prevailing state of the labor market (Kirschenbaum & Mano-Negrin, 1999;Lane et al, 2000).…”

“…For these reasons, the perceptions about the competencies developed during a degree can play an essential role in understanding future employability. Focusing specifically on employability, the concept still remains underresearched, particularly in the sense of what it actually means to individuals in the context of their experiences, their aspirations, and their perceptions concerning the ability they have to compete in the external labor market, which, in turn, may be the determinants of perceived employability (Rothwell et al, 2008;Wittekind et al, 2010). Rothwell et al(2008) developed a self-perceived employability matrix to construct and validate a scale for university students composed by four major components: my university, my field study, the state of the external labour market, and self belief.…”

“…However, the internal aspect, related to skills and self-confidence (close to beliefs of personal efficacy), was worthy of further investigation. In turn, although the model proposed by Wittekind et al (2010) regarding the determinants of employability represents an important advance for the understanding of the subject, it was developed with employees, and, to our knowledge, there is no data with college samples.…”