What’s your graduate capital and how can you take advantage of it in your job search?

What is it that makes a person more desirable than others?

How can you make yourself more employable and how can you approach this term?

As a graduate you are probably interested in your “employability” grade.

Here I will share one approach on graduate employability, which contains different forms of capitals. These capitals are not only for graduates, but important for everyone in their career.

First of all, what makes you employable, is more than possessing the most desirable level of skills. Graduate employability is more complex than this.

This text is based on M Tomlinson (2017) Forms of graduate capital and their relationship to graduate employability.?

Your capital as a graduate or jobseekers contains of 5 main parts, human, social, cultural, identity and psychological.

Your skills as a graduate is not only ones you develop in your studies. There are also a diverse and contextual skills in “skills that graduates have”, rather the more homogeneous “graduate skills”.

Most importantly is that your skills are develop in your work life after graduation. That is because the potential you have is developed and practiced in the work context where your skills are utilized.

What are then important for you? I’ll share the different capitals next. Self-management, career insight, ability to map out goals, self-confidence and your self-perceived employability are key general factors.

Human capital

These are the hard skills you have achieved from your studies. The basic idea is that formal education makes you more skilled and productive, it’s a proof of certain capabilities.

I hear often from students that they are unsure if their choice of subject is a good one. Most degrees in higher education are general, which means that you can use your knowledge for many tasks. This can often be a challenge, because you need to develop an ability to present yourself in an attractive way. No one but you can know who you are and what you possibly want to do. If you have a more specific degree, medical or STEM type of degree, the presentation can be much easier.

A newly graduate with a generalist degree is like a new-born brain that can be developed according to the employers wants, ask yourself how you would like to experience this development.

Your task is to show how your hard skills can be utilized for future performance.

Social capital

Learning and practicing bonding connecting ties are important for learning about opportunities, where they exist, who are the gatekeepers and how to handle them.

The interaction between employers and students is key to the development of social capital. This way students can be more visible to employers and become familiar.

Job fairs, LinkedIn and especially work experience like internships and other are probably the best ways to increase social capital and apply learned knowledge in a work setting.

Cultural capital

This is the cultural knowledge and behaviors in companies that helps graduates thrive in a new environment.

Also tokens that set you apart from others are important here, prizes, awards and other things that provide value.

In order to thrive in a company’s culture, you need to develop knowledge and ability about your body language, usage of voice, personality, values and so on, because this will help you be more flexible and self-aware. From this you can get insights, which are ideas about what you would like to change in your behavior.

Socio-economic background is also important here, graduates with lower background might have difficulties handling areas and situations that graduates with middle and higher background are comfortable in approaching.

Developing student’s confidence and self-image are therefore important. For example, enabling stronger interactions with employers, through networks and internships. Students that have this type of experience can more easily find opportunities, because they have experienced what can be.

The reason why cultural knowledge is so important is that it’s impacts the length of the induction period. If the employee is aware of the cultural practices, value, behaviors and is quick to fit in, it will be much easier to hire that person. This is often what graduates are missing, it’s difficult to get inside an organization when you are still studying.

Practicing and learning to present your value adding features, increasing confidence through coaching, are really important here. Practicing interviews and learning behaviors that fit in with the employer can be the key to get hired.

Identity capital

This is about going from who you are now to who you want to be in the future, especially your professional self. Your identity and who you are is something you have somewhat control over to decide. You are a person in constant development and you are able to choose the direction of your development. This will have an impact on how you are perceived by others.

In job search this is most effective through narratives, how you tell stories about yourself.

A career identity is an integrated part of your personal identity, where career is a central part for your life progression.

Identity capital is important for negotiation and access to job opportunities.

During your time in Higher Education, your studies, you can see this as a landscape of practice. Not only in the formal classes, but also through all sort of daily interactions with peers and different services. Through these interactions you are able to project a self-image towards future working life, increasing self-knowledge and certainty.

The more you invest in your career, making it a part of your on-going life project, the stronger identity capital for employment you have.

Modern job search and presentation is all about telling compelling stories about yourself, having a strong identity capital will open up more opportunities for you in all sorts of areas of life.

Psychological capital

The way to relevant employment is not so straight-forward, this applies to every graduate. Psychological capital is about your ability to adapt and navigate uncertain areas, getting back in the saddle after setbacks. It’s about resilience and a belief that you can handle any challenge that you will meet on your way to employment. One factor is to make better pro-active decisions at different stages.

Another one is to have a relatively high locus of self-control. If you focus on what you can control and influence, instead of trying to change things you can’t change, your will manage better. Employment is in a way about competition, can you keep calm in the middle of the storm, you will make better decisions.

Developing this kind of capital is not that easy and is not an official part of your studies. What you can understand is the significance of this skills and that you start exploring how you experience set-backs, how optimistic you are and how you can handle these things in order to manage in a complex environment, which the job market is.

You can also prepare for inevitable stress and set-backs, in order to develop your expectation management and career management. This connects to a protean career, which is a person aspires to be self-directed in his or her career choices and guided by intrinsic values.

Being open to multiple ideas and alternatives is key, if you are too focused on single jobs, you are less prone to identify other options which are as good as the option you are attached to.

Another aspect is to realize that the transition from education to chosen pathways might not be as smooth as you think, to prepare for this is called a “reality shock”, it’s a new reality to face after graduation. This is when flexibility and career malleability come in place, the beginning of your career might be less stable than you think.

Discussion

Higher Education institutions is probably the best environment to prepare for certain future employment, future leaders in their fields. It’s not perfect or the most optimal way, still what other better option do we have at the moment?

The skills you have as a graduate are perhaps more than you had thought of, this article have defined and explained the 5 major ones. They are meant to empower you in your job search and future employment.

What you might see from these skills and capitals is that you can’t get them all form formal education, much is developed in different settings and situations. If you are aware of the importance of your own pro-activity, you will have better chances for a shorter transition after graduation. Nothing is guaranteed, having all of these capitals developed is a recourse for life, so what do you have to lose?

It’s also important to have more than a couple of these capitals developed, because you can’t manage so well with just 1 or 2. They also feed of each other, making a stronger overall promise to the employer.

“An example here would be a graduate lower in identity capital who may be less prone to making personal investments in future employment which, in turn, may serve to lessen the impact of his/her formal human capital, as well as their ability to mobilise this through the formation of wider social relations.”

As a student, you task is to develop an understanding of the job market and how to orientate on it, learning how to present yourself in an attractive way and learn how to provide value, combining the dots for the employer.

So, it’s not so much about getting more qualified, getting hired is more about sharing who you are in a more compelling way and increasing your overall employability capital.

So, there we have it, the 5 capitals for graduate employability by Michael Tomlinson’s article “Forms of graduate capital and their relationship to graduate employability”.

I hope that you got some new ideas and is inspired to increase your employability skills. As the job market gets more competitive, it’s up to you to increase your perceived value and attractivity.

Is there something you believe is missing from this view on graduate employability?

Because this is just one way to look at it, a really good one in my opinion, as always, I’m open for differing views and other ideas.

Source: Tomlinson, M (2017). Forms of graduate capital and their relationship to graduate employability. Education + Training Vol. 59 No. 4, 2017 pp. 338-352 ? Emerald Publishing Limited 0040-0912 DOI 10.1108/ET-05-2016-0090.

Check also out: A narrative review of graduate employability models: their paradigms, and relationships to teaching and curricula Elizabeth J. Cook