An Empirical Study on the Improvement of College Students’ Employability Based on University Factors

Abstract

With the popularization of higher education and the promotion of college enrollment expansion, the number of college graduates increases sharply. At the same time, the continuous transformation and upgrading of the industrial structure put forward higher requirements on the employability of college students, which leads to the imbalance between supply and demand in the labor market. The key to dealing with employment difficulties lie in the improvement of college students’ employability. Therefore, we make a regression analysis of 263 valid samples from universities in Anhui Province and extract the factors that influence the improvement of college students’ employability in the process of talent cultivation in university. The result shows that there is a positive correlation between course setting, course teaching, club activities, and college students’ employability, among which the course teaching and club activities are the most critical factors which may influence college students’ employability. In addition, from the viewpoint of individual college students, the overall grades of college students and the time of participating in the internship are also closely related to their employability, i.e., college students with good overall grades and long internship time should also have stronger employability.

The impacts of innovation capability and social adaptability on undergraduates’ employability: The role of self-efficacy

“…Previous studies on the employability of college students adopted similar data collection strategies. For example, Zhang et al (2022) examined how university factors increase undergraduates’ employability and they did not survey the ages of the participants.…”

“…With their help, the questionnaire was distributed to the final-year undergraduates in the corresponding universities. Next, the students voluntarily finished the questionnaire on the online platform “Wenjuanxin” (known as China’s Qualtrics; Zhang et al, 2022 ) during the time span from 7 November 2021 to 25 January 2022. All participants were fully informed of the scope and objectives of the survey and the confidentiality and anonymity of their responses before filling out the measurement instrument to ensure the ethical consideration of the research.…”

“…Employability is a multi-dimensional and multi-level construct ( Bennett and Ananthram, 2022 ; Hu et al, 2022 ; Zhang et al, 2022 ). However, some definitions have been widely accepted, retested, and updated by researchers in the past two decades.…”

“…Employability refers to the combination of personal characteristics such as ability, personality, desire, and social resources to secure employment, including the knowledge and skills possessed by individuals in the process of developing their careers, as well as a series of comprehensive adaptations to the work contexts ( Schreuder and Coetzee, 2006 ; Yorke, 2006 ; Zhang et al, 2022 ). It is the embodiment of comprehensive competencies to drive career development based on learning ability.…”

“…In summary, most of the previous academic efforts have been made in detecting the components of undergraduates’ employability ( McQuaid and Lindsay, 2005 ; Fugate and Kinicki, 2008 ; Clarke, 2018 ; Zhang et al, 2022 ) and exploring the influencing factors such as career adaptability ( Udayar et al, 2018 ; Atitsogbe et al, 2019 ), self-efficacy ( Berntson et al, 2008 ; Dacre Pool and Qualter, 2013 ), soft skills ( Finch et al, 2013 ), emotional intelligence ( Potgieter and Coetzee, 2013 ), career satisfaction ( Nauta et al, 2009 ; Dacre Pool and Qualter, 2013 ), academic performance ( Pinto and Ramalheira, 2017 ), and work-integrated learning ( Jackson, 2015 ), but little research has been done pertaining to how and to which extent the innovation capability and social adaptability of undergraduates affect their employability. In the meanwhile, no previous research has simultaneously taken innovation capability, social adaptability, self-efficacy, and undergraduates’ employability into consideration.…”