The Changing Opportunities of Professionalization for Graduate Occupations

In recent times, rapidly changing occupational contexts have altered professional trajectories. While sociologists have emphasized that abstract knowledge acquired in higher education is an important characteristic of professionalism, it is not clear whether the expansion of higher education has affected the possibility of individuals and groups to monopolize their university credentials. In this article I argue that the emergence of new graduate occupations and the growth of a university-educated labour force have made occupational closure in the professions more difficult. The changing relationship between education, skills, jobs and credentials limits possibilities for the creation and maintenance of professionalization trajectories as a professional status and a professional knowledge base becomes harder to achieve. Due to the decreasing opportunities of using formal educational credentials to achieve professional closure, aspiring occupations will have to rely more on what is called ‘symbolic closure’

Higher Education and the Myths of Graduate Employability

Graduate employability remains high on the political agenda. Currently, a strong policy drive to reform Higher Education aims to improve graduate employability and reduce social inequalities. As a result, employability skills are becoming part of the formal curriculum in many universities. This chapter examines whether the increased reliance on universities to deliver graduate employability is consistent with current labour market realities. We argue that the graduate labour market is increasingly congested as well as suffers from persistent inequalities in class, gender and ethnicity. Improving student employability skills within Higher Education will not solve these deep-rooted social problems

Degree power: educational credentialism within three skilled occupations

An ongoing debate is centred around the question of how we can understand the value of university credentials in accessing jobs. We know that occupations are strong determinants of which skills, knowledge and abilities are utilised in work but we do not know enough of how occupational contexts shape what university degrees represent to employers and labour market entrants. Drawing on semi-structured interview data, this article compares and contrasts how Higher Education degrees serve as credentials in accessing three different graduate occupations: laboratory scientists, software engineers and press officers. Rather than functioning as direct signs of work skills and knowledge, signals of trainability or as instruments of social closure, the article shows that higher education credentials serve multiple roles within the three occupations. These occupational-specific forms of credentialism shape the competition for jobs for university graduates. The article argues for a renewed theoretical approach to educational credentialism

The meaning of higher education credentials in graduate occupations: the view of recruitment consultants

Three influential theories are used to understand why employers value and seek out educational credentials in hiring. Qualifications can function as proof of productive skills (Human Capital Theory), as a signal of desirable characteristics (Signalling and Screening theories) or as a means for social closure (Closure Theory). Although these explanations are not necessarily mutually exclusive, they tend to be presented as alternatives in the literature This article aims to better understand why employers value Higher Education degrees within the labour market by assessing these theoretical explanations in particular in cases where employers do not value HE credentials highly. It draws on semi-structured interview data with external recruitment consultants in England (N = 45). The article finds support for each of the three theoretical perspectives. Yet, the findings demonstrate that employers’ reasoning can include more than one of the three theoretical perspectives, creating hybrid forms. The article evaluates the implications for the positional competition for graduate jobs

Matchmaking under uncertainty: how hiring criteria and requirements in professional work are co-created

Purpose The aim of the study is to understand how the hiring process develops in cases where there are no explicit or formal requirements. How do implicit and informal criteria and requirements impact the process of selecting the right candidate? Design/methodology/approach A qualitative approach was employed through the use of semi-structured interviews with 47 external recruitment consultants in the south of England. Findings In contrast to what is assumed in mainstream Human Resource Management literature, employers do not rely on a comprehensive implicit understanding of what is needed in cases where there are no explicit criteria and requirements. Instead, high uncertainty makes the development of criteria and requirements incremental and negotiable but also problematic. The analysis shows that three mechanisms compensate for the lack of certainty in the hiring process. First, interviews with applicants shape how the hiring criteria develop. Second, market signals of what is available in the labour market help construct the criteria and requirements. Third, criteria and requirements are interpreted and negotiated during interactions with recruiters and others. Originality/value Hiring without explicit requirements and criteria is often understood as rather unproblematic and/or not fundamentally distinct from hiring with them. The study shows that in these cases the process becomes more unpredictable and more open to interpretation and negotiation

Within-occupation forms of positional labour market advantage in three skilled occupations

In recent decades, many scholars have accentuated the role of occupations in social stratification and class analysis. Within occupations, workers compete to improve their labour positioning over time and in the process, create unequal outcomes. Advancement to better positions or improved wages can be dependent on many individual factors such as tenure, skills, experience and effort. Yet, occupations also allow workers to create relative advantage by closing off opportunities to others or seeking otherwise meaningful distinction. This article aims to explain how the occupational context shapes how those within skilled occupations construct the means of relative labour market advantage. It is based on a wider UK case study of laboratory scientists, software engineers and financial analysts. It shows that within each occupation there are distinct forms of creating advantage depending on the nature of the occupation such as the educational composition of the incumbents, the situ of skill development and the level of educational congestion within the occupation

Extreme Kuiper Belt Object 2001 QG298 and the Fraction of Contact Binaries

Extensive time-resolved observations of Kuiper Belt object 2001 QG298 show a lightcurve with a peak-to-peak variation of 1.14 +-0.04 magnitudes and single-peaked period of 6.8872 +- 0.0002 hr. The mean absolute magnitude is 6.85 magnitudes which corresponds to a mean effective radius of 122 (77) km if an albedo of 0.04 (0.10) is assumed. This is the first known Kuiper Belt object and only the third minor planet with a radius > 25 km to display a lightcurve with a range in excess of 1 magnitude. We find the colors to be typical for a Kuiper Belt object (B-V = 1.00 +- 0.04, V-R = 0.60 +- 0.02) with no variation in color between minimum and maximum light. The large light variation, relatively long double-peaked period and absence of rotational color change argue against explanations due to albedo markings or elongation due to high angular momentum. Instead, we suggest that 2001 QG298 may be a very close or contact binary similar in structure to what has been independently proposed for the Trojan asteroid 624 Hektor. If so, its rotational period would be twice the lightcurve period or 13.7744 +- 0.0004 hr. By correcting for the effects of projection, we estimate that the fraction of similar objects in the Kuiper Belt is at least 10% to 20% with the true fraction probably much higher. A high abundance of close and contact binaries is expected in some scenarios for the evolution of binary Kuiper Belt objects.Comment: 15 text pages,6 figures(Color),5 Tables, Accepted to AJ for May 200