A winding road – professional trajectories from higher education to working life: a case study of political science and psychology graduates

Abstract

This qualitative and longitudinal study focuses on graduate employment and the development of graduate employment paths. The aim of this article is to explore the present professional trajectory from higher education to working life, with particular reference to graduates from two different study programmes at Linkö ping University in Sweden: Political Science and Psychology. More specifically, the article focuses on how graduates construe their professional trajectories in terms of their envisaged future work as senior students, and later as novice and early-career professionals with 18 and 34 months of work life experience. The results indicate that graduates' professional identities and vision of their future work change over time. The set of categories, depicting the graduates' vision and experiences of their professional trajectories, do not seem to follow a specific temporal and logical progression in their career. Rather, they appear in different order and at different points in time after graduation. The results, instead, endorse the discourse of lifelong learning and the need for flexibility and employability on the labour market.

Deltakerbaner i psykologutdanningen – en femårs oppfølging av psykologistudenter

“…Disse studiene har hovedsakelig undersøkt praksisdelene i utdanningene. Innen psykologutdanninger er teorien lite brukt, med unntak av en studie der man analyserte overgangen fra høyere utdanning og inn i den første tiden i arbeidslivet for flere profesjoner, blant annet psykologer (Nyström, Abrandt Dahlgren & Dahlgren, 2008). En av konklusjonene fra denne studien er at psykologutdanningen forbereder studentene godt på den første delen av yrkesutøvelsen og at nyutdannede psykologer opplever overgangen som lite problematisk.…”

Information Management graduates' accounts of their employability: A case study from the University of Sheffield

“…This approach would see the transition from university to work as one step in a complex, on going process and as a trajectory between two communities of practice. Moving into work is a transition from fitting into ways of being a student appropriately, itself negotiated in relation to the values and assumptions of the discipline/institution, towards an appropriate identity in a workplace, negotiated in relation to local values and expectations [7,11,16,24,25]. The degree of alignment between these two identities shapes whether it is a smooth or rather discontinuous experience of change on entering employment [11].…”

Adult learning, education, and the labour market in the employability regime

“…These graduates are relatively homogenous after graduation with regard to both vertical and horizontal dispersion in the labour market, and they encounter similar demands in their work. More direct vocational preparation and specialisation can occur in these educational programmes (Nilsson, 2010b;Nyström et al, 2008;Nyström, 2009;Statistics Sweden, 2010). However, some broader challenges are common for different education programmes.…”

“…Thus, because career changes are becoming more common, career paths have increasingly begun to resemble a series of individual projects. In some parts of the labour market-in Sweden, for example-there has been a shift from workers with lifetime employment to workers with a wide variety of jobs throughout their working life (Defillippi & Arthur, 1994;Nyström, Dahlgren & Dahlgren, 2008). This development has led to new conditions and labour market demands.…”

“…Rather, labour market demands are associated with a broader range of general competence and personal characteristics (Tomlinson, 2008). Employees are expected to be flexible, capable of orienting themselves quickly within new contexts, and able to continually learn and develop throughout their professional careers (Nyström et al, 2008). Workers must be able to establish an overview of the broader set of tasks within an organisation, work in multidisciplinary contexts, and possess the ability to collaborate and communicate with others.…”