Employability

From Theory to Practice

Michele Baukens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138522787
• eBook ISBN: 9781351311984
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In the struggle against unemployment and marginalization, employability has become the one major tool to counteract this phenomenon. Those who have no chances to develop or enhance their employability will fail in the competitive labor market of the new economic order. While the notion of employability is not exactly new, the weight now being placed upon it is new: to equip job seekers for the far-reaching changes currently taking place in the economy and the world of work. What is at stake? Is employability an instrument for the regulation of the labor market, distinguishing between the employable and the unemployable? Or is it a set of measures to facilitate the insertion or reinsertion of workers into the workforce? Is employability in the future the defining policy framework for labor market policies? What are the consequences of such a development for policy makers? Employability: From Theory to Practice addresses these questions. Its internationally renowned authors provide a valuable contribution to the conceptual and operational content of the notion of employability. The form and content of measures of employability vary by state, but represent a general trend. Part 1 deals with the concepts and instruments of employability. Part 2 evaluates measures implemented in a number of countries to improve employability of job-seekers. The countries involved are the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, New Zealand, Poland, and Slovakia. Part 3 showcases a practical approach with Canada, which in 1996-97 moved from an unemployment to an employment insurance. This volume shows both the possibilities and limitations of measures to promote employability. It helps clarify complex policy questions which will contribute to a better understanding of the concept for policy makers and administrators. It will help policy makers, professionals, and scholars assess current trends in the workplace.

Part 1
Concepts and Instruments

1
Employability—The Complexity of a Policy Notion

Bernard Gazier

Introduction

Based on a recent collective study,¹ this contribution will concentrate on the scope and the limits of employability as tools to combat unemployment.

Focusing on employability is an attempt to influence the “supply” side of the labor market, i.e., the workers and their productive capacities and performance, while the “demand” side is made up of the companies’ requirements, all of which depend on the growth dynamic. It is evident at once how incomplete and how current this position may be: incomplete, because offers only exist when confronted with a demand; and current, because one rarely encounters an economic policy that seeks to stimulate directly a strong demand for work, in the Keynesian tradition of spurring activity. In the last two decades, most governments have rather relied on a progressive improvement of the supply (of products or work) to re-establish conditions required for growth. Without discussing here the wisdom of this approach, one can conclude that priority has been given to the supply of labor rather than to the demand for it, whether with reference to the qualifications or the availability of the workers or to their salary demands.

In this manner, employability appears as an agenda for “activating” employment expenditures by promoting training programs, placement services, more or less targeted subsidies that favor hiring or maintenance in the job, as well as through a varied gamut of incentives or authoritarian measures aimed at “putting the unemployed back to work.” The process is meant to be individualized and preventive, as mirrored in the slogan about trying to shift from “job protection” to “security through employability” The application of such measures varies over time and according to the country and the national traditions as well. It is a changing agenda more than a set of stabilized and precise measures that could be inventoried and assessed as to their effects: an orientation, a tendency of labor market policies.

The variety of these practices goes hand in hand with the plurality of possible definitions of employability. In fact, the idea has existed for a century: the first uses of the term date from the beginning of the twentieth century, and they have provoked many applications and debates, the majority of which emphasize the key role played by the worker’s initiatives and abilities.

Some versions of the definition of employability place the responsibility for their own employability squarely on the workers themselves, thereby giving the individual the task of adapting to changes in the labor market. Other versions, such as the European Employment Strategy of 1998, have a more balanced content that involves both the social partners and the governments.

Some important questions can be detected behind these experiences and debates: up to what point is it possible or desirable to make the unemployed responsible, if not for their situation, at least for the steps to be taken in order to find a new job? What are the advantages and the dangers in insisting on the concept of employ-ability and in developing policies along those lines?

This study will be divided into three parts. A first historical-conceptual section will briefly review the different operational definitions of employability and the recent trends revealed in the interpretation of the concept: the move from static and feebly interactive employability concepts to dynamic, strongly interactive ones.

Part 2 will deal with the content of measures for employability promotion and will examine the problems arising from their implementation. In this context, a brief analysis will be made of a tool recently devised in the United States, “profiling,” which aims to classify individuals according to their employability needs.

Part 3 will expand the debate by examining the sort of interaction and responsibility that should be developed in the labor markets concerning the supply of jobs. Practices such as “workfare,” collective bargaining and social partners will be discussed, and a comparison will be drawn between two key concepts: “making work pay” (OECD) and “making transitions pay” (in the perspective of the “transitional markets”).

Employability, a Brief Assessment of Its History and Leading Concepts

A Midway Point between Theories and Practices

Understood as the ability to obtain and to preserve a paid job (salaried or not salaried), employability is not a theoretical notion inserted into a network of explanatory connections or of explicit, univocal and stable standards. Rather, it is a matter of identifying the problems and priorities linked to the actions of persons and institutions involved in the access to work and employment.

From the outset, employability was enmeshed in a set of economic and social, as well as moral, policy concerns. It followed on the old distinction drawn between the valid and the invalid poor, the first of whom received an entirely different treatment from that given the second. The invalid poor are the object of direct material and financial support, while the valid poor have to be put to work. Even today amongst social workers, to qualify a person as unemployable is to channel him/her toward measures and treatments based on financial assistance, with little or no reciprocity required. The person deemed employable, on the other hand, comes under labor market policies.

The term employability was initially operational and laden with concrete stakes, as well as with collective representations. It consigns employability to a network of more or less coherent concepts that fall midway between daily routines and more abstract schemes. Thus, it carries somewhat implicit meanings which often need to be spelled out and may be misleading from a more theoretical point of view, i.e., they may be attributed to several divergent causes.

This intermediate position also makes employability flexible; it has in the course of time accommodated different contents, however with few possibilities of accumulating experiences and developments, since the content itself may differ according to the authors or the trends. These experiences and developments are themselves miscellaneous and have scarcely been mentioned in the overall discussion.

The complexity of this concept ensues, as does the need to synthesize, at the least, the different main versions of employability in preparation for a more decisive analysis.

Seven Main Concepts

The outcome of several historical studies is that at least seven successive versions of the employability concept have been developed in the course of the twentieth century, each with its definition, its statistical reflection and its operational consequences.

In the study mentioned in the introduction in this section, these various versions have been identified and given a name to differentiate them from one another. The names assigned are intended to facilitate a discussion of the whole group and were neither produced nor used by the different authors of any version; the latter have mainly limited their terminology to the word “employability” without seeming to discern that a specific version was in question.

The first version (El) dates back to the 1900s and persisted, above all, in the United Kingdom and in the United States up to the early 1950s. This version presented employability as a simple dichotomy. A person either was or was not employable, i.e., valid and immediately available on the labor market. The statistical expression of this dichotomic employability gradually focused on three criteria which became current in many studies carried out in the United States during the Great Depression of the 1930s: belong to the right age group (between 15 and 64 years of age), not suffer any physical or mental handicap, and not be subject to strong family constraints, such as child-rearing responsibilities for mothers. In this way, people classified as poor were oriented in two different directions: those who were unemployable received emergency social assistance, while those considered employable were assigned to public works projects and returned to the labor market. This system was frequently criticized, on the one hand, because it was established with no thought for the labor market context and, on the other hand, because it did not recognize any degrees between the conditions of employability and unemployability.

The modem versions of the employability concept were bom of a second wave of applications and developments during the 1950s and 1960s that extended beyond the Anglo-Saxon framework to include contributions from many other countries and from France in particular. Three very different types of employability have been identified and used by social workers, labor market policy-makers, statisticians and doctors.

The first of these versions was E2, which can be called sociomedical employability. Mainly developed by doctors and rehabilitation practitioners and aimed at the handicapped, this version immediately introduced a quantitative scale: one can be more or less employable, and this evaluation constitutes the basis for action to improve employability. Concretely, this consists of ranking a series of items that make up a test of individual employability: the abilities of a more or less handicapped person being graded in different areas that cover physical as well as mental aptitudes and deficiencies (vision, hearing, heart, motor capacity, etc., and also the ability to abstract, to reason, and to take initiative). According to the deficiencies identified, a selection is made of those where intervention is possible so as to cure or to compensate, and a program of action is devised.

This first version was almost immediately succeeded by a more general second version, aimed at the unemployed who have difficulties. In fact, it is possible to introduce in the scale, with different emphases, items relating to social as well as to physical handicaps; thus, attention is focused not only on deficiencies of professional qualifications, but also of mobility and presentation. In this way, a person who does not have a driver’s license or has a police record or has been a drug user would be considered less employable. This E3 employability could be called manpower policy employability. It measures the distance between the individual’s characteristics and the production and acceptability requirements on the labor market. Here again, it is possible to select items on which it is feasible to act (for example, training programs or simply driving lessons or even advice on how to dress).

Versions E2 and E3, developed principally in the United States, are limited by their exclusively individualized focus on the persons being helped to find employment, accepting as immutable both the market conditions and the possible prejudices of employers.

A third variation was developed, especially in France in the 1960s, with a very different approach to the problem, based on a collective dimension. This version, E4, called flow employability concentrates on the speed at which a certain group of the unemployed finds work. This is assessed by the proportion within a given group of the jobless—for example, among the unemployed over 50 years of age—of those who have been without work for more than one year. This statistic of unemployability (rather than of employability) has the advantage of directly relating the situation of the unemployed with that of the labor market (more or less good economic situation, more or less rigid selectivity). From that point, it can be subdivided according to the individual disadvantages of any subgroup of jobless, or of a single unemployed person (a differential employability).

It is quite remarkable that the E2 and E3 versions, on the one hand, and the E4, on the other, were developed separately. In the 1970s, E2 and E3 reached a crisis, principally because their activism on behalf of the workforce seemed to be one-sided by many decision-makers (who considered it more efficient, for example, to introduce greater flexibility in the labor market) and also because the scores made on the different individual employability tests were found to be quite poor forecasts of the success of any given individual on the labor market. At about the same time, during the 1980s, it was the E4 version that came under fire, when massive and lasting unemployment pervaded much of Europe. Indeed, it seemed increasingly demotivating to permanently record a decline in the employ-ability of the jobless and only to assess a collective dimension based mainly on a slowing of the economic growth rate. How then can these persons be helped, if the avenues for rapidly reviving economic activity are blocked? For this reason, French statisticians who were using this system eventually abandoned it.

More recently, during the 1980s and 1990s, a more international third wave, including some contributions from Canada, has proposed three new versions of the employability concept.

Since the late 1970s, a series of American studies have proposed a more neutral statistical definition of employability, E5, which could be called labor market performance employability. Taking into account the available statistical information on employment paths, this version establishes for a group or an individual three specified probabilities referred to a defined time lapse: the probability of obtaining one or several jobs, the probable duration of these jobs expressed in hours of work, and the probable salary. By multiplying these three probabilities, a synthetic indicator is obtained for the aptitude of a person or a group for being gainfully employed on the labor market. This measurement is interesting, because it does not focus attention merely on the probability of finding work and because it introduces some minimal indications of the “quality” of a job (duration and salary). It does not propose a priori any link between individual aptitudes, collective situations or the action of economic or social policies and the result in the labor market. It is, in this sense, neutral and can only serve as a retrospective evaluation of one program or another.

This is not the case for two more recent versions developed mainly at the onset of the 1990s: E6, or initiative employability and E7, interactive employability.

The E6 version underscores the individual responsibility and a person’s capacity to trigger a process of accumulation of human capital and social capital around his/her projects. Thus, E6 can be defined as the marketability of cumulative individual skills and can be measured by the breadth of potential or already acquired human capital (knowledge and productive skills, but also learning ability) and by the size and quality of the network of help and support that a person is able to mobilize around himself/herself (social capital). The advantage of this version is its dynamic dimension. However, paradoxically this version favors the characteristics that are closest to the entrepreneurial model, making the most employable person the one who is most able to benefit from his/her knowledge and connections. Thus, the most employable p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Employability: From Theory to Practice
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: Concepts and Instruments
• Part 2: Dynamic Approaches
• Part 3: Trends
• Contributors
• Index