Health, wealth and happiness?: employers, employability and the knowledge economy

The key requirement of this literature review was to focus on employer definitions of what constitutes employability, how they perceive current skill requirements and shortages, and what they consider constitutes adequate policy responses. The approach taken in this review has been to avoid the fraught exercise of attempting to pin down employability, instead seeking to build up a composite picture of the contemporary concern with employability by identifying key ideas and contextual factors associated with the rise of the term as a major labour market policy concept. It has also been important, because of the ambiguities and inconsistencies in policy concerned with employability, to take a somewhat critical stance towards the literature and attempt to unpack a number of apparent tensions in the rhetoric surrounding this term.

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