What is employability and what does it mean for you?

What is employability and what does it mean for you?
Lisa Taylor
School of Health Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

Introduction
Employability may be something that you have never really considered in detail before. Perhaps you have been focusing on completing your studies without really thinking about what will happen when you have finished? Will you continue studying as a postgraduate, go travelling or try to find a job in your chosen profession? Your consideration of your own employability should start as soon as possible and is a lifelong journey of learning and reflection about yourself and what you can offer the world of work. What can the world of work offer you? In a changing health and social care environment the opportunities within your profession are changing too – What do you need to do to respond to that in a proactive manner?
This chapter provides you with some of the history and theory behind employability and encourages you to consider where you are in your employability journey. There are suggestions on what you can do to help develop your own employability. The remainder of the book builds upon the concept of employability presented in this chapter, focusing on key areas of personal and professional development that are particularly relevant for healthcare employability. Throughout this chapter you are encouraged to reflect and consider how the information presented affects you own perceptions of employability and your own employability journey.


What does the literature say on employability and how it has evolved?
Employability is complex and it is clear from the available literature that being able to develop a precise and clear focus on it as a concept is difficult (Harvey, 2001; Hillage and Pollard, 1998). Employability and career development are very often conflated as concepts but are addressed individually in this book. The debate on employability has been longstanding, reaching far beyond the United Kingdom (Harvey and Knight, 2003). Although the meaning of employability has changed over time (Moreau and Leathwood, 2006), the importance of employability within the strategic direction of the Department of Education has been highlighted (Hillage and Pollard, 1998). Some authors state that employability has historically been viewed from a number of perspectives – economic social, organisational and individual – with the individual perspective emerging more in the 1990s (Nauta et al., 2009).
Rosenburg, Heimler and Morote (2012) discuss employability as the basic skills needed for job performance and once an individual is in employment, employability develops into transferable core proficiencies. They are, therefore, suggesting that employability is a continuing process of personal and professional development. Yorke (2006) states that employability as a concept was developed within education and focuses on the possession of relevant achievements and the ability to function in a job, not actually the process of acquiring a job. Dacre Pool and Sewell (2007) support this assertion, suggesting that employability is more than just getting a job. Employability is rarely defined as an individual being equipped to do a job (Harvey, 2001). Some approaches appear to confuse employability and employment (McQuaid and Lindsay, 2005). Harvey and Knight (2003) present different perspectives on employability – from developing attributes for graduate employment to the ability of a graduate to get a job and to succeed in a job. Therefore, there are a wide range of perspectives on employability, most of which reinforce the notion that employability is more than just a set of skills and is a continuing process.