Striving for sustainable graduate careers

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to conceptually articulate the differing needs of graduates and graduate employers, which can be competing or complementary in nature. Drawing from theoretical frameworks of career ecosystems and the new psychological contract, a set of propositions are presented using three themes: career management, development of talent and technological change. Design/methodology/approach A conceptual design offering a conceptual model through adopting the career ecosystem and new psychological contract as a framework. Findings These propositions offer a new conceptual model, which provides a practical contribution by articulating sustainability of graduates’ careers through employability at the graduate level and competitive advantage at the employer level. Originality/value The paper offers important contributions to theory by connecting career management and vocational career literature through acknowledging shared constructs of life-long learning and sustainable employability for graduates. These two streams are often developed in parallel, thus this paper helps to bridge the gaps in respective research agendas. This paper therefore has the originality of helping to advance the fields of career theory and sustainable human resource management.

Enhancing self-perceived employability via a curriculum intervention: a case of “The global marketing professional” module

“…The vocational behaviour and the higher education literature addressing sustainable graduate careers remains in a relatively embryonic and conceptual state, particularly in the context of curriculum interventions for master's and international students (e.g. De Vos et al, 2020;Donald et al, 2020;Lent and Brown, 2020;Van der Heijden and De Vos, 2015). The Global Marketing Professional module offered an opportunity to empirically explore a gap in the literature at the intersection of internationalisation, employability and the international student experience (Fakunle, 2021).…”

“…One approach is to create a theoretical framework of human capital theory and sustainable career theory (Van der Heijden and De Vos, 2015), capturing the three dimensions of person, context and time (De Vos et al, 2020). Sustainable career theory highlights the need for career ownership and the development of human capital through early intervention during education and continued support across the lifespan (Donald et al, 2020). Our paper advances human capital and sustainable career theory by focussing on the impact on selfperceived employability of participation in a mandatory module titled "The Global Marketing Professional".…”

“…R€ omgens et al (2020) posit that human capital encompasses job-specific and generalist dimensions to facilitate an individual to thrive within evolving labour markets. Additionally, Donald et al (2020) suggest that the acquisition of human capital coupled with a focus on career ownership and a commitment to lifelong learning can facilitate career sustainability across the lifespan. Thus we focus on facilitating career agency as a way to enhance one's selfperceived employability to enable the individual to make informed career decisions (Coetzee and Engelbrecht, 2020) and propose the following:…”

“…Yet, proactive career ownership relies on the individual to have confidence in their career agency to foster career sustainability (Donald et al, 2020). The university curriculum has the potential to address pre-existing barriers such as lower levels of human capital and career ownership in women (Donald et al, 2019) and differing levels of social and cultural capital (Kalfa and Taksa, 2015).…”

The influence of achievement motivation on college students’ employability: A chain mediation analysis of self-efficacy and academic performance

“…Employability of college students has become a hot research field in academia in the past few years in various disciplines such as human resource management ( Donald et al, 2019 ; Nimmi and Donald, 2022 ), educational management ( Peng et al, 2021 ), psychology ( Wang et al, 2021 ), sociology ( Ingram and Allen, 2019 ), etc. Higher education institutions are striving to integrate employability developing programs into their educational system to ensure that the college students can be equipped with necessary knowledge, skills, attributes, and behaviors for a successful transition from campus to workplace ( Yawson and Yamoah, 2020 ).…”