increasing employability through higher education...fact or fiction
Introduction

Whether you.re a recent graduate or are facing the prospects of looking for a job in the near future, there are many factors to consider before entering the job market. Knowing the kind of job you want, getting yourself prepared for the job market, and presenting yourself as a valuable asset would make it easier to obtain a position that will successfully meet the needs of both you and your employer. With globalization taking place and the employment equity act in force the job market has become rather competitive. Now, a person not only has to compete for a job with the different people from his own community or country but also with the people who emigrate from other countries. So what is it that will distinguish you from all your competitors?
This literature review aims at exploring employability and focusing on the link between education and employability to determine whether employability can be increased through higher education.
Defining employability
A report carried out by Hillage and Pollard (1998) for the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) found that.
. Employability is about having the ability to acquire initial employment, keeping employment and acquire new employment if required.
. For an individual, employability depends upon:
1. Assets in terms of knowledge, skills and attitudes,
2. The way these assets are used and deployed,
3. Presentation of assets to potential employers,
4. The context within which the individual works, e.g. labour market, personal circumstances.
Comprehensively, employability is the capability to move self-sufficiently within the labour market to realise potential through sustainable employment. It is about being capable of getting and keeping fulfilling work. Employability is a difficult concept to define. Fugate (2004) and Little (2001) agree that employability is a multi-dimensional concept and factors relevant to obtaining a job and factors relevant to the preparation for work need to be distinguished between. From an employers. perspective, employability is the capacity of a graduate to display attributes that employers predict will be necessary for the effective functioning of their organisation in the future (Harvey, 1997).
Graduates need to be more pliable to the growing number of career changes

6 experienced through life, because of the increase in short term contracts, part-time work, outsourcing and home-working (Harvey, 2000a). Employment and employability are not the same thing. Being employed means having a job, whereas being employable means having the attributes needed to maintain employment and progress in the workplace. Employability from the view of higher education institutes is therefore about producing graduates who are capable and able, and this impacts upon all areas of university life, in terms of the delivery of academic programmes' and extra curricula activities.
Employability skills
The concern of employers today are finding good workers and training them. According to Robinson (2000): Employability skills are those basic skills necessary for getting, keeping, and doing well on a job. These are the skills, attitudes and actions that enable workers to get along with their fellow workers and supervisors and to make sound, critical decisions. Unlike occupational or technical skills, employability skills are generic in nature rather than job specific and cut across all industry types, business sizes, and job levels from the entry-level worker to the senior-most position. (p.1) Robinson also discusses that in order for one to become a valuable employee an individual needs to think critically, act logically, be able to evaluate situations to make decisions, and to solve problems.
Findings from Dearing (1997) showed key skills to consist of four components:
- Learning how to learn;
- Information technology;
- Numeracy;
- Communication and suggested that it was important that these were developed at undergraduate level.
The Department for Education and Skills (DfES) adds teamwork and problem solving to this list. There are many different lists of key skills, although there is general agreement about the importance of communication, numeracy, teamwork, IT and problem solving (Dunne et al., 2000). These are considered to be generic skills as they represent skills that can be used to support study in any discipline. The possession of some key skills . IT, numeracy, for example, will facilitate the acquisition of subject understanding (Yorke, 2001), as using IT for research will enable students to learn more about their discipline.
.Employability skills. are defined by Coopers and Lybrand (1998) in terms of four

7 key areas:
- Key skills-communication. IT, etc;
- Traditional intellectual skills . e.g. critical evaluation, logical argument;
- Knowledge of organisations and how they work; and
- Personal attributes . motivation, self-reliance
Whereas Robinson (2000) defines .employability skills. into three general categories:
1) Basic academic skills- e.g. reading, writing, math
2) Higher order thinking- e.g. reasoning, thinking creatively and
3) Personal qualities- e.g. self control, team spirit
The critical employability skills vary considerably in the way in which they are organized but most researchers agree on the same skills and traits required by employers. Employability skills are not merely attributes that employers. desire in prospective employees; rather, many employers now require applicants to have these skills in order to be seriously considered for employment. Following their review of over 100 studies undertaken to identify the characteristics and skills desired by contemporary employers, Sherer and Eadie state, "It is very important...that the schools provide the basic employability skills so that all students and adults are equipped to handle the complexities of their jobs throughout their lives" (1987, p. 16).
Measuring employability
An Employability Performance Indicator (EPI) is thought by many to be too crude and that it could be used inappropriately (Harvey, 2000b). An EPI will probably be used as a management tool for the allocation of funding against performance criteria and also to produce information to inform students about potential career routes that might follow a particular university course (Smith et al., 2000). Concern has also been expressed that an EPI backed by the Treasury would be primarily economically-driven, rather than related to the education mission of HEIs and the broader purposes of higher education.
There are two main purposes of EPI:
1) Accountability and improvement, accountability through benchmarking and league tables, accompanying press coverage and through additional student numbers, and
2) Improvement through internal institutional development and continuous quality

8 improvement. Harvey (2000b), states that an EPI must have greater emphasis on improvement than on accountability, but that any EPI must be seen as part of the development of the learning process, not detached from it. Harvey (2001) concludes that any evaluation of employability needs to clearly indicate areas for internal improvement, rather than simply ranking institutions. There is a danger that institutions will focus too much on their place in the league tables as they seek to improve their scores. This may be at the expense of fulfilling the educational aims that students should leave with a rich variety of employment orientated skills, understandings and attributes (Knight & Yorke, 2001).
Educational acquisition and employability
For businesses, the employee's intellectual ability can be treated as an asset. This asset can be used to create products and services which can then be sold. The more highly-educated workers available, the more a firm can theoretically produce. The knowledge and skills of workers available in the labour supply is a key factor in determining both business and economic growth. Economies with a significant supply of skilled labour, brought on through school education as well as training, are often able to capitalize on this through the development of more value-added industries, such as high-tech manufacturing.
According to Lees , ¡°There is a lack of a common language of skills between higher education institutes and employers (Dunne et al., 2000). Part of the problem with the skills agenda and initiatives in HE is the assumption that .skills. has the same meaning in the education context as the employment context (Holmes, 2001). This is not necessarily true. The relationship between the employability-development opportunities provided by the HEI and the employment of the graduate is complicated by the role played by employers who convert employability into graduate employment (Harvey, 2001). Increasingly, .graduate attributes. are more important than the degree subject studied (Harvey, 2000). For some employers, the degree subject studied is not as important as the graduates. ability to handle complex information and communicate it effectively (Knight & Yorke, 2000). Graduate recruiters want a variety of other skills, personal and intellectual attributes, rather than specialist subject knowledge. Oral communication, teamwork, self-management, problem solving, leadership (Warn & Tranter, 2001) . employability skills are all-important.
Employers increasingly want graduates who have self-theories that are marked by

confidence, optimism, and a belief that they can make a difference. Employers want graduates who can adapt to the workplace culture, who can use their abilities and skills to evolve the organisation and who can participate in innovative teamwork (Harvey et al., 1997; Little, 2001). Employers also value critical thinking (reflection) as this is required for innovation and anticipating and leading change (Harvey et al., 1997). There is not necessarily agreement over whether there is a .skills gap. or how big it is if it exists (Dearing, 1997). Atkins (1999) suggests that there is no reason why employers should have a common set of skills that they require graduates to develop as this may vary with region, size of business and type of business-market orientations. CVCP (1998) (cited in Little, 2001) noted that it was difficult to find any hard evidence that employers actually preferred graduates who had received employability skills training over those who had not. Holmes (2001) suggests that employers do not want to recruit graduates with skills per se, rather that they require competency and effectiveness. Morley, (2001) suggests that the concept of .employer-ability. needs to be developed to balance out the power-relations embedded in the employability discourse of recruitment and retention. She implies that the education process should also encompass employers so that they are more sensitive towards issues of difference such as race, class, gender, sexual orientation and disability. It is only then, she suggests that employability attributes will have similar economic and professional values for different social-economic groups.¡±(2008)
Conclusion
One of the leading sources of comparable national statistics measuring the state of education worldwide, Education at a glance, published by The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which covers research done over 34 countries, have included in their current edition (Education at a glance 2011) a special indicator looking at how educational attainment affects participation in the labour market.
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The findings highlight the strong link between tertiary education and employability, particularly in the economic downturns of recent years. The following were noted:
- In all OECD countries, individuals with a tertiary-level degree have a greater chance of being employed than those without such a degree. On average across OECD countries, 84% of the population with a tertiary education is employed. Overall, employment rates are more than 27 percentage points higher for those with a tertiary education than for those who have not completed an upper secondary education (Education at a glance, 2011).
- Full-time work generally increases with higher levels of education. The proportion of individuals working full-time is 10 percentage points higher among those with a tertiary education than among those without an upper secondary education. Across OECD countries, 66% of those who have not attained an upper secondary education work full-time, 72% of those with an upper secondary education do, and 75% of those with a tertiary education do (Education at a glance, 2011).
- Education is generally good insurance against unemployment and for staying employed in difficult economic times. In 2009, average unemployment rates across OECD countries stood at 4.4% for those with a tertiary education, 6.8% for those with an upper secondary education, and 11.5% for those who have not attained an upper secondary education (Education at a glance, 2011).
- While possessing a tertiary degree is a strong positive factor in employability, it is not a guarantee of employment. Across the OECD countries, 15% of those with tertiary degrees are unemployed (education at a glance, 2011).
Good education and skills are essential, especially in the current economic climate. It is important that Governments maintain investments in the education sector, including higher education. Although HEI.s provide individuals with a better chance of being employed, they need to focus more on employability skills required by individuals once they graduate.

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References
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