Assessing graduate perceived employability through emotional and social competencies

Intense competition among applicants in dynamic labor market building pressure for stakeholders (researchers, academicians, universities, employers and policymakers) to help the graduates to become employable for smooth entry in labor market. Graduate employability is also crucial for (macro) socio-economic perspective and gained stakeholders’ attention due to remarkable increase in university enrolments and unemployment in labor market. The debate on graduate employability lacks empirical evidence and largely based on theoretical arguments in literature. With the empirical investigation, this study aims to target the graduates’ perspective to illuminate the role of emotional and social competencies (ESCs) in perceived employability and career satisfaction. Three years’ time-lagged data of 138 Italian students was collected after each academic year from 2013-2016. To build the ESCs profiles, we used multi-raters approach followed by 1199 additional responses from sixteen different stakeholders including parents, siblings, friends, mentor, and colleagues. Primary analysis through Partial least square-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) confirms the association between ESCs with perceived employability and career satisfaction. To get more robust results, we controlled age, prior work experience including internship and study abroad, gender and educational field. Further, mediation test indicates that perceived employability mediate between ESCs and career satisfaction. This study contributes to the literature in two folds: First, it extends the current debate on graduate employability, particularly the role of competencies in enhancing (perceived) employability and achieving career satisfaction in the dynamic labor market. Second, it provides guideline to individuals and higher education institutes (HEIs) to build and equip essential competencies that are valued and required in the labor market irrespective of disciplines or fields of study.