The early years of the 21st century has witnessed the boom of knowledge, growth of technology, unification of production and finance, free flow of labour across countries, and much more. All of them have contributed to creating significant changes and uncertainties in the labour markets. The following are three major characteristics of the 21st-century labour market.
A knowledge-based economy
The first significant change is the shift from the industrial to the knowledge-based economy. This has been augmented by the liberalization of trade and finance, the emergence of new types of firms (e.g. lean production, internally flexible firm) and the predomination of the service industry, technology and innovation (Leoni, 2012; Tomlinson, 2013). At the workplace, technologies â especially digital ones â have enhanced work productivity, replaced many jobs that demand human labour by machines and robots and simultaneously created new jobs (N. Lee & Clarke, 2019). New knowledge is doubled almost every two years, giving human beings an abundance of opportunities to explore new horizons that they have never known before (Dehkord, Samimi, Alivand, & Sani, 2017). These changes have also transformed linear and organizational-based careers into boundaryless careers characterized by greater flexible, adaptive, non-permanent and uncertain employment arrangements (Clarke, 2018; Tomlinson, 2013).
To respond positively to changing economic trends, industry demands their prospective employees to possess evolving sets of professional skills (Carnevale & Smith, 2013; Pham, Saito, Bao, & Chowdhury, 2018), also known as âsoftâ skills or generic and transferable skills. Employers have highly appreciated these skills, considering them an important indicator of graduate employability linked to their hiring decisions (Nickson, Warhurst, Commander, Hurrell, & Cullen, 2012; Robles, 2012; Succi & Canovi, 2019). Similarly, graduates who are looking for jobs also believed that their employability skills are crucial for them to obtain an employment opportunity, rather than their qualification alone (Brown, Hesketh, & Wiliams, 2003). In fact, rapid technology changes in the knowledge economy seem to devalue formal education and require employees to be able to learn on the job in order to catch up with new knowledge and skills so that they can undertake work duties effectively. For example, the 2018 Graduate Outcomes Survey in Australia (The Social Research Centre, 2019) reported only 57.4 per cent full-time employees felt that their qualification was âvery importantâ or âimportantâ for their current employment while for postgraduate coursework graduates, this figure was only 46.5 per cent. Graduates in part-time work positions even rated their qualification as less important. Overall, less than one-half of all employed graduates reported their qualification as a significant factor related to their employment outcomes.
The 21st-century workplace is becoming more diverse due to labour mobility. Workforce mobility is a phenomenon first catalysed by globalization, economic cooperation agreements (e.g. European Union, North American Free Trade Agreement, and Agreement in Trades in Services). Under such agreement, a graduate could travel from one country to another to work and live. For example, in 2017, there were 17 million people moving across countries in the EU, among which 12.4 million were within the working age between 20 and 64 compared to 11.8 million in 2016 (Fries-Tersch, Tugran, Markowska, & Jones, 2018). Such global labour mobility has been exacerbated by the âwar for talentâ between healthy economies like Australia, England, Canada, and America due to a shortage of skilled workers (Chiswick & Hatton, 2003). Advanced countries have supported migration by sponsoring skilled workers and granting post-study work rights to international graduates to remain in the labour market for certain periods. Take Canada as an example, in 2012, the Canadian government decided to increase the number of international student enrolments to 450,000 by 2022 in an attempt to make Canada a hub for top talent, using favourable post-study migration policies (Hawthorne & To, 2014). By 2012, approximately 3,983 international graduates had successfully obtained Canadian permanent residency as skilled migrants, with more expected to take advantage of this policy trend (Hawthorne & To, 2014).
At the same time, economic saturation in advanced countries and rapid economic development in developing countries, particularly in Asia, have triggered âreverse mobilityâ which denotes the flow of labour from developed to developing countries. In 2017, unemployment rates in Australia, the UK, and the US were 5.4 per cent, 4.2 per cent, and 4.4 per cent, respectively, whereas this figure was only 2.1 per cent in Vietnam, 1.0 per cent in Thailand, and 0.8 per cent in Myanmar (GradStats, 2018; Men, 2018). Therefore, with their qualifications, knowledge, and skills obtained from a developed country, graduates from developing economies could more easily secure jobs at home.
Reverse mobility is an inherent trend in international education. Termed by J. J. Lee and Kim (2010), it refers to students coming out of their home countries to pursue international education in a host country, and then return to their home countries. It is observed that there has been an increase in the number of returnees to rapidly developing economies due to job opportunities and incentives launched by local governments to attract this source of skilled workforce for the development of local economy, society, and innovations (Ho, Seet, & Jones, 2016). In addition, scholarships awarded to developing countries often mandate graduates to return home to contribute to nation building (Medica, 2016; Tran, 2019b). For example, around 50 per cent of international students in Australia have returned to their home country (Lawrence, 2013). Moreover, relatively cheap labour costs in Asian labour markets have led many Western investors to establish businesses, which, in turn, have expanded further employment opportunities for Asian returnee graduates (Donaubauer & Dreger, 2018).
âReverse mobilityâ is also happening to Western international graduates. Until the mid-1990s, the destinations of choice were English-speaking countries, such as the US, the UK, and Australia. In recent years, Western graduates have found employment in China, Singapore, and Malaysia (Sharman, 2014). Australia and the UK have supported their students in sourcing opportunities for study and work abroad, through policies and other activities. For example, the Australian Governmentâs New Colombo Plan has enabled many of its students to undertake work placements and internships in the Indo-Pacific region. Similarly, between 2008 and 2011, there was a 27 per cent rise in the number of British students moving overseas (mostly to Asian countries) for job opportunities.
Many labour markets now also experience labour mobility between occupational sectors, within or between countries. The Australian HR Institute reported an increasing organizational turnover rate from 13 per cent in 2012 to 18 per cent in 2018, with smaller organizations reporting more staff turnover than larger ones (Institute, 2019). In Japan, 36.1 per cent male and 37.9 per cent female graduates reported a tendency to leave their current jobs (Kosugi, 2017). Job turnover is caused by a range of factors including personal factors (e.g. age, location, family movement, financial burdens, vocational interests, and expected occupational self-efficacy) and external factors (e.g. company management systems, dynamic head hunting) (Volodina & Nagy, 2016). Labour market factors such as restructuring, delayering and downsizing, casualization, lack of job security, and harsh working conditions are also found to contribute to career mobility (Kosugi, 2017), as further elaborated below.
New work arrangements and patterns
The 21st-century labour markets have seen many new work arrangements and patterns organized to fit better with constant change in skills demands at work and personal demand in career development. It is observed that while permanent jobs are diminishing, precarious jobs are on the rise (Lewchuk, 2017; Maciejewska, Mrozowicki, & Piasna, 2016). For example, between 1976 and 2015, the percentage of full-time employees in Australia dropped by 11.7 per cent from 85.4 per cent to 73.7 per cent (Lewchuk, 2017). In the same period, that figure in Canada was 5.6 per cent, with 87.5 cent full-time employees in 1976 and 81.9 per cent, by 2015 (Lewchuk, 2017). In Germany, in ten years (2000â2010), the number of full-time employees reduced by approximately 2.55 million, whereas the number of part-time employees increased by 1.83 million (Lehndorff, 2016).
In addition, instead of working for an organization, more people are becoming self-employed. A recent report of the US Bureau of Statistics revealed that in 2015 there were 15 million people on a self-employment position, equivalent to 10.1 per cent of all workers in the US (Hipple & Hammond, 2016). The ...
