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There is increasing pressure from governments, funding organizations, students and parents on universities around the world since graduate employability has been clearly recognized as one of the main objectives of university education. Accreditation bodies also appear to measure quality of education through the contributions made towards employability. In such a context one would assume that employability of university graduates to be clearly understood and extensively researched area. However, the real situation appears to be one which requires the urgent attention of all stakeholders of university education. A review of literature on graduate employability is a clear need today and current paper achieves this by summarizing the major articles on university graduate employability theoretical frameworks and empirical studies. Despite the large number of studies, graduate employability appears to be suffering from the problems of lack of theoretical control and politicization which appear to have become major obstacles for future developments of the concept.

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This paper operationalises the OECD Guidelines for Measuring the Quality of the Working Environment (OECD, 2017) to describe job characteristics among European countries, the United States and Korea in 2010 and 2015. The analysis extends the range of aspects of quality of the working environment beyond those featuring in the Job Strain index presented by (Cazes, 2015), which is used to monitor implementation of the OECD Job Strategy, but at the cost of a more limited country coverage. While the two indices of job strain are largely consistent both across countries and over time, all of the job characteristics included in the 'extended' index turns out to matter for workers' well-being. The framework uses the job demands-resources model (Demerouti, 2001) that stresses the importance of balancing the demands of the job and the resources that are available to workers to meet those demands. Workers are classified as (heavily) strained when the number of job demands they face (largely) exceeds the number of job resources they benefit from, and conversely, they are classified as (very) well-resourced when their job resources (largely) exceed their job demands.

On average among 28 OECD countries, about one third of employees are (moderately or heavily) strained at work, while one half are well-resourced. The share of employees that are heavily strained is close to 10 per cent. Job strain is relatively more frequent among employees with low education and low occupational skills, and it is relatively less frequent in the service sector and in the public sector. Due to composition effects, women hold on average slightly less strained jobs than men. The share of strained workers has slightly declined on average over the 2010-2015 period, falling in a majority of countries. The improvement in working conditions is related to better prospects of career advancement, higher take-up of training, stronger social support and organisational participation at work, higher flexibility of working time, as well as lower exposure to physical risk factors, hard physical demands and unsocial work schedule. On the other hand, perceptions of job insecurity, intimidation and discrimination, as well as work intensity have been on the rise. Finally, quality of the working environment is strongly associated with workers' well-being as measured by mental and physical health, days of sickness, job satisfaction as well as job motivation, and the associated effects are potentially large. For most outcomes, perceived intimidation and discrimination at work is one of the most powerful predictor of workers' well-being.

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A two volume report of the evidence on the demand for, and supply of, skills in England has been produced by Warwick University's Institute for Employment Research (IER) on behalf of the Learning and Skills Council (LSC), in association with the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), the Sector Skills Development Agency (SSDA) and the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs). Volume one provides a national overview of the key issues and challenges facing those charged with delivering skills. Volume two provides a detailed review of the evidence on changing skill requirements at sectoral and local levels. This volume contains the following chapters: Introduction - measurement and value of skills; International evidence on skills; The demand for skills; The supply of skills; Skills deficiencies and imbalances; Future skill needs; Key challenges; Annex A - classification of skill. Includes glossary and references.

Volume two is indexed at TD/TNC 73.591. 'Key messages from Skills in England 2002' is indexed at TD/TNC 73.368. Show less

Skills lie at the core of well-functioning economies and inclusive societies. Skills systems support and shape transitions and play a crucial role in delivering skills, in using talent and in matching skills to jobs. With a view to promoting evidence-based skills policy in the EU, this policy brief uses Cedefop's 2022 European skills index to take stock of trends, to identify improvement potential and to locate best practices.

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Purpose: The primary purpose of this study is to examine the effect of organizational culture (OC), that is, group, developmental, hierarchical and rational culture on organizational learning (OL) of employees in electricity distribution companies of Isfahan province. Further, the role of the high-performance work system (HPWS) as a mediator between OC and OL has also been explored. Design/methodology/approach: Questionnaire survey method has been used for data collection, and data analysis was completed through a two-stage partial least squares structural equation modeling technique. At the first stage, the measurement model was examined for construct validity and reliability, whereas at the second stage, the structural model and by implication the research hypotheses were tested. Findings: Results indicate that OC positively affects OL. Further, HPWS act as a mediating variable between OC and OL. Originality/value: The findings contribute to the existing literature by demonstrating the mediating role of HPWS in the relationship between OC and learning.

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We propose a framework for measuring social exclusion in Australia and discuss a number of issues that need to be resolved in order to arrive at valid and useful indicators or measures. To do this we first provide a general overview of international developments in the measurement of poverty and social disadvantage, examine the meaning of the concept of social exclusion and summarise the various approaches taken by international and Australian studies to measuring social exclusion and identifying the socially excluded. We then outline our proposed framework for the measurement of social exclusion in Australia, identifying and discussing some of the issues that arise in moving from this framework to actual measures, including discussing the limitations imposed by the data currently available in Australia.

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As the economies of Southeast Asia continue adopting digital technologies, policy makers increasingly ask how to prepare the workforce for emerging labor demands. However, little is known about the skills that workers need to adapt to these changes. Skills profiles in low- and middle-income countries are typically derived from data collected in the United States, which is known to inaccurately reflect their occupational skills. This paper uses online job postings data from Malaysia to identify the digital, cognitive, and socioemotional skills required for digital and non-digital occupations. The skills profiles for each occupation are then merged with labor force survey data from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam to sketch skills profiles of the workforces in these countries. Using descriptive statistics and linear probability model regressions, the paper finds evidence that highly digital occupations require not only digital skills, but also cognitive and socioemotional skills. Similarly, virtually all occupations, regardless of the digital intensity of the job, require some basic or intermediate digital skills. Pairwise correlations and a factor analysis confirm the complementarity between digital skills and different subsets of cognitive and socioemotional skills. The data also confirm that, even with the excitement about the digital revolution, the bulk of employment in Southeast Asia is in low- (around two-thirds) or medium-digital (around one-third) occupations. Only between 1 and 5 per cent of jobs are highly digital in the four countries studied. These findings suggest that as education and training systems adapt to teach basic digital skills, they will need to continue to foster cognitive and socioemotional skills.

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The structure of education systems varies widely between countries. In order to produce internationally comparable education statistics and indicators, it is therefore necessary to have a framework to collect and report data on education programmes with a similar level of educational content. UNESCO's International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) is the reference classification for organising education programmes and related qualifications by education levels and fields. The basic concepts and definitions of ISCED are intended to be internationally valid and comprehensive of the full range of education systems. ISCED 2011 is the second major revision of this classification (initially developed in the 1970s and first revised in 1997). It was adopted by the UNESCO General Conference in November 2011.

Prepared jointly by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), the OECD and Eurostat, this operational manual provides guidelines and explanatory notes for the interpretation of the revised classification, by each education level. It also includes country examples of programmes and qualifications that have been classified to ISCED 2011. This manual will be useful for national statisticians collecting and reporting data on education to international organisations, as well as for policymakers and researchers interested in better understanding of these data. The contents are as follow: ISCED 2011 overview; ISCED 2011 Level 0: early childhood education; ISCED 2011 Level 1: primary education; ISCED 2011 Level 2: lower secondary education; ISCED 2011 Level 3: upper secondary education; ISCED 2011 Level 4: post-secondary non-tertiary education; Overview of ISCED 2011 tertiary education levels; ISCED 2011 Level 5: short-cycle tertiary education; ISCED 2011 Level 6: Bachelor's or equivalent level; ISCED 2011 Level 7: Master's or equivalent level; ISCED 2011 Level 8: Doctoral or equivalent level.

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Competence is a widely used concept to describe capabilities - mostly of employees - to perform in a certain way in organisations. Although a long and ongoing debate about measuring and developing competence exists, the concept itself is only partly founded on theory. It sometimes seems that 'competence' is used as a material construct, which refers to real objects like arms or heads. Rather, it is a social construct, only viable if it grounds on a common understanding of what it should stand for. And this common understanding seems to be still missing, after a debate that lasted at least since the 1980s. What could be helpful is a theoretical framework that goes beyond what is already discussed by Chomsky, White and others.

This chapter formulates such a framework. Therefore, it starts with a short overview of the theory discussion on competence in the past and discusses the relationship between competence and qualification. Next it explains why the close relationship between competence and performance is one of the problems, not only to measure competence but, moreover, to get to a decent understanding of competence itself. That will lead to thoughts about how to get to a theoretically founded explanation of the construct of competence. The most used way is to define a desired performance and afterwards derive a relating competence. The chapter will show why this is problematic and offers an alternative for explaining competence which is founded on action theories by analysing the relationship between action, performance, situation and competence.

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[The authors] examine the careers of a nationally representative US cohort of young adults using sequence analysis and information-theoretic techniques to describe these careers' structure and how this structure might inform differences in wage mobility. [The authors] operationalise the career as a sequence of industry-occupation pairs observed quarterly. [They] investigate how the content of these pairs and their organisation over time relate to future mobility. [The authors] perform the analysis across three different mobility groups, one of which is characterised by persistent low-wage work. Contrary to what one might expect, low-wage work is not typified by a lack of structure, even in many of the careers in which the worker is weakly attached to the labour market. Using clustering techniques customised to this problem, [the authors] build a typology of careers within three groups of workers defined by their wage mobility. [They] find significant variation within, as well as similarity across the three groups, enhancing understanding of careers with different levels of mobility.

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