Graduate Work: Skills, Credentials, Careers, and Labour Markets [1 ed.] 9780198744481

Table of contents :
Cover
Graduate Work: Skills, Credentials, Careers, and Labour Markets
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Copyright acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
1: Introduction
What Happened to the Graduate Labour Market?
The Study
The Four Occupations
Software Engineers
Laboratory-based Scientists
Financial Analysts
Press Officers
Outline of the Book
Notes
2: The Contested Nature of Graduate Labour
The Dominant View on the Graduate Labour Market
Knowledge-based Economy
Knowledge Worker
Education
Critiques from within Academia
Demand for Education?
Impasse
Notes
3: The Changing Graduate Labour Market
Growth of High-skilled Jobs
Demand for Skill?
Where Do Graduates Work?
Wages
Conclusion
Notes
4: Recruitment and Selection of Graduate Workers
Introduction
The Process of Picking Winners
Selection as an Interactional Process
Suitability
Technical Skills
Qualifications
Acceptability
The Relationship between Suitability and Acceptability
Conclusion
Notes
5: The Role of Education
Introduction
Meaning of HE
Where Work-based Skills Are Learnt
Credentials
Degrees as Means of Access
What Do Degrees Signal?
Credential Inflation
Credential Half-life
Education and Labour Market Advantage
Master´s Degrees
PhD Qualification for Laboratory Scientists
Professional Qualification and Financial Analysts
Non-graduate Competition
Conclusion
Notes
6: Skills and Knowledge
Introduction
Skills Used in the Work Process
Technical Skills: Graduates as Knowledge Workers?
Lab Scientists
Software Engineers: Problem Solvers?
Financial Analysts: the Power of Numbers
Press Officers: Knowledgeable Workers?
Job Control and Creativity
Technical Skills: Conclusion
Soft Skills
Communication Skills
Social Skills
Social Fit
Conclusion
Notes
7: Graduate Occupations
Introduction
What is an Occupation?
Within-occupational Differences
Company Size
Sector-dependent Differences
Nominal Fluidity
The Social Construction of Graduate Occupations
The Issue of Demarcation: Lab Technicians and Graduate-level Scientists
Software Engineers: Labour of Love?
Financial Analysts: the Thorny Relationship with Accountancy
Press Officers: Dealing with Rapid Change
Professionalization
Abstract Knowledge
Education
Identity
Professional Bodies
The Possibility of Professionalization
Conclusion
Notes
8: Graduates´ Careers
Introduction
Careers
Boundaries
Technological Change as a Boundary
Sectorial Boundaries
Occupational Trajectories of Graduate Workers
Becoming Management
Planning Careers
Employability and the Competition for Jobs
Skills
Work Ethic and Networks
The Role of Education
Conclusion
Notes
9: The Ideal of the Graduate Worker
Introduction
Recruitment and Selection (Chapter4)
The Role of Education (Chapter5)
The Skills Used at Work (Chapter6)
Occupations and Professionalization (Chapter7)
Careers (Chapter8)
Symbolic Closure and Classification Games
Graduates
Are the Cracks Showing?
The Function of HE
A Way Forward
What Are Graduate Skills?
What Are Graduate Jobs?
Recruitment and Selection
The Role of HE
Conclusion
Skills and Economic Policy
Social Mobility
Final Thought
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Graduate Work

Graduate Work Skills, Credentials, Careers, and Labour Markets Gerbrand Tholen

1

3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Gerbrand Tholen 2017 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2017 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2017939218 ISBN 978–0–19–874448–1 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

This book is dedicated to the loving memory of my mother and father, Grietje Tholen (1944–1989) and Hein Tholen (1939–2016).

Acknowledgements

This book is the culmination of a three-year study into the UK labour market for graduates (2012–2015). The idea for this project emerged from a realization that in the last decade very few novel sociological approaches were trying to come to terms with how the current labour market for graduates is organized, and how the competition for graduate work can be understood within the wider economic and social context. What was evident to me, I thought, was the need for an update, a renewal, or potentially transcendence of existing attempts to theoretically explore the relationship between credentials, skills, jobs, and the work process for graduate workers. This is clearly easier said than done. The empirical work that followed examined what the universityeducated do at work within four graduate occupations. Making sense of their stories and perceptions has been a demanding but ultimately rewarding challenge. Because of this intellectual struggle, it took me a long time to write this book. I really hope it will be of use to those interested in what graduate work represents in the twenty-first century. Throughout the research and writing process, I have received the help and guidance of various individuals and institutions. I wish to particularly thank Phil Brown who has given me a lot of encouragement and wisdom over the years and provided helpful feedback on the book manuscript. During the research project, I was a member of the Centre for Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance (SKOPE) at the Department of Education at Oxford University which was an excellent place to work. The stimulating intellectual environment and practical support the Centre has provided me with have been invaluable. I would therefore like to thank everyone who works (or has worked) at SKOPE. They include Ken Mayhew, Marta Mordarska, Stephanie Wilde, Ewart Keep, Craig Holmes, Maia Chankseliani, Hubert Ertl, Emma Miller, and Jennifer Allen. A very special thanks goes to Susan James Relly, who has been a great help throughout the project and thereafter. I also greatly appreciate her valuable comments and suggestions on the manuscript. I also received support from Chris Warhurst, Oliver Cowan, Linacre College and my colleagues in the Department of Sociology at City, University of London. Sam Osborne created the superb illustration on the front cover of the book.

Acknowledgements

This book also could not have been written without the financial support obtained from the British Academy. The BA Postdoctoral Fellowship I received made it possible to dedicate all the necessary time and effort to this study. I would like to thank Oxford University Press for giving me the opportunity to write this book and editors David Musson and Clare Kennedy for their patience and guidance. I am extremely thankful to my research participants, whose stories this book is based on, for their willingness and candour to share the intimacies of their working lives with me. Through their generosity with time and their openness and honesty, they passed on great insights into their occupations. Finally, I am deeply grateful for the support and love of my wife Ankeeta and our daughter Iris.

viii

Copyright acknowledgements

Excerpt from The Schooled Society: The Educational Transformation of Global Culture by David P. Baker Copyright © 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher, Stanford University Press, http://sup.org

Contents

List of Figures List of Tables

1. Introduction

xiii xv 1

2. The Contested Nature of Graduate Labour

14

3. The Changing Graduate Labour Market

29

4. Recruitment and Selection of Graduate Workers

42

5. The Role of Education

63

6. Skills and Knowledge

87

7. Graduate Occupations

112

8. Graduates’ Careers

142

9. The Ideal of the Graduate Worker

166

References

189 215

Index

List of Figures

3.1 Share of graduates in 25–64-year-old population range (%) in 2001 and 2014 for selected OECD countries

30

3.2 Share of graduates in 24–34-year-old population range (%) in 1991, 2001, and 2014 for selected OECD countries

30

9.1 The role of education for graduate occupations

182

List of Tables

3.1 Occupational change in the UK between 2000 and 2015

31

3.2 Share of UK graduates employed for major occupational groups in 2002, 2009, and 2015

36

3.3 Absolute graduate employment for major occupational groups for April to June 2015

36

1 Introduction

In short, the shift in America’s workforce has not been from factories to fast-food outlets. Rather, the key growth in U.S. employment has come in offices and non-office settings like hospitals and schools that provide higher-skill services; nearly two-thirds of Americans now work in these higher-skill workplaces. The U.S. economy’s largest and fastest growing sectors—business services, finance, healthcare, and education—are service sectors that have been clamoring for more educated workers and powering the dramatic upskilling of America’s occupational structure. The rising value of education and training—especially postsecondary education and training—has been caused by the ongoing growth in these post-industrial service jobs. Advances in information technology and the rise of complex consumption and production networks have also been key factors in America’s economic growth since the 1960s. This expansion of technology has only increased the demand for educated workers who can utilize that technology. (Anthony P. Carnevale and Stephen J. Rose, 2015, p.16) Schooled individuals are capable of (accustomed to and expected to use) certain kinds of skills, particularly those flowing from academic intelligence, which less-schooled or unschooled individuals tend not to be. Work is increasingly organized around these skills, and this process is sustained by formal organizations that contain significant numbers of jobs. This is not to say that the educated worker is a “naturally” more productive worker in every type of workplace, as cruder versions of the human capital view suggest. Rather, the educated worker is the definition of productive in the educated workplace. Worker and jobs dynamically change together as the full impact of the education revolution unfolds. (David P. Baker, 2014, p.155; emphasis in original)

In these two rather long quotes, scholars aim to tackle how the growth in (higher) education drives changes in the workplace and vice versa. Indeed, a key question for all sociologists of work and education as well as many other

Graduate Work

labour market experts remains how to understand the way the two forces impact each other. With the stark growth of higher education in recent decades came the growth of the number and share of workers with university degrees within the labour market. Mass higher education is not without its critics (see Attwell and Lavin, 2007), yet there exists a powerful idea that graduate workers that have attended university are a distinct category of workers with the advanced skills to succeed in the modern economy. Furthermore, it is thought that their growth in numbers is matched by a growth in the labour demand for their skills within a knowledge-based economy. Some, like Carnevale and Rose, assume that in a post-industrial economy, more education means more skilled workers in the labour force yielding higher productivity, which leads to improved economic performance and higher relative wages for the educated. Others, like Baker, feel that education is shaping work fundamentally and makes university-associated advanced skills key assets in the modern workplace. Both see the growth in participation in higher education in recent decades as a logical step towards a high-skilled, high-waged economy. In this book, I argue that both make the same mistake. The growth of higher education has not been the main leitmotiv within the world of work, neither as a catalyst of labour market demand nor in itself shaping skill use, job content, or working conditions in a particularly major way. This is not to say that for an increasing number of people higher education is not shaping their lives as they participate in higher learning. Can we talk about graduates as a meaningful labour market grouping? What do they have in common? How has higher education (HE), in itself, shaped their skills, knowledge, and labour market status and power? This book tries to find some answers to these questions by examining how we can understand the graduate labour market as a social phenomenon, focussing mainly on the United Kingdom. In doing so, it provides a distinct sociological contribution to an ongoing debate on the extent that the modern economy is defined by the skills, knowledge, and contributions of graduate workers. I take the position that the meanings of graduate labour and graduate work are not fixed but under continuous change due to economic, technological, and educational social changes which alter our understanding of their definition, their value, and their function within the wider economy. As with any other type of labour market, the labour market for graduates should not merely be understood as a result of supply and demand forces (as neoclassical economics would have it). Who gets which jobs and why is predominantly not a technical discussion of how features of human capital such as skills are matched with jobs. Instead, the labour market is understood as being socially constructed by those who compete for jobs as well as employers and stakeholders. Individuals try to advance their interest through the application of 2

Introduction

the available resources. Akin to the struggle for material resources, actors participate in symbolic struggles to define other actors’ understanding on the nature and rules of the labour market. Following Bourdieu (1984) I assume that individuals’ cognition of the world is shaped by the terms, concepts, and categories created through a conflictual interest struggle. Powerful actors try to legitimize these classifications and categorizations in order to maintain their position within the hierarchy. Once the world view expressed in particular categorizations is accepted, domination is achieved and relatively easily maintained. This symbolic inequality is furthermore strengthened by wider cultural processes through which, for instance, individuals and groups identify themselves, and are identified by others, shaping and legitimizing systems of categorization (Lamont et al., 2014). In the book, I argue that there is no valid reason to assume that graduate labour necessarily constitutes a special type of skilled and high-status labour, distinct through its association with higher education. Neither do university degrees play the same type of role across the whole of the graduate labour market. To rather deconstruct the consensual view that associates and often conflates knowledge worker, skilled worker, and graduate worker, the book focuses on four key questions that encapsulate some of the most important areas of contention and misunderstanding. These are: What is a graduate occupation? What is the role of education for graduates in the labour market? What are graduate skills? What are graduate careers? Graduates now make up between 20 and 35 per cent of the workforce in most Western countries. Although concentrated in what are deemed highly skilled occupations, they work in various types of workplace and sectors. How can we understand something that is large and widespread and multifaceted, that is, the labour market for all these graduates?

What Happened to the Graduate Labour Market? The labour market for graduate workers has never been so under pressure and in flux. A range of trends are changing the work of, and the demand for, graduate workers. In an earlier work, I identified seven key trends affecting the graduate labour market (see Tholen, 2014). These are still of key importance today. They are: 1. The fast expansion of higher education The vast increase in supply of workers with higher education in recent decades in the UK and worldwide has created an abundance of highly 3

Graduate Work

skilled workers, leading to questions as to whether demand for these workers has kept up. 2. The recession and the widespread effects on the general labour market The 2008 recession, which affected most Western economies, in the UK context led to extensive austerity measures. Flexicurity measures have increased the labour market’s flexibility and deregulation (Heyes and Lewis, 2014). Western labour markets have recovered in a fragmented way, with a high incidence of long-term unemployment and failing job growth. Although graduates tend to be less affected than lower-educated workers during a downturn, they still are dealing with the same economic landscape. 3. Global economic integration Globalization has fundamentally changed the nature of not only low-skilled work but also other types of white-collar work such as professional work. The global economy relies on the ease of relocating parts of company production processes, making offshoring and global competition for advanced skills increasingly based on quality and price (Brown et al., 2011). 4. The emergence of new graduate occupations A growing number of jobs are now ‘partially graduate’ (Brynin, 2013), meaning that graduates are entering occupations that were traditionally not pursued by graduates. In addition, new occupations emerge in which the majority of workers are graduates; this ‘graduatization’ of the labour market differentiates the meaning or value of formal higher education credentials and skills. 5. New types of work organizations and technological change Liberalization, technological innovation, and mobile production systems have turned markets in which even smaller companies operate into volatile, ever-evolving globally competitive arenas. Management systems are in place that change the content of many graduate-level jobs and careers. Within the UK, the rise of non-standard employee contracts and self-employment needs to be mentioned. There is evidence to suggest that technological change in general and computerization in particular are changing the nature of work of graduates (e.g. professions, Susskind and Susskind, 2015), as well as both negatively and positively impacting the demand for particular graduate occupations (Frey and Osborne, 2013). 6. The war for talent and the elite labour market Many organizations increasingly rely on a limited number of graduate employees that are deemed ‘talented’. These well-paid and fast-tracked positions are much coveted but the competition for these jobs is demarcated from the rest of the graduate labour market. Access is to a large extent closed off to most graduates, irrespective of their skills, knowledge, and abilities.

4

Introduction

7. Increasing wage differentiation According to most studies, wage premiums of graduates over non-graduates have continued in recent decades. Yet wages for UK graduates have dispersed in the last decade. It is most likely that some graduate occupations have seen their rewards increase rapidly, whereas others have stagnated. But also within occupations there is increasing wage inequality. We cannot assume that the increase in rewards for some graduates is fully or necessarily caused by an increasing demand for advanced academic skills. Here the role of institutions, organizational change, and closure strategies of certain professions are major forces. These changes have made the graduate labour market increasingly elusive to understand and in this book I am making an attempt to shine a light on the four questions posed earlier. To explore the nature of modern graduate work I draw on a detailed investigation into four graduate occupations: software engineers, laboratory-based scientists, financial analysts, and press officers. The book uses these four occupations to develop a renewed sociological understanding of graduate work and the labour market for graduate workers.

The Study During a three-year period four in-depth occupational case studies were completed. The decision to use occupation as a unit of analysis was not the obvious choice. Much of the existing research has focused on large-scale surveys and statistics distinguishing labour market outcomes according to different levels of education. Having a strong interest in what people do all day at work, akin to Studs Terkel’s (1972) classic US study on the working lives of workers in various occupations (see Biggs, 2015 for a similar but more recent and UK-focused investigation), I made a conscious choice to use occupations as the level of analysis when I designed the study. There is a risk that occupations are not the right approach to understand the graduate labour market. Concentrating on very specific workers who work perhaps under very specific conditions does not tell us much. We also know how important organizations are in unequal labour market outcomes (e.g. Tomaskovic-Devey, 2014; Sakamoto and Wang, 2017). Yet, occupations matter within work; they are important in how workers understand their own work, their organization, the division of labour, and the power and status of workers. Occupations convey a much wider status of resources and opportunities. They are an important conduit for social reproduction (Jonsson et al., 2009), and thus represent meaningful categories through which workers relate to the labour market.

5

Graduate Work

The goals of the case studies were to provide detailed vignettes of what workers do at work and how they think about their work within four occupations that are considered to be graduate occupations. In doing so, the case studies are able to provide valuable insights into the nature of graduate work and the so-called graduate labour market. Unlike some sceptical voices (e.g. Holmes and Mayhew, 2015), I strongly belief that in-depth case studies are able to elucidate greater understanding about the nature of graduate work in general through their strong focus. It is true that these four occupations can never be seen as ‘representative’ of the whole graduate labour market, nor are they intended to be. They are used to investigate how the work that graduates perform is organized, understood, and negotiated within their occupational contexts and how higher education interacts in those. The in-depth nature also provides scope for meaningful comparison of the work of graduates. Much of the existing research on the graduate labour market relies predominantly on statistical data that is often based on large-scale surveys. These studies provide valuable knowledge about many aspects of the graduate labour market. For instance, they are able to explore in detail the relationships between a multitude of social factors such as social class, gender, degree, educational institution, and labour market outcomes for various graduate populations. Yet in doing so, they lack the detail and depth to explore how, within a single occupation, the role of graduates functions within the work process as well as in recruitment and selection. Also too often the focus is on early career outcomes and does not take into account further career trajectories or the work of more experienced graduate workers. In this study, the four case studies together construct an empirical base upon which we can theorize the labour market for graduates, accepting the difficulty in ascertaining its external validity. The fieldwork took place between January 2013 and May 2015. Over this period a total of 107 interviews were conducted. The majority of these were with graduate workers in the four occupations. In addition, employers, HR managers/recruiters, non-graduate workers, and higher education lecturers from relevant fields were interviewed. Participants were selected and recruited purposefully from available LinkedIn profiles to allow significant variation in terms of sector, age, gender, and educational background. A small minority were recruited through snowball sampling. Participants were located all over the United Kingdom, although the majority were in the south of England. There was considerable spread in terms of age and career stages. The gender balance was somewhat skewed towards males (N = 65), particularly in software engineering and lab-based science. The semi-structured interviews explored: • How and where graduates obtain their skills; • How the competition to enter the occupation is organized; 6

Introduction

• What the roles of degrees and other credentials are within the competition; • The employability strategies of those who enter the occupation; • The skills demanded by employers to access the occupation; • The influence of the 2008 recession on the occupation; • The influence of the global labour market on the competition for jobs causing changes to the labour process; • The effects of the influx of graduates into the labour market; • The skills and abilities that are utilized in the work process; and • How careers are developed and maintained within the occupation. The interviews were fascinating and insightful. The interviewees were very generous with their time and effort to explain to me how they understand their work and the labour market. Overall, they have provided me with sophisticated accounts of their work in which they articulate their view of their own work, their work identity, and the day-to-day work experience. Through careful data analysis I have aimed to make sense of their narratives, highlighting both commonalities as well as differences within the occupation as well as between occupations. All the participants have been given pseudonyms.

The Four Occupations The four graduate occupations have been carefully selected, albeit without fully knowing what I would find. Their work reflects many of the economic and employment changes that the graduate labour market has undergone, outlined earlier in this chapter. There are some potential weaknesses in this selection. Although sufficiently different, three of them at first glance rely on Science, Technology, and Mathematical scientific knowledge and skills. And although they are almost unequivocally seen as graduate occupations, none of them could be regarded as a traditional graduate occupation or profession. I will succinctly introduce each of them.

Software Engineers It feels like software engineers have been a permanent fixture within the occupational landscape, but it is important to realize how novel the occupation actually is. Software engineering has made a stellar rise in the last three decades, during which time the concept of software engineering became a distinct occupation within the information technology field. Software engineers have inherently been associated with the economy of tomorrow, 7

Graduate Work

and few occupations have more often been associated with the so-called ‘New Economy’ than this one. Software developers are seen as typical knowledge workers (Reich, 1991; Scarborough, 1999; Castells, 2000). This may be due to the ubiquitous nature of software applications embedded within a growing number of devices, technologies, and processes, as well as the ever-increasing role of the Internet over our lives. Many perceive coding skills to be in growing demand for the future. Regularly, commentators argue that children should learn to code from an early age in order to promote future economic competitiveness, or that individuals must learn to function within a networked society or face being ‘intellectually crippled’ (Naughton, 2012). Recently, the UK government has replaced the old Information and Communication Technology (ICT) curriculum with a renewed focus to teach children as young as five to learn to code (Gove, 2014). The occupation consists of a variety of roles in almost every sector imaginable. Next to software engineer, their job title can be ‘programmer’ or ‘software developer’.1 In essence, the task of software engineers is the designing, development, testing, and evaluation of software. This involves writing the code (program) that creates software that fulfils the users’ needs and satisfies the requirements of customers or managers/team leaders. This means instructing a computer, line by line, how to perform a desired function. Before engineers start coding they analyse first the needs of the user/client, after which they commence to design, construct, test, and maintain computer applications software or systems (or some of these activities). A large part of the role is trying to understand what is needed and communicate with various stakeholders within organizations. There are a wide set of characteristics that good software needs to fulfil. An important quality standard distinguishes functionality, reliability, operability, performance efficiency, security, compatibility, maintainability, and portability (as well as sub-characteristics within these) (ISO, 2011). So, software engineers want to produce code that is correct and robust, as well as easy to reuse and to improve.2

Laboratory-based Scientists For this study, only scientists working in pharmaceutical and biotechnological commercial companies were selected. No scientists working at universities were interviewed. This was to create some homogeneity within a wide scientific community of researchers. The study also focused on graduate workers and not postgraduate workers (despite the latter’s ubiquity in those sectors). The two industries encompass research working on a wide range of scientific projects examining a wide range of topics. Whereas the modern pharmaceutical industry originated in the mid-nineteenth century, the biotechnology 8

Introduction

industry is relatively new and with its application and production rapidly expanding. Sociologists of work have been treating the work of laboratory scientists with much interest (e.g. Kerr et al., 1977; Owen-Smith, 2001; Smith-Doerr, 2005; Wagner, 2006) as well as sociologists of science; many have aimed to describe how science is ‘performed’ and knowledge is created within the laboratory setting (Lynch, 1985; Latour and Woolgar, 1986; Latour, 1987; Amann and Knorr Cetina, 1988). The scientists in the study exclusively work in corporate environments, working on applied scientific projection using the principles, rules, and methods of science and in particular experiments to solve problems or complete tests. Within the biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies the research labour force is made up of scientists, technicians, and managers with various education levels. Scientists tend to have wide educational backgrounds yet the majority are within the life sciences, in particular chemistry and biology. Scientists are not necessarily involved in all steps of the research process, for instance some mainly interpret designs or operational test results, calibrate scientific or technical equipment, or advise customers on the use of products or services.

Financial Analysts The role of financial analyst is not easily summarized because of the wide application of the job title. The usage of the term for many is of a financial expert who aids investors and asset managers with their investment choices through numerical and statistical analysis. One can find these workers in banks, hedge funds, investment banks, institutional investors such as pension funds, etc. They assess the performance of stocks, bonds, and other types of investments and/or focus on equity, debt, or risk. Here they are involved in making buy and sell recommendations, sometimes specializing in a single sector or industry. Alternatively, financial analysts offer a support role within an organization. In other words, investment is not the core business of the organization, but the analyst fulfils the financial analysis needs the organization may have, using the same research skills to assess financial aspects of the organization itself or stakeholders, competitors, or other contexts. This tends to involve examining financial statements and data and making projections about the future financial welfare of a company or departments. Although aligned with the role of the accountant there is a distinction when it comes to analysing the finances rather than putting the accounts together. Much of the sociological literature focuses on the first type of workers (e.g. Knorr Cetina, 2011). 9

Graduate Work

According to the O*NET database (2016), the most important tasks are (a) drawing charts and graphs, using computer spreadsheets, to illustrate technical reports; (b) informing investment decisions by analysing financial information to forecast business, industry, or economic conditions; (c) monitoring developments in the fields of industrial technology, business, finance, and economic theory; (d) interpreting data on price, yield, stability, future investment-risk trends, economic influences, and other factors affecting investment programmes; and (e) monitoring fundamental economic, industrial, and corporate developments by analysing information from financial publications and services, investment banking firms, government agencies, trade publications, company sources, or personal interviews. Wansleben (2012) observed that financial analysis emerged as a twentiethcentury profession with the rise of the financial sector. In the US, the demand for financial analysis increased with the sharp increase in share ownership in the 1950s and the corresponding need of investors for information. Around this time various professional associations for financial analysts emerged, providing professional training and qualification. In the UK context, the American-based CFA Institute has become the most important (global) professional association.

Press Officers The occupation of press (or related media/communication) officer is firmly grounded within the public relations (PR) field. The latter is defined by the UK’s Chartered Institute of Public Relations (2016) as ‘the discipline that looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and understanding between an organization and its publics.’ The press officer role is there to create and maintain a favourable public image for the organization they represent through dealing with the media and, in particular, the press. Traditionally, this has happened through designing media releases which shape public perception of their organization’s work and goals. Yet the modern press officer also deals with online social media inquiries and discussion, along with building relations with various journalists and media representatives as well as the public directly. Most medium-size organizations and larger, as well as many smaller organizations, do have an employee dealing with press inquiries or media engagement (this role is sometimes combined with marketing tasks). Some organizations outsource their relations with the media to external PR agencies, whilst others employ a press officer or a press team in-house to deal with press inquiries and increasingly with other types of (social) media. 10

Introduction

It is believed that PR became a paid profession as early as the 1900s (Heath, 2006), yet in Europe PR was relatively undeveloped until the 1950s and 1960s (Watson, 2012). From that point onwards various PR roles such as media manager, communication director, and press officer emerged. The PR profession is now a female-dominated profession within the UK context (Aldoory and Toth, 2002) but career progression has nonetheless been problematic for women (Fröhlich and Peters, 2007; L’Etang, 2006).

Outline of the Book The book is organized as follows. Chapter 2 discusses the existing conceptual understandings of the graduate labour market. I outline a dominant mainstream narrative that highlights a distinctive nature of graduate work and the perceived close relationship between graduate workers and so-called knowledge workers. In opposition, there are a number of academic contributions that have skilfully articulated how this prevailing discourse shows important flaws. Despite these critiques, I argue that currently useful alternative imaginaries of the graduate labour market are incomplete or have not caught on. Chapter 3 outlines some important changes in the UK graduate labour market using some available statistics matched with findings of various empirical studies. The chapter exhibits the stark growth in the share of graduates within the general labour market and reviews some of the evidence on whether supply has kept up with demand. The chapter then examines what type of job university graduates work in and the wages they receive for their labour. I argue that the graduate labour market has fundamentally changed and the heterogeneity in labour market outcomes has yet to be fully acknowledged. Chapter 4 is the first of the empirical chapters and examines the recruitment and selection process within the four graduate occupations. It shows that this process is distinctly different between occupations. Rather than a straightforward matching process it can be only understood as deeply contextualized and situational. Hard skills and knowledge associated with higher education do not have a privileged status within the recruitment and selection process. Chapter 5 examines the role of education within the four occupations in more detail, assessing whether HE shapes the graduate labour market in the fundamental way it is often assumed. For each occupation it outlines the meaning of HE within the occupation, the function of university credentials, and the extent HE drives career progression. The case studies show HE shapes work in a more modest way than it is generally understood to do. Qualifications are not always merit-based signallers to employers. Also, credentialism has not disappeared. 11

Graduate Work

In chapter 6, I examine the skills demanded and deployed in graduate work. The case studies reveal that a rich tapestry of relevant skills, abilities, and knowledge were mentioned as being important by those within the four occupations. Despite the dominant ideas that skills associated with HE shape the skills demands of graduate occupations, within the four occupations this is hardly the case. Instead, a wide range of skills as well as a working together of hard and soft skills are needed to perform the role. Also, how the skills used at work are socially constructed within the four occupations is not uniform. A further rethink of the notion of ‘graduate skills’ is needed. The concept of a ‘graduate occupation’ is explored in chapter 7. What sets apart the occupations that are defined as graduate occupations? In the chapter, I highlight the great variance within occupations in terms of skill use, job tasks, and job discretion depending on the size of the organization, the sector of employment, and due to the fluidity in job titles. The chapter then looks at the possibilities for graduate occupations to move toward professionalization. Many workers with a university education may not have either the organizational power, occupational identity, or knowledge base upon which professionalization may succeed. Chapter 8 deals with the careers of graduate workers. The chapter maps out common career trajectories within the four occupations as well as how graduate workers in the occupations understand their careers. The chapter compares the findings of the case studies with the influential notion of the ‘boundaryless career’, observing both similarities as well as stark differences. There still exist technical, sectorial, and occupational boundaries. The chapter distinguishes how graduate workers in the four occupations remain employable, improve their employability, and understand the competition for jobs. Many graduate workers experience a fractured career path and try to anticipate the future through investment in skills or networks. Yet there is nothing intrinsic that warrants set career paths linked to their graduate status, skills, or qualifications. The ninth and final chapter concludes this book and aims to bring the previous chapters together in order to make sense of the phenomenon that is called the graduate labour market. It explains how the evidence from the four case studies repudiates many of the assumptions of the dominant discourse on graduate labour. I argue that the representation of the graduate labour market as unproblematic, high skilled, knowledge-based, and independent from non-graduate work can be partly explained by how categorization takes place within the labour market. Through what I call ‘symbolic closure’, closing off opportunity based on persuasion and forms of meaning, concepts like graduate work, graduate occupation, graduate skills, and graduate labour market are far from neutral but at the centre of a struggle for labour market advantage over other participants. The roles of university credentials, skills, and knowledge are symbolically constructed within each occupational 12

Introduction

field. Towards the end of the chapter I reflect on what this means for our understanding of the graduate labour market and HE in general. Throughout this book I refer to the graduate labour market as the labour market for workers with university degrees, and not merely for those who have recently graduated as is often understood in colloquial terms.

Notes 1. Many use these terms interchangeably although they are historically deemed to be different. 2. O*NET (2016) summarizes the tasks of the software engineer as follows: • Modify existing software to correct errors, to adapt it to new hardware, or to upgrade interfaces and improve performance. • Develop or direct software system testing or validation procedures. • Direct software programming and development of documentation. • Consult with customers or other departments on project status, proposals, or technical issues, such as software system design or maintenance. • Analyze information to determine, recommend, and plan installation of a new system or modification of an existing system. • Consult with engineering staff to evaluate interface between hardware and software, develop specifications and performance requirements, or resolve customer problems. • Design or develop software systems, using scientific analysis and mathematical models to predict and measure outcome and consequences of design. • Prepare reports or correspondence concerning project specifications, activities, or status. • Confer with data processing or project managers to obtain information on limitations or capabilities for data processing projects. • Store, retrieve, and manipulate data for analysis of system capabilities and requirements.

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2 The Contested Nature of Graduate Labour

How can we understand the labour market and activities of those workers that have completed higher education? Specific conceptualizations of what graduate labour is and should be have been with us for a long time. This chapter shows that even in the face of contrasting evidence, dominant ideas remain strong and continue to influence how we currently understand the work that graduates perform, their status, and the role of HE in the economy. This chapter will describe, rather succinctly, how the discourse on modern capitalism and in particular the knowledge economy has reified our vision of the graduate labour market. It does not provide a thorough historical analysis, but does outline the theoretical and conceptual roots and argues that these foundations originate in earlier ideas on the nature of post-industrialist, post-Fordist capitalism, giving emphasis to theoretical knowledge and continuous expansion of professional, technical, and managerial classes and work. Contemporary society is portrayed as ever more complex, differentiated, and dependent on specialized knowledge. Based on these ideas, a strong, powerful, and, for many, convincing discourse developed, swaying the policy and the public as well as large parts of academic debates on work and employment. This story has given the graduate labour market a special status within economic history due to graduate workers’ assumed relationship with theoretical knowledge and advanced skills. Yet, over time many social scientists, in particular sociologists, have questioned, criticized, and rejected the idea of a knowledge-based economy and what it was thought to signify for graduate employment. However, their often resounding contributions tend to have had limited impact and in some cases have been ignored. Yet they serve as the theoretical base for the rest of the book as well as the starting point for further exploration of the graduate labour market.

The Contested Nature of Graduate Labour

The Dominant View on the Graduate Labour Market In the prevailing view, graduates feature as a meaningful, distinct category of workers. As such they are presented as labour market winners, their educational achievements rewarded by outstanding labour market outcomes. In earlier work I have described how the prevailing view represents the graduate labour market as an isolated, normative, and a purely economic phenomenon (Tholen, 2014). This distinct understanding of the graduate labour market has not developed in a social vacuum, in fact its construction can only be understood if we examine the historical, economic, and social context in which it has been developed and reproduced. To understand the role of the graduate labour market in our collective imagination, we need to go back in time. The imagined relationship between HE and the labour market before its massive expansion after World War Two was distinctly different. HE was elite in its nature and there was no assumption that it should be accessible for all or even that there was a growing demand for it. Graduates were not talked about as a distinct labour market group. This was not because university was deemed unimportant as a means to educate the professional classes, graduates were just not linked to any particular national economic or skill policy. Although universities have been around since the Middle Ages, as pointed out by Stefan Collini (2012), the modern university is a nineteenth-century creation (p.23), combining a heightened desire for research as well as mainlining and expanding the need to train the next generation of professionals, administrators, and scholars. In the process, this has led to credentialing processes within various fields such as medicine and engineering. Due to its distinct elite nature the role of university graduates within the national economy or as part of an economic strategy was hardly reflected upon. It was not until midway through the twentieth century that university education was directly linked to economic performance or viewed as a major potential source of social mobility. Rapid expansion of HE took off first in the United States after 1940. According to Trow (2010, pp.64–5), a dual force of growing expectations and aspirations of American parents as well as a shift in the occupational structure were the major drivers in the early years. Significantly greater participation in British HE started in the 1950s but particularly took off in the early and mid-1960s. The Robbins Report published in October 1963 is generally accepted as a watershed moment in the move towards a mass HE system. Strongly arguing for an expansion of HE, it directly attacked the notion that only a small minority of young people were capable of benefiting from it. Robbins (1963) observed that a much greater share of young people could benefit from participating in HE (in particular

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those from poorer backgrounds). HE should be available to all who were qualified and willing. From this point onward UK HE grew as new universities were built. According to Scott (1995, p.5), this expansion and the later establishment of polytechnics formed a significant change ‘in scale and ethos’, creating a new kind of HE, a ‘campus culture’, closely linked to the opening up of post-war society and the growth of popular culture yet still elitist in essence with barely 8 per cent of young people enrolling. Not until the mid-1980s did it pass the 15 per cent mark. The growth in participation in HE including growing participation rates of women, ethnic minorities, and working-class students has changed, likewise has the direct relationship between university and elite societal status. Whereas graduates as a whole could once be characterized as a ‘social elite’ (Kelsall et al., 1972), now there are only distinct groups of graduates linked to particular universities (Wakeling and Savage, 2015). A further growth of non-standard programmes (e.g. part-time), professional and vocational subjects, the number of mature students, HE in FE, teachingfocused universities, and soon potentially an influx of private providers of HE (BIS, 2016a) may further change these perceptions.

Knowledge-based Economy A distinct change in the way university education was associated with work came with a realization that the economy was shifting from an industrial towards a post-industrial, post-Fordist globalized economy. HE was no longer serving the old manufacturing-based economy, but rather a new technologyintensive service-orientated economy infused with work that was thought to be the opposite of manual work: knowledge work. From the 1960s onwards, theorists have continued to argue that the future of advanced capitalist countries is defined by the exploitation of knowledge and information.1 Key authors such as Peter Drucker (1966, 1985, 1993), Daniel Bell (1973), and Alvin Toffler (1970, 1980, 1990) argued that the knowledge-based revolution was to industrialization what industrialization was to the agricultural society. A large body of literature developed, emphasizing the importance of knowledge and advanced formal education to fuel a knowledge-based economy. Similar later attempts to define and describe the changes that Drucker and Bell have identified have been named ‘new economy’ (Carnoy, 2000), ‘network society’ (Castells, 2000), ‘virtual society’ (Shields, 2002; Woolgar, 2002), or ‘weightless economy’ (Coyle, 1997; Quah, 1997; Kelly, 1998). All these highlight this distinct role of knowledge in the modern economy. For some this was combined with stressing the growing importance of innovation and a creative economy (Rifkin, 2000; Leadbeater, 2000). Management theorist Peter Drucker was one of the first who identified how knowledge and advanced education drive the modern economy. In Landmarks 16

The Contested Nature of Graduate Labour

of Tomorrow (Drucker, 1959) and later in The Age of Discontinuity (Drucker, 1969), he forecasts a transformation of the American economy and society. Drucker claimed that traditional ‘modern’ energy-based industries were no longer vital sources of economic development. In a new society (coined the ‘knowledge society’, p.263), the application of knowledge such as IT technology spurs economic development. This has created a need for formal learning over experience. ‘The systematic acquisition of knowledge, that is, organized formal education has replaced experience—acquired traditionally through apprenticeships—as the foundation for productive capacity and performance’ (p.37). American sociologist Daniel Bell describes in the Coming of the Post-Industrial Society (1973) a similar shift from industrial to post-industrial modes of production. The latter is characterized by the growth in white-collar service employment as well as the growing importance of IT. Here, key is the role knowledge has taken throughout the economy and society. The codification of knowledge into abstract systems of symbols creates new science-based industries (IT, computers, and electronics). Knowledge and innovation have always played an important part in economic development, but for Bell it now has been positioned as centre stage as it serves as the cornerstone of the new economy. Knowledge is the key commodity, not just a resource.2 In addition, knowledge derives from research and development. Within the post-industrial society, theoretical knowledge serves as the source of innovation and policy formation for that society. A special place is also reserved for ‘theoretical knowledge’ or scientific knowledge (Bell employs the terms interchangeably) as the most important knowledge (Bell, 1973, p.212). Like Drucker and Bell, many of the knowledge-based economy proponents agree that Western economies have entered a phase in economic history called the ‘knowledge’ or ‘knowledge-based’ era. The brains of the workforce are thought to be the most important contributor to today’s wealth creation. Through technological progress, innovating activities, and knowledge creation, economic prosperity is accomplished. A knowledge-based economy relies primarily on the use of ideas rather than physical abilities and on the application of technology rather than the transformation of raw materials or the exploitation of cheap labour. Knowledge is used, created, acquired, and transmitted throughout the whole economy, where it becomes a crucial element for the production of goods and services and economic development in general. Although the meaning of what a knowledge economy constitutes varies, most definitions emphasize the importance of knowledge-based activities. The economy is increasingly dependent on production and services that are based on knowledge-intensive activities that contribute to an accelerated pace of technological and scientific advance, as well as equally rapid obsolescence (Powell and Snellman, 2004). Scientific knowledge has penetrated all 17

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aspects of life, in particular in production and consumption. Stehr (1994) describes this process as the ‘scientisation’ of theoretical knowledge which is thought to have penetrated into every sphere of modern society.

Knowledge Worker Rather than employing manual workers, knowledge-based industries employ predominantly what have been called ‘knowledge workers’. For Stehr (1994, p.183), knowledge workers are those workers who ‘consult, provide guidance to others, counsel, or give expert advice, as the group of occupations engaged in the transmitting and applying of knowledge’ (emphasis in original). These knowledge workers have been thought to represent a new type of elite. Bell (1973) observes that the distribution of power in society shifts to those who can successfully transform and work with knowledge. The so-called knowledge elites are those professionals who can capture, exploit, and control knowledge and therefore will increasingly be powerful and influential. Social and economic power is directly associated with the ability to exploit most this resource in post-industrial capitalism. Effectively, a new class structure in which technocrats wield power has been observed, most famously by Galbraith (1967) in his description of the technostructure. Conflict between classes that can exploit knowledge was also observed by Touraine (1974). Florida (2002) distinguishes a new creative class made up of intellectuals, artists, and designers reshaping Western societies through their labour power and lifestyles. Knowledge and the ability to transform it become both a form of human capital, as well as a driver of social differentiation. In other words, there is a direct link between education, knowledge, human capital, and privilege. Due to their unique skills, purpose, and role as a collective base for economic competitiveness, the positions of knowledge workers within the social stratification are becoming clearer. There is also a strong assumption within the knowledge economy discourse that existing work is also becoming more complex and thus skilled. Carnevale and Smith (2013, pp.493–4) write: New post-industrial jobs in industries like business services, education, health care and office service jobs require higher levels of interpersonal and problem-solving skills because the work entails higher levels of human interaction and personalized responses to people’s wants and needs. These same behavioural skills are required in high-technology and manufacturing jobs as well, because the technology itself takes on more of the rote, manual processing tasks, allowing employees to spend more time interacting with each other in order to exploit the new flexible technologies to provide cutting-edge value added such as quality, variety, customization, convenience, speed and innovation.

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The Contested Nature of Graduate Labour

As a result of the upgrade in skill-use, the workplace itself is thought to have changed in fundamental ways, at least if you are a knowledge worker. For this growing group of workers, work is about solving problems, making sense, and transforming information aided by an autonomous work regime and creative thinking that create extraordinary value. Compared to other work, knowledge work is complex, interactional, and relies on working with ideas or symbols involving high levels of reasoning (abstract, synthetic, and systematic things) (Frenkel et al., 1995). The key is that knowledge requires skills that are not necessarily widely found in the workforce yet increasingly of importance for companies’ competitive advantage (Spender and Grant, 1996; Teece, 2003; Wickramasinghe, 2006; see Grugulis, 2007, chapter 7 for an excellent overview of knowledge work). As knowledge is ever changing, obtaining, processing, and utilizing new information and data become paramount. The growing importance of the knowledge economy means there is an acceleration of knowledge creation and knowledge destruction. This means it is necessary for companies and individuals to continuously update knowledge and competencies (Archibugi and Lundvall, 2001). The need to adapt to new circumstances is integral to the knowledge-based economy. New innovations and new applications of knowledge require workers who can adapt and easily acquire the skills for success. Knowledge management has become a key area within human resource management, but also within the overall strategies of companies. The rise of the knowledge society has also changed the employment and occupational structure of Western economies. High-value service industries take up an increasing share of the economy and so the demand for knowledge workers is rapidly increasing. Carnevale and Rose (1998) write that the American economy is no longer a ‘pyramid with a broad, solid base of jobs in manufacturing, construction, and natural resources; where productivity is high, which supports an array of medical, personal, and financial services at the top’ (p.8). The authors argue that the industrial pyramid has been turned upside down: ‘In the new economy, workers employed in a wide variety of office functions from marketing to managing and consulting are driving value added by reinventing, reorganizing, and rationalizing old industrial, natural resource, and service industries’ (p.8). Crucially, within an increasingly globalizing economy the fortunes and labour outcomes of knowledge workers are determined globally (Brown et al., 2011). Economist Robert Reich explains in ‘The Work of Nations’ (1991) that economies are no longer simply national in scope but global, rewarding the most skilled around the world with ever-greater wealth while consigning the less skilled to declining standards of living. As opposed to routine producers (e.g. data processors) and in-person servers (e.g. librarians), the highly skilled knowledge workers he calls symbolic analysts with the 19

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ability to manipulate abstract forms of knowledge will be in increasing global demand because of worldwide communication and transportation technology. Western economies should focus their activities on these high-value services by establishing a high-skilled workforce. His ideas still to this day resonate highly in policy circles.

Education In line with the growing complexity and knowledge-intensity of work, an ever-growing demand for more education has been predicted. Whereas in the industrial age experience would be enough for most (learned through apprenticeships), now workers need formal education to engage with the informational demands of the modern workplace. Economists in particular have stressed that the economic shift into service work has increased demand for advanced skills due to the complexity of work, demanding highly educated workers (Berman et al., 1998; Levy and Murnane, 2004). Not for nothing does Bell call universities the central institution of the post-industrial society (Bell, 1973, p.344). Universities are thought to be the centres of innovation and technological development. Castells and Hall write that universities, as major producers of knowledge, have the same role in the ‘information economy’ as coal mines had in the industrial economy (1994, p.231). Similarly, Leadbeater (2000, p.114) argues that ‘Universities should be the open-cast mines of the knowledge economy’. Another impetus for Western economies to continue to pursue growth in HE is a growing global competition for knowledge work, with China and India among others heavily investing in education (see Brown et al., 2008, 2011). Within a global economy, skills are understood as the global currency of the twenty-first century (OECD, 2013, p.11). The idea that investment in (higher) education is key in moving towards a knowledge economy has had a direct effect within policy circles, both nationally and transnationally. It is now accepted that education is an important promoter of growth in the advanced economies, justifying greater investment and reform from governments in order to keep up with economic needs (DFE, 2010; OECD, 1996; World Bank, 2002; EC, 2004; HM Treasury and BIS, 2011; see also Godin, 2006). The World Bank, OECD, and the World Economy Forum have been actively promoting skill-based education in order to fulfil the perceived skills gap within Western economies (Spring, 2015). Both individual workers as well as workforces as a whole in Western economies would benefit from additional investment in education in order to fulfil the needs of the modern workplace and global labour markets. National education and training systems should be grown in order to fulfil the demand for advanced skills. Universities serve as the main provider of the high skills needed. Warhurst (2008, p.74) points out that graduates are regarded as emblematic 20

The Contested Nature of Graduate Labour

of knowledge workers as universities and colleges become the site of skill formation. Throughout the 1990s, 2000s, and to a lesser extent the 2010s the need for further HE expansion has been part of economic policy in advanced economies, as the economy was thought to thrive on more educated workers. The knowledge economy discourse was taken up by policymakers in many Western nations in particular in the 1990s and early 2000s (OECD, 1996; European Commission, 2000; World Bank, 2002, 2003; DTI, 2004). But it continues to be a policy tenet during economic downturn (Coughlin, 2011; Obama, 2011; The European Commission, 2010) and beyond (Cable, 2012). UK Education and Childcare Minister Elizabeth Truss (2014) writes, ‘With free labour markets, countries with highly skilled working populations are more likely to attract and create highly skilled jobs; countries without, go without . . . In other words: in a country like ours, in a globalised economy, good jobs follow good skills.’ Aspiring to a high-skilled labour force she then writes, ‘Napoleon called us a nation of shopkeepers. Why can’t we be a nation of coders, analysts, inventors, entrepreneurs, creators as well—selling our skills to the world?’ For decades, UK governments have focused on supply-side intervention into the labour market by allowing growth of the HE sector and boosting the number of graduates in the labour force. A key policy document is the Leitch Review of Skills (2006) which had the aim of assessing the UK’s skills need. Stating that there is ‘a direct correlation between skills, productivity and employment’ (3), it proposed an increase in adult skills across all levels. One recommendation was for ‘50 per cent of young people to participate in HE’ (p.67). The consensus is that improving the quantity and quality of the stock of qualifications leading to a better-qualified workforce will meet the thinking skill needs of the knowledge economy as well as improve economic competitiveness. For instance, Shadow Higher Education Minister Shabana Mahmood explicitly stated that more graduates would help Britain compete with emerging economies (Burns, 2012). The knowledge-based economy discourse and its understanding of the graduate labour market is still dominant within policy and academic circles (Warhurst, 2008; Brown et al, 2011; Tholen, 2014). One of the reasons why this discourse is so attractive is the support it receives from a dominant economic perspective: human capital theory (e.g. Becker, 1964; Nerdrum, 1998; Schultz, 1971). The theory assumes that individuals make choices regarding investment in human capital based on benefits and cost. Training and education are considered to be an important investment inasmuch as there are benefits over a long period of time. According to the information they receive and their individual preferences, individuals will rationally invest in education, experience, or acquisition of skills. Likewise, employers will rationally hire the employee who is expected to show the highest 21

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productivity. According to Becker (1964), there is a strong causal relationship between the post-war growth in productivity and the growth in HE. The individual makes the investment in learning skills (money, time, energy) in relation to the perceived payoff. Economic value is fixed in a person. If there is an incentive for acquiring education, individuals will respond accordingly. Although risks and uncertainty might distort the perception of incentive, individuals will still respond to economic demand for different classes of skills, the cost of education, and the changes in earnings. Becker shows that the evidence for a growing rate of return from schooling is clearly present. Educated people seem to have higher earnings for a reason (which is increased productivity). Given the significant returns to HE, employers are on the whole still willing to pay a premium for graduate labour and therefore the demand must be growing, given the growing supply of graduates moving into the labour market. Human capital theory in its essence is a rather simple theoretical framework, in which its strength may lie. Keep and Mayhew (2010) suggest that it calls mainly on the supply side, without having to address or intervene in factors within the ‘black box’ of employment and organization such as ‘ownership structures, product market strategies, work organization, job design, employee relations, patterns of innovation, property rights, corporate governance regimes, or wider investment patterns’ (568). The basic neoliberal tenet to use the free market as a normative guide drives the promotion of HE as a force of economic growth and individual prosperity. The on-average high private rate of return is thought to signify stable demand for workers with graduate skills. Taken all together, I have outlined a consensus that skills provided by education that are available in the workforce have a direct effect on productivity, and economic competitiveness and growth. Here, there are key assumptions placed on the nature of skills, education, and the labour market. Livingstone (2012, p.88) points out three key assumptions. These are that workers: (1) increasingly require more skills to do their work (2) become more involved in planning their work (3) increasingly constitute a professional class. In addition, I would propose adding the following propositions: • The economy is increasingly based on (abstract) knowledge. • Labour markets increasingly rely on educated workers. • Knowledge work relies on advanced or high skills. • HE is the developer of skills used for and needed by the (knowledge) economy.

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The Contested Nature of Graduate Labour

• Possession of a degree is evidence of the acquisition of these skills. • The skilled segment of the labour market is analytically different from the rest of the labour market. This is not to say the other occupations cannot be knowledgeable, but true abstract knowledge is the domain of the knowledge workers’ class. • Graduate premiums are a direct sign of graduate demand. • There is a direct relationship between HE and productivity, innovation, and economic competiveness. Although the concept of the knowledge economy or knowledge-based economy has lost importance in recent years, these assumptions still underpin the dominant understanding of the graduate labour market within the policy and public domains, and much of academia. Yet clear dissent among the latter keeps growing.

Critiques from within Academia Within the academic literature the knowledge society discourse has been largely supported and adopted as a framework to understand capitalism and the roles of work, education, and skills in it, in particular within economics and management studies (e.g. Blackler, 1995; Davenport, 2002; Mosher, 2007). Yet there have been numerous critiques that have been made of the knowledge-based economy and its assumptions, in particular by sociologists. For instance, theories of post-industrial society have been criticized ever since their earliest formulations for presenting a seriously misleading understanding of social change (Cohen and Zysman, 1987; Doogan, 2009; Fuchs, 2012; Gershuny, 1978; Kumar, 2005; Webster, 1995, 2002). Similarly, others have underlined the mythical nature of the concept of a knowledge economy (Meyer et al., 2007), find it misunderstood (Pink, 2005), or have condemned it as a neoliberal capitalist formation (e.g. Kenway et al., 2006). Scott (2005) observes that the tide in belief in the knowledge economy is slowly turning: Most politicians still speak of the knowledge economy not only as an inescapable formation but also as an almost entirely positive phenomenon [ . . . ] The need for investment in the highly-skilled workforce required to produce and service the new technologies sourced in science is emphasized, and mass higher education— originally grounded in notions of opportunity, emancipation, and democracy—is now justified in terms of meeting skill shortages. Recently, this confident discourse has been inflected by the strain of pessimism implicit in conceptual accounts and

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Graduate Work empirical descriptions of the knowledge economy/society. Awkward questions are now being asked. (pp.298–9)

The assumptions the knowledge society advocates place on graduate labour have also been met with a chorus of critical contributions. What follows is by no means a comprehensive overview but I will mention some important offerings. Thompson et al. (2001) argue that literature on the knowledge economy does not grasp the actual extent to which workers use knowledge in the workplace. The problem with the orthodox knowledge economy approach is that it exaggerates the extent of the knowledge economy, lacking appropriate forms of measurement and suffering poor conceptualization. In addition the relationship between theoretical knowledge and tacit knowledge is misunderstood. Guile (2010, p.3) writes: Policymakers and transnational agencies have only partially grasped the implications of the new role of knowledge in the economy (and by extension more widely within society) because they have both concentrated on one aspect of the account of the new role of knowledge. In the process, they have treated knowledge as an abstract entity that is separate from both the social practices responsible for its codification and its deployment as a resource to generate new products and services in the economy.

More radical is the notion that, rather than actual observation grounded in empirical facts, the knowledge economy should be understood as a very successful semiotic entity presenting an emerging reality, to which actors on all levels respond (Robertson, 2008). Most notably, from a cultural political economy perspective, Jessop (2008; see also Sum and Jessop, 2013a) regards the knowledge-based economy as the hegemonic ‘imaginary’ or dominant frame for understanding contemporary capitalism and HE. Related to this, Livingstone (2012) sees the popularity of knowledge economy theories as based in the fact that its advocates make up the technocratic and expert class with its emphasis on scientific knowledge and skill upgrading. Furthermore, for Livingstone the emergence of the knowledge-based economy presents another example of evolutionary progress that is often taken as a model of social change over time. Livingstone remains highly sceptical of the proponents’ claims, in particular the need for continuous and overall skill upgrading, pointing out that high numbers of highly qualified people are unemployed or underemployed and most experience decreasing, marginal returns for their formal education. Simultaneously, there have been numerous critiques of the concept of knowledge work. Several researchers have argued that knowledge workers are a socially constructed phenomenon (Alvesson, 2000; Knights et al., 1993; Robertson and Swan, 2003), and have highlighted the ambiguity of defining 24

The Contested Nature of Graduate Labour

knowledge workers due to the insufficiency of rigorous methodology and theory guiding the notion of knowledge workers (Alvesson, 1993, 2001; Collins, 1997; Scarbrough, 1993, 1999). Others have drawn attention to the unsatisfactory reliance on the use of knowledge within the definition of knowledge work (Hislop, 2008). Some emphasize that knowledge always has been utilized in work and that a closer examination of how management tries to appropriate that knowledge is needed (Warhurst and Thompson, 2006), and that doing knowledge work itself is not necessarily defined by great autonomy and freedom (Causer and Jones, 1996; Gleadle et al., 2012) or by extensive use of skills (Fleming et al., 2004); for instance, knowledge management can be used to assert control over workers (Hayes and Walsham, 2000) as does the often-used project management in knowledge work (Hodgson, 2002). Many have observed that knowledge has not been the exclusive realm of a special professional group. Collins (1997) observes that all jobs require knowledge and there is no clear threshold to identify the intensity of knowledge in an occupation we think of as a knowledge work one. Knowledge has penetrated throughout the economy. Even those strongly adhering to Bell’s idea of the existence of a knowledge-based economy have stressed there is no monopolization of knowledge; instead it is now more widely used than ever through its codification (e.g. Stehr, 2002). Others have observed the increasing codification of knowledge. Brown et al. (2011) have convincingly shown that a large share of what is considered knowledge work is increasingly standardized and able to be performed all over the world due to codification of knowledge, ICT possibilities, and a large graduate population spread over the globe. Multinational companies can consider shifting knowledge work to wherever on the planet costs are low and quality standards can be maintained. Codification of knowledge deteriorates skill use as autonomy as so-called knowledge workers are subject to ‘digital Taylorism’. For example, software packages that apply standardized criteria for assessing bank loan applications have altered the role of bank employees, lowering their professional judgement and discretion. That knowledge and high-skilled work are under the same pressures in a globalized economy is slowly being acknowledged. Even the aforementioned Leitch Review of skills states that, ‘Technology is rapidly breaking down the barriers between what can and cannot be traded. All work that can be “digitised”, automated, and outsourced can increasingly be done by the most effective and competitive individuals or enterprises, wherever they are located’ (Leitch, 2006, p.7). Yet often the full implications of skill competition on price remain muted. Others have specifically criticized government economic and social policies based on the knowledge discourse. Some have observed that it has relied too 25

Graduate Work

much on serving the assumed demand for skilled education by promoting HE participation, leading to simplistic skills policy (e.g. Keep et al., 2006; Keep and Mayhew, 2010; Payne and Keep, 2011). Keep and Mayhew (2010) explain how the UK’s focus in its skill policy is a general upskilling of the labour force which has been used to tackle a whole range of social and economic problems. Unwilling to intervene in the economy, for the government it acts as a substitute for other social and economic measures. The authors also emphasize that the fact that average private rates of return to a first degree have not declined does not necessarily mean that the supply of graduates has kept up with the demand for HE graduates as many economists want us to believe (p.568). Employers might be willing to pay for the most capable and education serves merely as a filter.

Demand for Education? Within the dominant view the solid and relatively high returns to HE have become proof of the demand for skills and knowledge imparted by HE institutions. But what can we say about demand and supply for graduates? And do graduates form a strategic asset within the economic development of advanced economies? A strong sociological body of literature on the nature of HE skills and labour market outcomes considers that any claims on growing demand must move beyond simple human capital assumptions on the relationship between wages and demand. Rates of return to education are poor proxies for the relationship between the demand and supply for HE. Earnings depend on many other factors than qualification (institutions, social class, gender, age, ethnicity, etc.); matters of interaction and homogeneity make any of the claims on the average return to education not very meaningful. According to Wolf (2002), the fanatical educational aspirations of the British government to ‘push’ as many young people as possible through college in the end lead to positional struggle within the graduate population and declining returns for graduates. To Wolf, investment in HE is not necessarily the ‘driver’ behind economic growth, arguing there is little economic evidence to support the assertion that more public investment translates directly into economic growth, to the detriment of investment in vocational training. The focus on education as the ‘engine of economic growth’ has ‘narrowed the way we think about social policy. It has also narrowed—dismally and progressively—our vision of education itself ’ (p.254). Like Wolf, others have also questioned the direct relationship between the amount of HE in a society and its (future) growth rate (Chang, 2011; Holmes, 2013). Some (e.g. Brown and Hesketh, 2004) also have questioned whether the demand for skilled jobs has increased as much as some proponents of the new economy are suggesting. 26

The Contested Nature of Graduate Labour

One of the first studies to notice that not all college students will obtain high-skilled jobs and that underutilization of skills is a real phenomenon was The Overeducated American (Freeman, 1976). Freeman suggested that the market (in the 1970s) could not absorb the increasing supply of highereducated people and many school leavers were forced to accept jobs that required a fraction of the skills that they had actually obtained. The skills they possessed were not being used. The investment in skills is therefore not always justified and can even be quite wasteful. Although his analysis applies to the US economy of the 1970s, it is an early, sceptical reply to the ‘skill-optimists’. Others have argued that raising the educational standards of the workforce does not necessarily lead to economic growth. In the 1970s, Ronald Dore (1976) and Fred Hirsch (1977), among others like Raymond Boudon (1974) and Ivar Berg (1973), suggested that educational achievement and productivity might not be so closely connected as many believe. Dore (1976) poses the question of how one knows if the enhanced earnings of graduates are the result of their education rather than other factors, such as intelligence, wealth, or institutional factors. Hirsch (1977) writes that the limited goods of jobs exert ‘great magnetism to people as these jobs pay well and have large nonfinancial benefits’ (p.183), like status and satisfaction. That is why many people will try to get these jobs by obtaining college degrees. These jobs are nevertheless only attainable for a minority and this leads to severe competition for these positional goods. In the UK (Brown and Lauder, 2001), the US (Habibi, 2015), Canada (Coates, 2015), and India and China (Sharma, 2014), some have suggested that the number of graduates in the labour market does not fit the number of graduate jobs available.

Impasse Deeply engrained in our imagination of the graduate labour market remains the idea that this market is a uniform, relatively closed-off segment of the labour market made up of workers who benefit from the high demands for advanced skills. The graduate labour force is presented as the foundation, or in some cases represents the avant garde, of economic progress, built on a strong trust in HE as the development base of the skills and knowledge that employers in knowledge-based sectors are asking for. On top of this there are strongly political assumptions on the instrumental role of HE in increasing the meritocracy of the labour market and as a means for social mobility. These vested interests in encouraging further growth in HE often are intertwined with the economic and political arguments for moving towards a knowledge-based economy. Despite all the critical chorus of academic contributions delineating 27

Graduate Work

powerful counterarguments, the dominant assumptions outlined earlier have not been fundamentally changed or been fundamentally challenged within the public domain. In addition, these critiques are not taken up within the political sphere, even though they provide clear lessons for policymakers. The remainder of the book tries to create more clarity on how we can understand the graduate labour market, interrogating some of the claims outlined earlier. In doing so it potentially can produce a more holistic account whilst updating existing critiques. Before we can do this we need to understand how the graduate labour market has changed over time to show that many of the claims of the dominant understanding of the graduate labour market no longer are justified.

Notes 1. Narratives around the knowledge-based economy can also include a wider set of ideas around the relationship between capital and society, such as the idea of ‘cognitive capitalism’ (Caruso, 2016). 2. For Bell (1973, p.167) knowledge is ‘that which is objectively known, an intellectual property, attached to a group of names and certified by copyright or some other form of social recognition (e.g. publication)’.

28

3 The Changing Graduate Labour Market

This chapter demonstrates that the graduate labour market has fundamentally changed in recent decades. By using secondary statistical data as well as reviewing existing empirical studies, the chapter illustrates some key changes shaping the British graduate labour market. The fast expansion of higher education has been observed and outlined by numerous authors (e.g. Palfreyman and Tapper, 2010; Trow, 2010; Tholen, 2014). Chapter 2 has mentioned the shift from elite to mass HE. For now, we focus on the more recent effects of continuous growth of HE expansion on the labour market. The UK HE participation rate is relatively high compared to most other developed countries and its Initial Participation Rate has been slowly rising in the last decade, from 42 per cent in 2006/2007 to 48 per cent in 2014/2015 (DfE, 2016). This has resulted in a growing numerical share of the workforce with university degrees. Figure 3.1 shows the percentage of 25–64 year olds with degrees in 2001 and 2014 for various OECD countries and, in particular, an increasing share of young workers with university degrees. Figure 3.2 shows the percentage of 24–34 year olds with university degrees for selected OECD countries over time. It is important to note that university participation in the UK is still strongly skewed towards the middle classes (e.g. Elias and Purcell, 2012; Croxford and Raffe, 2014). In particular, in elite universities the share of middle-class students is disproportionate and the difference cannot be explained by exam grades (Jerrim, 2013). Students from socially disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to gain access to more prestigious HE institutions even after accounting for prior educational performance (Boliver, 2013). In 2010, the share of students that came from routine/manual occupational backgrounds was lowest at Oxford University (11.5 per cent) and highest at London Metropolitan University (57.2 per cent). The average for all universities in the UK is 32.3 per cent (Davis, 2010). Roberts (2013) observes that university education is the new normal (or mainstream option) for young people. Yet

Graduate Work OECD average United States United Kingdom Sweden Spain Korea Japan Germany France Australia 0

10

20

30 2014

40

50

2001

Figure 3.1. Share of graduates in 25–64-year-old population range (%) in 2001 and 2014 for selected OECD countries. Source: OECD (2001, p.54) and OECD (2015, p.41).

60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Australia

France

Germany

1991

Spain

2001

Sweden

United Kingdom

United States

2014

Figure 3.2. Share of graduates in 24–34-year-old population range (%) in 1991, 2001, and 2014 for selected OECD countries. Source: OECD (2001, p.54) and OECD (2015, p.41).

elsewhere (Roberts, 2010) he also points out that only for the upper middle class is participation accompanied by a complete sense of entitlement and normality, as roughly half of middle-class youngsters do not go to university. In other words, there are plenty of differences within the growing middle classes when it comes to access and attainment. 30

The Changing Graduate Labour Market

Growth of High-skilled Jobs So with this growing supply of graduates, what happened with the demand for them within the labour market? This is not an easy question to answer. First, we have to be careful. Those with university degrees over time have moved into a wide range of jobs as well as new occupations having been created, up(or down)graded for a wider range of jobs. These are a few key trends that are worth addressing here. A common observation is that the demand for education has increased with occupational change that favours the highly skilled. A growing body of literature on labour markets in advanced economies has identified a trend towards polarization in the type of jobs generated in advanced economies in terms of both their skill requirements and their remuneration (see McIntosh, 2013, for a review of the evidence). This is demonstrated by changes in occupational structure and in particular the increase of managerial and professional jobs (in both absolute and relative terms). Table 3.1 shows the absolute and relative changes between 2000 and 2015 for major occupational groups. Next to the growth of the lower-skilled service workers, we can see the stark rise in the numbers of managers, professionals, and technicians/associate professionals over the last ten years.

Table 3.1. Occupational change in the UK between 2000 and 2015. 2000 2015 (1000s) (1000s)

Managers Professionals Technicians and associate professionals Clerks Service workers and shop and market sales workers Skilled agricultural and fishery workers Craft and related trades workers Plant and machine operators and assemblers Elementary occupations

Share of total Growth 2000 2015 employment 2000 (%) (%)

Share of total employment 2015 (%)

Difference

2412 5880 1939

3329 7149 2581

38.0 21.6 33.2

8.8 21.4 7.1

11.0 23.7 8.6

2.2 2.2 1.5

4609 5251

3444 6779

27.4 29.1

16.8 19.1

11.4 22.5

5.4 3.3

270

359

33.1

1.0

1.2

0.2

2879

2186

24.1

10.5

7.2

3.3

1133

1034

8.7

4.1

3.4

0.7

3052

3316

8.7

11.1

11.0

0.1

Source: Cedefop database (2017).

31

Graduate Work

Demand for Skill? Does the growth in professionals and managerial professionals signify an increased demand for graduate workers? Many have observed that in recent decades there has been a strong employment growth for both the lower skilled as well as higher skilled, with those in the middle experiencing a decline in employment opportunities. Often economists have used wages as a proxy for skill levels, observing that mid-skilled occupations have declined, whilst highskilled and low-skilled occupations have grown, leading to a ‘U-shaped’ graph or hourglass figure with managerial and professional jobs representing the high-skilled occupations. There exists now a large and growing body of empirical research showing the relative decline of mid-skilled jobs and expansion of low- and high-skilled jobs, in particular for the United States (e.g. Wright and Dwyer, 2003; Autor and Dorn, 2009; Acemoglu and Autor, 2011) and the United Kingdom (Goos and Manning, 2007; Plunkett and Pessoa, 2013). There is considerable heterogeneity among European countries (FernandezMacias, 2012; Nellas and Olivieri, 2012) in the extent to which they have experienced this polarization. It is thought that, in particular, a decline in routine work has caused the demand for the middle occupations to fall. Many analysts of job polarization in developed economies have argued for the so-called ‘routine-biased technological change’ (RBTC) hypothesis: the idea that declining, mid-skilled occupations are those that are most ‘routine’ and therefore easily replaced by computers (Autor et al., 2003; Goos and Manning, 2007; Goos et al., 2014); others point at the role of expanding international trade and offshoring (Blinder, 2007; Grossman and RossiHansberg, 2008; Acemoglu and Autor, 2011). All of these observe a growing demand for the non-routine cognitive occupations: managerial, professional, and technical occupations. Yet others have pointed at supply-side factors as the dominant explanation for the hollowing out of the occupational distribution (Mishel et al., 2013). The general upskilling of the workforce, female labour market participation, and immigration and welfare reform are thought to be equally important (McIntosh, 2013; Salvatori, 2015). It is also important to note that not everyone agrees to what extent hollowing out has occurred in the UK and why it has happened. Holmes and Mayhew (2012, see also 2010), for instance, find limited evidence of polarization in wage distributions. Jobs continuing around the middle of the wage distribution did not massively disappear, but the authors suggest that job titles have been upgraded. The result is that what are seen as ‘good jobs’ continue to earn middle wages despite higher-status job titles. Examples are found in managerial jobs, in the retail and wholesale sector, and in financial intermediation which show great variation in earnings within these groups. Recently, Salvatori (2015) has found that polarization is a 32

The Changing Graduate Labour Market

non-graduate phenomenon. The decline of middling occupations is entirely accounted for by non-graduates who have seen their relative numbers decrease and the distribution of their employment shift towards the bottom of the occupational skill distribution. The increase at the top is entirely accounted for by compositional changes, as a result of the increase in the number of graduates since the 1990s. Employment has not polarized for graduates, but has become less concentrated in top occupations, especially in the 2000s, and graduates have shifted towards the bottom. A US-based study showed that in the last decade and a half, graduate workers have moved down the occupational ladder and have begun to perform jobs traditionally performed by lower-skilled workers (Beaudry et al., 2016). After 2000 the demand for those who can perform cognitive tasks often associated with high educational skills has been in decline in the US. The authors dryly observe that at this point, ‘having a college degree is only partly about obtaining access to high-paying managerial and technology jobs—it is also about beating out less educated workers for barista and clerical-type jobs’ (pp.S201–S202). An important problem with many of these analyses is that they use wages as a proxy for an occupation’s skill level, ranking occupations on a spectrum from low- to high-skilled on this basis. In addition, the term ‘skilled’ is often used as a synonym for educated. Formal education is a traditional skill measure that is widely used. As being educated is found to be positively related to wages at the occupational level, high-, middle-, and low-skilled workers are thought to be high-, middle-, and low-paid. Yet this is problematic as it assumes that education provides skills which then form the basis for the pecuniary rewards for labour. Although this may sound reasonable and rational, wages are determined by many factors other than skill level. For graduates, for example, we know that not all skills are equally rewarded in the labour market (Liu and Grusky, 2013). So the hourglass literature is only of limited use in understanding the demand for graduates. Is there any other evidence available? There is no shortage of predictions regarding future skills and employment trends. The European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (Cedefop, 2016) predicts a 13.8 per cent increase in the employment of workers with high levels of qualification (International Standard Classification of Education [ISCED] levels 5 and 6) between 2015 and 2025. This is distinctly higher than the growth in medium-educated workers (7.9 per cent) and loweducated workers (–24.1 per cent). The UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES) predicts an increase of 27.3 per cent in the share of workplaces that will be taken by those with university-level education (Qualifications and Credit Framework [QCF] levels 4–8) between 2012 and 2022 (Wilson et al., 2014, p.109), from 40.3 to 51.3 per cent. However, it has still not become clear 33

Graduate Work

from their analysis whether this represents supply or demand. Despite their best efforts it is rather hard to make accurate predictions due to the complexity of economic and workplace developments. What we do know is that compared to other countries, the UK is not the high-skilled powerhouse that some believe it to be. Holmes (2014) finds that between 1998 and 2008, low-skill occupations increased by a larger share than high-skill ones whereas in most European countries, growth in higher-skill jobs dominated over growth in low-skill jobs in this period. In replacing those middle-level jobs, the UK has shifted far more towards lower-skilled service work than many other European countries. There is additional strong evidence that graduate numbers exceed the growth in employment in high-skill jobs (Dolphin et al., 2014; Mishel et al., 2012 for the US). One report from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) (2015) calculates that a declining share (not number) of English graduates (of working age) now work in what can be considered or rated as ‘high skill employment’, diminishing from 70.9 per cent in 2006 (second quarter) to 66.4 per cent in 2015 (second quarter). The share of nongraduates working in these jobs also slightly decreased from 22.7 per cent to 21.3 per cent within this period. For young workers (21–30 year olds), these trends are even more notable with only 57 per cent of those graduates working in these occupations in 2015 (down from 62.3 per cent in 2006). Of course, the problem is how we define high-skill jobs. In many studies, such as the BIS study, they are defined as Standard Occupation Classification (SOC) codes 1–3. SOC 1–3 includes managers, directors, professional occupations, and associate professional and technical occupations. In European countries only 56 per cent of managers, 78 per cent of professionals, and 44 per cent of technicians and associate professionals deemed tertiary-level education necessary to do their job (Cedefop, 2015, p.32). This brings us to the growing body of literature that has observed graduates working in jobs that do not require their qualifications (over-qualification) and/or skills (over-skilled). These tend to be based on the workers’ own selfreporting. Various studies show that over-qualification is widespread among (new) graduates, in particular those in the UK. Verhaest and van de Velden (2010) examined the incidence of over-education in relation to the jobs held among graduates six months and five years after graduation in fifteen European countries and Japan (using REFLEX data). After Spain, the UK has the highest incidence of over-education in relation to jobs held for new graduates (41 per cent, compared with the European average of 26 per cent), but, after 4.5 years, far fewer UK graduates reported being over-educated in relation to their job (20.4 per cent compared with the European average of 15.6 per cent). Similarly Cedefop (2015, p.34) found that, based on a largescale survey, the UK has the second highest rate (around 18 per cent) of 34

The Changing Graduate Labour Market

graduates employed in jobs that demand lower qualifications than their own (after Ireland). A large study of recent UK graduates found up to 40 per cent of those that graduated in 2009 remained in non-graduate employment, eighteen or thirty months after graduation (Purcell et al., 2013). They also found a sharp increase in the share of graduates working in non-graduate jobs after graduation compared with a cohort that graduated in 1999. Over-qualification and over-skilling (and levels of graduate unemployment) are only indirect measures of the demand for graduates. Whether graduates are demanded for their skills or whether it is down to credentialism remains a key question. An important issue is what we understand to be ‘suitable’ work for graduates. We will come back to this issue, as well as the question of whether graduate work should be seen as necessarily high-skilled work. For now, let us move to what type of jobs graduate workers perform.

Where Do Graduates Work? First, we should have a look at the occupational distribution, using the conventional major groups found in standard occupational classification. Table 3.2 shows the share of graduates for each group for 2002, 2009, and 2015. It shows that, perhaps as expected, professional occupations are most likely to be university-educated and process, plant, and machine operatives the least. Jobs of managers and senior officials and those in associate professional and technical occupations also are popular destinations for graduates. It also shows a growth in the share of graduates in all groups. This means that the whole labour market is ‘graduatizing’, albeit numbers are likely to remain relatively low in some low-skilled occupations. Striking growth has occurred in administrative and secretarial occupations, personal service occupations, and sales and customer service occupations that in 2015 reported figures of 22.9 per cent, 15.4 per cent, and 13.3 per cent, respectively. This happened within the last thirteen years: a relatively short time span. Of course, these groups are not of equal sizes and so Table 3.3 shows the absolute number of graduates working in each occupational group (using SOC2010 classification) for April to June 2015 for illustration. The table shows that the majority of graduates work in the first three groups—in what by some are classified as high-skilled occupations. We can also see that as much as 21 per cent of graduates, 2.1 million, are employed elsewhere. There is a growing overlap in the employment distribution between graduates and non-graduates. Gardiner and Corlett (2015) observe that graduates are far less likely to be in routine occupations than non-graduates, but this gap has shrunk as graduate numbers have grown. A new set of occupations has 35

Table 3.2. Share of UK graduates employed for major occupational groups in 2002, 2009, and 2015. Managers and senior officials

Professional occupations

Associate professional and technical occupations

Administrative and secretarial occupations

Skilled trades occupations

Personal service occupations

Sales and customer service occupations

26.8% 33.1% 41.4% 54.5

66.8% 72.5% 78.7% 17.8

27.5% 36.1% 46.4% 68.7

9.5% 14.2% 22.9% 141.1

2.5% 4.4% 7.0% 180.0

4.8% 9.2% 15.4% 220.8

4.7% 7.6% 13.3% 183.0

2002 2009 2015 Growth 2002–2015 (%)

Process, plant, and machine operatives

1.6% 2.9% 5.7% 256.3

Elementary Occupations

Total

1.9% 3.8% 7.4% 289.5

17.9% 24.2% 31.5% 76.0

Note: SOC2000 groups. Source: Labour Force Survey (ONS, 2015).

Table 3.3. Absolute graduate employment for major occupational groups for April to June 2015. Number of workers (thousands)

Total 1 Managers, directors, and senior officials 2 Professional occupations 3 Associate professional and technical occupations 4 Administrative and secretarial occupations 5 Skilled trades occupations 6 Caring, leisure, and other service occupations 7 Sales and customer service occupations 8 Process, plant, and machine operatives 9 Elementary occupations Note: SOC2010 groups. Source: Labour Force Survey (ONS, 2015).

Share of graduates

Number of graduates (thousands)

Share of total number of graduates

30,950

31%

9718

100%

3182 6083 4289 3337 3352 2891 2354 1965 3377

39% 74% 43% 23% 7% 15% 14% 5% 7%

1244 4483 1831 754 225 439 325 106 240

13% 46% 19% 8% 2% 5% 3% 1% 2%

The Changing Graduate Labour Market

also appeared that graduates have moved into but which we do not know how to define. As Brynin (2013) describes it, ‘While some occupations have become wholly graduate and others remain wholly non-graduate, many occupations are now partially graduate’ (p.285). Purcell and Elias (2004) distinguish traditional graduate from three other categories of graduate occupations. The first are the modern graduate occupations: newer professions where an undergraduate degree course became the normal route into the occupations such as software programmers, journalists, and primary school teachers. The second are ‘new graduate occupations’ which have entrée requirements that have been increased to include university degrees or new or expanding areas of employment requiring degrees. Examples are marketing and sales managers, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, and management accountants. ‘Niche graduate occupations’ are typically non-graduate employment areas in which graduates find opportunities to use their degree for growing specialist niches. Examples include leisure and sports managers, hotel and accommodation managers, nurses, and actors. The other occupations are regarded as non-graduate occupations.1 Those who work in newer or (previously) non-graduate occupations are not necessarily overqualified; for instance, it is dangerous to assume that these graduates are necessarily being ‘underutilized’. We know from studies in which graduates move into previously non-graduate occupations that in some cases the job content has been modified to take advantage of graduatelevel skills and knowledge, and thus ‘upskilled’ (Mason, 1996, 2002). Green and Zhu (2010) show that a majority of those graduates in jobs that do not require a university qualification (overqualified) indicated that they were not felt over-skilled for their current role (74 per cent in 2006). Yet OkaySomerville and Scholarios (2013) found that British graduates working in associate professional and technical occupations had a lower incidence of skill utilization as well as job control, opportunity for skills development, job security, and pay compared to those in traditional graduate occupations. The fact that a growing pool of graduates finds jobs within the labour market does not necessarily mean that these jobs could not have been performed by workers without a tertiary education. There are more questions than answers when it comes to skill utilization.

Wages There is a strong consensus that graduates as a group enjoy a solid premium in wages over non-graduates, but by how much is a matter of debate and dependent on methodological choices. For instance, Walker and Zhu (2013) find that men with a degree earn 28 per cent more than those without one, 37

Graduate Work

while for women the differential is 53 per cent. This results in an extra £252,000 over their lifetime for women and £168,000 for men.2 Britton et al. (2015) find the ratio between graduate earnings and non-graduate earnings to be large, typically over 2 for men and over 3 for women (p.41). Interestingly, the Bank of England found a declining average effect of having a degree on wages between 1995 and 2015. The average wage increase a graduate would have over someone with no qualifications fell from 45 per cent to 34 per cent (Abel et al., 2016, p.18).3 Despite these mixed messages we also need to be wary of what these studies tell us about the relationship between higher education and wages. There are serious methodological issues as well as issues of principle with these studies; they are too simplistic. Most fundamentally, we cannot isolate the role of education in workers’ earnings. As Marginson observes (2015, pp.6–7): Earnings are affected by social background, by family income, by type of secondary school attended, by social and family networks at the point of entry to higher education, by networks in the transition to work and networks through the career, by field of study, by the status and resources of the higher education institution, and by the level of the qualification. Earnings are also affected by custom and hierarchy in professions and workplaces, by the system of wage determination, by the industrial balance of power, and by the configurations and fluctuations of national and regional economies.

We also cannot assume that the increase in rewards for some occupations is necessarily caused by an increasing demand for advanced academic skills. Here the role of institutions, organizational change, and closure strategies of certain professions are major forces. Liu and Grusky (2013) examined the relationship between workplace skills and skill premiums between 1979 and 2010 for the US. The authors found that only for analytic skills was there a stark rise in returns, along with a modest growth for managerial and nurturing skills. The other skills have remained stable or declined. The authors observe that the increase in income inequality is a consequence of changing returns to workplace skills rather than, as is typically supposed, changing returns to skills learned or selected in school. Another problem is that these economic studies make projections from the past to calculate the premiums in the future. Earning differentials in the future may also not reflect the past. There is little evidence to suggest that the premium on university education is to grow in the future. In fact, there are signs that university graduates are increasingly exposed to low- and middle-paid work (see also Brynin, 2013). Research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (2016) has found evidence to suggest that the increase in graduate premiums may go down in the future as the labour market will have trouble creating graduate-level (in particular managerial) jobs. It states: 38

The Changing Graduate Labour Market There are now signs that it might be reaching a natural end, with some small falls in the wages of graduates in the private sector relative to school leavers in the most recent years. Further increases in the number of graduates could start to erode the graduate wage premium in the future.

In the US, graduate workers have experienced a cumulative decline of 2 per cent in real average hourly wages between 2007 and 2014 (Gould, 2015). For the UK, BIS (2015) reports that the earnings gap between non-graduates and graduates in the working-age population has narrowed. Graduate earnings have decreased from around 55 per cent to 45 per cent higher than nongraduate earnings between 2006 and 2015. The postgraduate earnings premium over graduates has been largely stable at around 20 per cent of graduate earnings over the same time period. For new graduates, earnings remain uncertain and highly uneven between subjects, which causes great concern (Paton, 2014). Longitudinal research by the Department of Education (2016) found that for those who graduated in 2004, the median earnings were £16,500 one year later, increasing to £22,000 after three years, £26,000 five years later, and rising to £31,000 in 2014. Yet for the lowest quartile of this cohort their median earnings one year after graduation were just £11,500, increasing to £16,500 after three years and £19,000 and £20,000 after five and ten years, respectively. Graduate premiums also do not take notice of the financial implications of student debt (Kemp-King, 2016). The increase in tuition fees and the decline of financial support for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, within the UK context, have further complicated the relationship between educational experience and graduate premiums. Due to the retreat of the state, a growing importance of family support shapes the well-being and academic and labour market success of those enrolled in HE (Antonucci, 2016). Graduate premiums also hide a great deal of heterogeneity in earnings. High incomes at the top end skew these figures. I have shown elsewhere (Tholen, 2014) that the growth in earnings inequality within the graduate labour market is unlike the rest of the labour market. Between 1994 and 2011, the dispersion of wages between graduates was much faster than for nongraduates.4 Increasing dispersion in the returns on graduate education in the UK has also been detected by Green and Zhu (2010) over the period 1992 to 2006, when the numbers graduating increased sharply. Brynin (2013) shows that due to the increase of graduates in the labour market, graduate-dense occupations no longer are necessarily well-paid. There is an increasing overlap between wages for graduates and school leavers. For those at the bottom of the wage distribution, learning has not led to earnings (Brown et al., 2011). High graduate earners have taken off compared to the rest of the graduate labour market population. Holmes and Mayhew (2012) show that between 1994 and 39

Graduate Work

2007, the UK graduate premium has fallen for all except those in the top 20 per cent. The authors observe that ‘Those outside the top 20 percent now more closely resemble those working in mid-range occupations rather than those in top jobs’ (p.1). Similarly, in the US the average earnings for most graduates have stagnated since 2000. Between February 2000 and February 2016, the real average hourly earnings for graduates with only a Bachelor degree (16–64 year olds) rose from $29.79 to merely $31.40 (Kroeger et al., 2016). Within this group, only the top earners have seen a significant growth in earnings (Mishel et al., 2012). At the same time, wage inequality in general has increased but much of the growth has been within occupations (e.g. between age groups, regions, or sectors) rather than across them (Mishel et al., 2013; Lindley and Machin, 2011). There is evidence that this is particularly the case with graduate occupations (Brown et al., 2011).

Conclusion Like most other Western countries, the UK labour market has seen its share of (associate) professional and managerial jobs increase. To what extent this has been caused by technological change remains a topic of debate (Goldin and Katz, 2008; Bogliacino, 2014). What we do know is that there has been a widespread graduatizing in all corners of the job structure. Not that long ago, in 1991, only 53 per cent of those in professional occupations were graduates and this figure was less than 20 per cent in managerial and associate professional jobs (Holmes and Mayhew, 2015, p.3). The growth of skilled occupations may have partly been induced by the growing number of graduates in the labour force. Yet the question of how the influx of graduates relates to the demand for their skills remains unclear. To understand the role of higher educational credentials we may want to move aside from perceiving degrees as containers of human capital and look for sociological understanding of what the meaning is of degrees and education within the world of work. In this chapter I also observe that we do not know exactly whether the demand has kept up with supply but more fundamentally, it seems hard to measure as we do not have a shared understanding of what a graduate occupation is. Also we do not know what makes a graduate occupation distinct from a non-graduate occupation—what makes graduate work distinct from non-graduate work. In order to understand this a more in-depth investigation is needed. The following five chapters will undertake precisely that, empirically exploring the work of graduate workers in four occupations in a wide sense, concentrating on access (chapter 4), the meaning of education (chapter 5), skills (chapter 6), occupations (chapter 7), and careers (chapter 8). 40

The Changing Graduate Labour Market

Notes 1. Later on Elias and Purcell (2013) put aside this classification. Instead, graduate occupations are now defined by to what extent they utilize specialist, orchestration, and communication expertise, leading to three types of graduate occupations (Experts, Orchestrators, Communicators). 2. A previous report by BIS was less optimistic (Conlon and Patrignani, 2011). It estimated that the mean net graduate premium over a lifetime associated with an undergraduate degree is approximately £108,000 (£121,000 for men, £82,000 for women). 3. Over the same period, the wage premiums over those with no qualification for those with only A-levels and those with only GCSEs also fell, but by far less. 4. However, Britton et al. (2015) found that wage inequality is lower for graduates than for non-graduates.

41

4 Recruitment and Selection of Graduate Workers

Introduction This first of five empirical chapters deals with recruitment and selection. How do graduate workers access jobs? Who is eligible to enter graduate roles and why? What does it take to be recruited and selected in both entry-level and more senior roles? Here, I include the process of finding a pool of capable people to apply for employment (recruitment), as well as the process of choosing from that pool a person or persons to be employed in alignment with management goals and requirements (selection). Through the recruitment and selection process individuals try to exchange their skills, qualifications, experience, and attributes for employment and wages. Within the idealized version explored in chapter 2, the recruitment of graduates is aligned to the nature of the modern graduate labour market. It is perceived that within knowledge-driven, professionalized graduate labour markets, there is an increasing need for employers to rely on procedures that will seek out those candidates with the best skills and knowledge to perform the (increasingly complex) work. This has led to an increasingly exact and scientific approach to recruitment and selection, to link candidates to jobs based on rational, objective, as well as meritocratic principles. Through increasing formalization and procedural rigour it is believed that recruitment and selection are getting better at finding the right candidate (CIPD, 2015). Finding the right candidate by definition is about discriminating against all applicants except those deemed the best candidates for the roles advertised. Employers are not necessarily looking for the most qualified or most technically skilled candidate (Protsch and Solga, 2015). As with any other type of labour market, employers hire workers based on many factors, not just qualifications; a wide array of skills (basic, interpersonal, analytical, etc.), as well as personality traits and demographic background, influences who obtains

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which jobs (see Ashley, 2010; Dafou, 2009). The graduate labour market is no exception. Furthermore, the recruitment and selection outcomes are a mediated process between employers’ views and actions as well as candidates’ presentation and actions. Graduate roles generally tend not to be explicitly distinguished from nongraduate roles in the literature on recruitment and selection, apart from in studies that look explicitly at the elite labour market (e.g. Ashley et al., 2015; Rivera, 2015). As such, there is no theoretical framework or theory of graduate recruitment. This chapter does not claim that the recruitment process for graduates’ roles is indeed necessarily distinct. Yet a closer look at how software engineers, press officers, financial analysts, and laboratory scientists are recruited and selected reveals that particular mainstream assumptions on the nature of the recruitment and selection within graduate occupations need to be re-examined. This chapter shows that recruiting and selecting suitable candidates is a deeply contextualized, situational, and occupation-dependent process. In it, hard skills and knowledge do not have a privileged status. The chapter shows that despite the differences between occupations, sectors, and positions there are indeed few general principles that define the recruitment and selection process for graduates.

The Process of Picking Winners The recruitment and selection of graduate workers vary enormously between organizations, sectors, levels, and the roles that are recruited for. There is, of course, no general recruitment strategy or process implemented universally or exclusively for graduate occupations. The existing heterogeneity within employers comes with a wide range of preferences and thus makes patterns of recruitment and selection extremely difficult to establish, predict, or aggregate (Keep and James, 2010, p.5). It has been well established in the academic literature that uncertainty defines the process of recruitment and selection. Economists stress that employers do not have perfect or complete information. Information asymmetries and shortages ensure that employers do not know the ‘true’ characteristics in the pool of candidates; nor do they know what they will be once the candidates are selected (known as the agency problem, see Shapiro, 2005). According to Human Capital Theory (Schultz, 1971; Mincer, 1974; Becker, 1964), employers make decisions based on the expected productivity of candidates linked to, for instance, work experience or educational qualification (which makes workers more productive). Others attest that worker characteristics such as education (but also sex or age) also ‘signal’ or ‘screen’ intrinsic 43

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productivity (Spence, 1973; Arrow, 1973; Stiglitz, 1975). Employers cannot directly observe who will yield the largest productivity once in a job and therefore employers use proxies or signals. Particular characteristics would be a signal of higher productivity (or lower propensity to be absent) based on previous experience. These can be cognitive (such as years of schooling) or non-cognitive (ethnicity/gender). Higher levels of education for instance can be desired not because they raise productivity, but because they certify that the candidate is a good or suitable worker. Employers believe that educational credentials are positively correlated with greater ability compared with low ability, as low-ability workers are less likely to invest in obtaining advanced qualifications. Other signals such as a criminal record may be seen as undesirable. Similarly, periods of unemployment can also be seen as a signal of low productivity (Lockwood, 1991). If the applicant has been considered unworthy of jobs in the past, why should the applicant be considered worthy now? By such signalling and screening, these characteristics are used to ‘sort’ workers according to attributes that are unobserved within the recruitment and selection process. Within the personnel management literature, recruitment and selection are predominantly based on matching the person specifications with the candidate who best embodies these. The closeness of the match is assessed in the recruitment and selection process. The knowledge management paradigm (Davenport and Prusak, 2000; Botha et al., 2008) prescribes that organizations are preoccupied with developing, applying, and sharing knowledge within the firm to gain competitive advantage. Identifying the skills, knowledge, and capabilities that are deemed vital to the organization is therefore crucial in the process. Here, developing talent aligned with the strategic business goals is also associated with an increasingly scientific and precise approach to recruitment and selection processes. Brown and Hesketh (2004) describe how talent management has influenced the recruitment and selection process of large UK companies. Their study confirmed that attracting, hiring, and managing talent was of immense importance for companies and employing these ‘special’ individuals was seen as a great competitive advantage. In finding the talent, a quasi-scientific approach was adopted to ensure objectivity and improve the chances of finding the talent needed. This is in line with the idea that in the knowledge economy the optimal use of human capital available in the workforce is paramount, as the knowledge and skills of knowledge workers are heralded as the pillars of economic competitiveness. If indeed knowledge workers’ labour market position and educational background define their work, then particular ways of connecting workers with jobs can be identified. Yet the case studies reveal that the process of recruitment and selection, although often designed to increase rationality, in practice is rather far removed from a scientific approach. This is not because of the employers’ lack of critical faculties but due to the fact that 44

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employers do not know exactly what they are looking for and allow deeply personal feelings, biases, and intuitions to interfere. From the interviews it emerges that the first issue is that uncertainty is not merely an obstacle; the selection criteria cannot be defined in detail. This is best exemplified in the work of software engineers. Recruiting software engineers is an intricate task. The skills of engineers are chiefly assessed through examining previous programming projects undertaken. And thus the process involves ascertaining whether candidates’ previous work experience fits with the demands of the job at hand. Given the specific nature of many software projects, it not always obvious how well a candidate can deliver the required work. This in particular is an issue for contract jobs where there is no time to train workers. In addition, employers themselves do not know what it is they are looking for and their criteria are therefore rather rudimentary. One engineer, Peter, comments: Um . . . I mean some companies will just do it on what languages do you know, what languages have you programmed in—okay, that kind of ticks the box.

Employers recruiting software engineers may not have the exact knowledge of what needs to be done and thus finding out how able are the various candidates is a very messy process and relies heavily on networks and previous work experience. They may know what they want but not what they need. What is desired is an engineer that can come in, hit the ground running, and make computer systems work. One IT recruiter, Abigail, noticed how the requirements change during the recruitment process: Sometimes that can change dramatically, especially with new roles. They have an idea of what they want and then when they start interviewing that can really change quite dramatically. We may do a search of present candidates and then the client changes their mind so we would restart the search based on what they were now looking for. [ . . . ] So sometimes they will want somebody experienced in a particular area in terms of their technical ability, but then once they have interviewed they may decide ‘Actually we want somebody who is more at trainee level so we can build them up to this level where we want them to be’, and hence the salary level will drop.

In other cases, the employer may know what they need but may not know how to recruit and select. The same recruiter told me that she: . . . worked with clients that have just no experience of the recruitment process so they are not very good at getting what they need from the interview [ . . . ] sometimes they need a bit more support in terms of just what sort of questions to ask. What sort of questions they can’t ask as well in terms of discrimination, for example.

The recruitment process for engineers tends to vary in procedure. It can range from a short informal conversation for contract engineers to a standardized 45

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whole-day process for large corporations. Some of these also use psychometric tests, although they are not deemed overly important (and only used if recruiters are in doubt). Technical tests, on the other hand, are widely used. This can be on the computer or it can be a written test. They may get candidates to look at some bits of code, asking them to comment and find solutions. An example of such a test is explained by Susan, a junior software engineer working in the oil and gas industry: . . . so if you wanted to carry out this particular basic task, there was an array of numbers and if you want to sort the arrays of numbers in the right order then how would you write that in C++ codes, but just with a pen and paper kind of thing, if that makes sense.

And yet it is acknowledged that it is very difficult and, according to some, impossible to distinguish a good from a bad software engineer in the recruitment process. This may be the reason that networks are so important for contract engineers to remain employed, relying on their reputation as a good developer (which can include more than just ability to code). Some engineers comment on how poor employers and agencies are at establishing the capabilities of an individual engineer by mainly identifying the technologies that they are familiar with. But in many cases it is accepted that the recruitment and selection process can only do so much. The process can be very short. Software engineer Winston recalls, ‘I got an email from my now boss and he said do you want to come for an interview and I did and it was a quarter of an hour. It was just a chat and then I got the job.’ Often work experience serves as an insurance that the person will be a good worker but in no sense does it guarantee a good match or a good programmer. For all four occupations, reservations were expressed regarding how accurate the selection process can be in finding the right person. For laboratory scientists, tests may deal with some of the generic knowledge; the exact demands of the job are difficult to measure in a formal interview. Sally, a director of research in a small bioscience company, notes: . . . it ends up as a bit of a lottery because, you know, the sorts of things you’re trying to assess are, you know, people’s commitment to hard work, their organization, and just their diligence and sort of accuracy. And we don’t find it very easy to, you know, come up with a sort of an interview process that lets us get to the bottom of that.

The serendipity of outcome causes feelings of comfort as well as frustration: I think it’s a bit pot luck really, I think most of the people who attend the interview are probably at the same sort of level—it’s just a question of luck. [Trevor, senior scientist, biotechnology]

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A third aspect of recruitment that strays from the traditional understanding of graduate recruitment relates to the stability of selection choices. What is required is not only difficult to establish but it is subject to change depending on the supply of candidates. Sam, a head of pharmacology in a medium-sized pharmaceutical company, expressed that his desires or needs are not fixed but depend on the number of candidates: So definitely would change my requirements based on the number of people we have. And you do get more stringent on them. Again though, I really don’t think I would pull out one specific one and say that is absolutely the driver. I think again it comes down to the picture that you build of somebody. But there, you know, generally I would be looking for better fits. It might be more relevant experience, it might be more years of experience even. It will give me a chance to see someone like that. It might be the lab they’ve come from, if I thought they had particular strengths or benefits that one will get from somebody who had been in that group, I mean.

Studies by Brencˇicˇ (2010) and Modestino et al. (2015) confirm that employee skill requirements rise when there is a larger supply of relevant jobseekers, and are lowered when there are few applicants.

Selection as an Interactional Process How can we theorize how employers select graduates? There is a large positivist body of literature examining which types of skills and characteristics are linked to increased employability, based on econometric modelling (e.g. Heijke et al., 2003; Teijeiro et al., 2013). For instance, recently Humburg and van der Velden (2015) found through a large choice experiment with European employers that graduate candidates with CV attributes which signal relatively high occupation-specific human capital and interpersonal skills would have the highest chances to be recruited and selected. Yet the authors also observe that: . . . employers’ demand for skills varies substantially [ . . . ] Remarkably, background variables, such as employers’ country, occupational field, firm size or international market exposure, explain little of the variance in preferences: the relative importance employers attach to CV attributes and types of skills does not cluster according to characteristics often used to describe and categorize them—the country differences of preferences for master’s degrees and study experience abroad being exceptions. (Humburg and van der Velden, 2015, p.37)1

This heterogeneity was also found in the four case studies. Recruitment and selection of graduates remain highly shaped by the characteristics and specific experiences (including biases) of employers. According to signalling and 47

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screening theories (Spence, 1973, 1974; Arrow, 1973; Stiglitz, 1975), employers evaluate job candidates based on a range of observable personal characteristics (e.g. educational credentials, job experience, race, and sex). But it is accepted that these signals can also be based on stereotypes, cultural perceptions, and individual experiences. We can safely say that this is one of the main reasons that discrimination is so persistent. We know that ethnic minorities still face unequal treatment at the point of recruitment (Quillian, 2006; Pager, 2007; Blommaert et al., 2014). We also know that recruitment and selection are a social process in which employers and recruiters draw on intersubjective notions of worth and value and in which social divisions of gender, class, and ethnicity are reproduced throughout the process (Moss and Tilly, 2001; Brown and Hesketh, 2004; Rivera, 2015). Hiring decisions remain governed by stereotypes and bias which enable employers to organize, rank, and interpret the amount of data provided by job applications (Jewson and Mason, 1986; Curran, 1988; Pager and Karafin, 2009), leading to systematic discrimination. First of all, interpreting information is not straightforward. There is no consensus on what signals mean and when information becomes a signal and why. Miller and Rosenbaum (1997) have observed that employers rely on impressions during interviews and do not use information such as about academic ability. An issue is that employers feel they cannot always trust the information available, doubting educational credentials, employment agencies and tests, and former employers’ valuations. The authors write that employers ‘consequently place strong reliance on information that they can collect personally, conducting brief interviews and trusting their “gut instincts” ’ (p.500). Employers use their own employees and social networks to obtain what they perceive as accurate information. The interaction element of the recruitment and selection process is crucial to understand who gets selected. Cappelli (2015) observes how within the economic literature the recruitment and selection process is presented as a static process in which employers measure applicants across a set list of skill requirements. ‘Skills are seen as coming with the applicant to the job, and job requirements are absolute, such that candidates either have the necessary skills to do a job or not and, if not, they cannot do the job’ (p.254). In recent years, sociologist Lauren Rivera (2011, 2012, 2015) has made great strides in widening our understanding of the recruitment process, in particular for the top end of the labour market. Here, the hiring process is heavily structured around cultural conceptualizations and evaluations of merit that advantage socioeconomically privileged job applicants. The broader consequence of this, Rivera argues, is a skewing of the playing field for these high-paying, high-status jobs, which contributes to the reproduction of elite privilege. Rivera suggests that interviewers seek a ‘cultural fit’ between themselves and 48

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job candidates. Her research also emphasizes the recruitment process is interactional. Evaluators use their own emotional reactions to candidates’ storytelling to judge the candidates’ worth. In the case studies, I did not observe the recruitment and selection directly but they did provide an insight into how employers make decisions and how candidates perceive the competition for jobs. They showed that the demands for skills and competences are not necessarily the demands to perform the role. Neither employers nor candidates should be presented as static or passive forces but are involved within an interactive process that is deeply social, fluid, and flexible. To demonstrate this, I will analyse the recruitment and selection process in the four occupations using two types of criteria that employers employ: suitability and acceptability, which were first distinguished by Jenkins (1984, 1986). Whereas suitability signifies technical and functional-specific criteria of performance, measured in terms of technical and educational qualifications as well as experience, acceptability deals with non-specific criteria which relate to social fit within the organization, such as attitude and manner. Jenkins uses the dichotomy to illuminate that racism within the recruitment process can be observed within the graduate labour market context.2

Suitability What we can call suitability is not necessarily fully based on the skills and ability needed in the labour process; it can be independent of this. Distinguishing skills demanded to perform work tasks and the skills valued and acknowledged during the recruitment and selection process and skill deployment—the skills actually used in the labour process—is important here (James et al., 2013). Workers can offer, supply, or demonstrate— knowingly or unknowingly—particular skills, abilities, and characteristics. We also should not understand suitability as a technical exercise to ascertain how well the skill demand matches the candidate’s skill set. The interviews showed that within the actual interview process, suitability is often expressed in uncertain terms and constructed within an occupational context. I demonstrate this by looking first at two key markers of suitability: technical skills and qualifications.

Technical Skills Technical skills (sometimes named hard skills) typically are abilities acquired through learning and practice. They are required in some shape or form for nearly any job and role. Technical skills are often job- or task-specific. Those 49

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who work in what are deemed graduate occupations are thought to be reliant on technical skills, in particular those associated with higher education, and would require higher education in order to perform or develop them. If graduate work is indeed defined by technical expertise, technical skills should be of prime importance in the recruitment and selection process. Laboratory scientists represent the clearest example of this. During recruitment, employers are looking for candidates that have the exact technical skills needed to perform the research role advertised. The requirements can be quite specific: . . . advanced molecular biology skills, so that is one thing which is very important. We have protein chemistry, we have tissue culture skills. [Sally, director of research, bioscience]

Yet often an exact match on technical skills cannot be made and employers will recruit as close as possible. In other cases, in particular for labour market entrants, the candidates need to have a specific scientific background and technical skills can be developed by on-the-job learning: You’d hope they have the fundamentals but what we do isn’t generally covered in university courses so people have to use their general principles of knowledge to help them understand and develop the skills to work in what we do specifically. [Sean, lab technician, biotechnology]

Likewise, for software engineers there is a strong emphasis on technical skills in the recruitment and selection process. Again, employers tend to be looking for someone with the exact skills set needed, expressing specific skills that they are interested in (despite the difficulty of setting these requirements). In some cases, there is no one in the company who has the expertise to teach new people but, in general, companies do not tend to provide extensive training. The technical requirements can be defined rather narrowly, focusing exclusively on the experience and mastering of particular coding language. In many cases, the technical requirements cannot be specified in detail. In a general sense, employers want to make sure engineers think logically, and are good problem solvers, or in some cases are mathematically minded. Barry, a manager in a small software company, expressed it as follows: I think really what they want is they want to be able to see that they can code and they can get a task done and that they understand what they are doing.

Work experience forms key information in linking technical expertise of the candidate with the employer’s demands. Many employers tend to value if engineers have experience in the full life cycle of software (from conception to delivery). The employers I spoke to tended to be very selective when it came to coding languages. Direct experience with the programming language used is likewise seen as crucial. For new labour market entrants the requirements are 50

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slightly looser but they are expected to have a decent software grounding, for example, to be aware of the principles of software engineering and software life cycle. How technical requirements are tested is also context-specific. Many employers use formal tests but they remain open for interpretation. An HR manager in a small software company reflects: So, you know, we have employed people who have actually not done well on the technical exercise ’cause they hadn’t understood it and it’s not a familiar language or whatever, but they explained what they did and they explained their approach and you could see the way they were analysing it was a way that would work, and they would work with us.

Technical skills turn out to be harder to define than one thinks. For financial analysts, the needed technical skills are hard to define to begin with. Employers want good analytical skills as well as knowledge of practical accountancy principles, although in many cases these can be acquired on the job. Work experience is important for employers for this reason. Numeracy tests and psychological aptitude tests are used but there is no consensus on what they constitute or signify. Technical skills sometimes do not receive much attention at all at the selection stage: I had my line manager asking more specific things about my particular experience and some fairly technical accounting-type questions, which was quite interesting because I hadn’t come across that in interviews previously, where you are sort of put on the spot for your technical knowledge. [Troy, senior financial analyst, public sector]

Technical skills are in other cases not part of the formal process but are assumed from the CV or indirectly covered. Lee, an ex-analyst for a major global investment bank, told me: . . . it was more just through talking about the companies that I have covered or the industry trends and things like that than the technical skills were discussed.

In other cases they were examined explicitly and independently from other suitability criteria. For example, a prestigious investment bank divided out its technical requirement as part of an intensive recruitment day: One person might be grilling you on the technical knowledge, like how you’ve got to come in and work with the business and do you know much about derivative products and have you priced options? [Roy, financial analyst, investment banking]

The technical demands for recruiting and selecting analysts, although in many cases significant and in some cases conditional for being appointed, present only one of many requirements. 51

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The technical skills for press officers are rather hard to delineate. The majority of skills are rather ‘soft’ in nature. The command of written English could be seen as a key technical skill for press officers, and can be tested through writing tests. In many cases the technical expertise of the role is implicit, not outlined in detail, and intertwined with other soft skills required. What are considered technical skills is open to interpretation. They can be measured directly through tests but can also be approached through a much more ephemeral, informal, and feel-based process. There is an occupational dimension to their meaning within the recruitment and selection process. Whether they are dominant (lab scientists), narrowly defined (software engineers), hard to define (press officers), or hard to distinguish (financial analysts) seems to be associated with occupational characteristics such as job tasks and recruitment and selection practices.

Qualifications How important are qualifications in the recruitment and selection process? I will go in depth into the meaning of education within the graduate labour market in chapter 5, so for now I will concentrate on how university qualifications contribute to candidates’ suitability. There is a growing literature within sociology on the role of education in hiring (e.g. Bills, 1988; Van de Werfhorst, 2011; Distasio and Van de Werfhorst, 2016). A key study by Jackson (2007) examined around 5000 British newspaper job advertisements and found that formal educational qualifications are important to some employers. For higher professional occupations, academic qualifications were demanded in 83 per cent of the advertisements and in about half of those relating to lower professional and higher managerial jobs. But for the rest of the labour market, qualifications were not often mentioned. What the exact weight of qualifications is in the selection process remains unclear. Preliminary results of a large study on the skill and educational requirements in online job adverts suggest that educational qualifications are not mentioned by 30 per cent and 40 per cent of adverts for professionals and managers, respectively (Souto-Otero, 2016). The workers in the four case studies predominantly express uncertainty and little consensus on how qualifications work towards their employability. The large majority agree that qualifications are of decreasing importance over a career’s span. It is also accepted that for new labour entrants a degree is now a prerequisite. For software engineers, an occupation where the relationship with education is complex (see chapter 5), there is certainly this expectation from most employers. The experience of a recruiter who works mainly with small- and medium-size companies was that the minimum requirement has 52

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become a degree. He estimates that 80 per cent of his clients definitely take education into account and in almost all cases expect a degree. The role of the institution is far less important. The discipline of study has to be related to software engineering. IT degrees such as computer science and software engineering but also degrees such as maths, physics, or even engineering are acceptable. Humanities or social science degrees would not be looked at. Employers in some cases demand a minimum level of 2:1 or above. A minority of employers are very selective in terms of institutions/ grades and the type of A-level and A-level grades they will consider: If you get a CV from someone who’s been at a university that was previously a polytechnic and they’ve got a 2 or a 2:2, we're not going to want to see them. [Rose, manager, IT company]

A degree represents more than just technical skills. According to one employer it ‘demonstrates that that person has been through education, they’ve studied various concepts, they are a self-starter, they can work individually, and everything else’. Another employer mentioned that candidates with degrees tend to be more professional, reliable, they can sit down and meet deadlines, and they can deliver to target. Experienced engineers noticed that the requirements over time were increasingly asking for graduates from specific computer-related degrees as companies were no longer willing to train other types of graduates. Yet for the current extant generation of engineers, not only is there a much wider range of educational backgrounds but also their employment opportunities are far less dominated by formal education qualifications. For more senior roles there is little need for qualifications if the applicant has relevant work experience: I’ve worked with several people who’ve had degrees but not degrees in related fields. I’ve worked with people who are managing software departments that have degrees in chemical engineering or geography and that kind of thing. [Paul, senior software engineer, manufacturing] I think it gets me into the door and that’s it. The most important thing, like I said, was that I played around with Linux. [Frank, software engineer, IT company] No, I’ve not been asked about my degree possibly since my first job. [Ewart, software engineer, IT company] The degree is literally just the foundation to build that to help you get your foot in the door through that, but it’s ultimately the experience that will matter at the end of the day. [Jennifer, IT recruiter]

There are signs that apprenticeship routes into software engineering are becoming more accepted. Yet many expressed that access to the occupation without a relevant university degree has become closed off. As described 53

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earlier, the university credential represents a certain readiness and understanding of the core concepts as to a large extent the qualification reduces the risk of workers not being work-ready: If somebody, say, is self-taught, that’s great, but again to the employer, with them being self-taught, are they familiar with all the formal concepts that the universities would teach [ . . . ] All those formal principles, will they know that? Because if they’re self-taught, how much can they actually cover on their own? [Jennifer, IT recruiter]

For laboratory scientists, educational qualification is crucial to access the occupation. A relevant degree is a prerequisite: Qualification is one of the first things you look at, it’s a qualifier to get into the process largely. Once people are in the interview process, then it’s unlikely we would consider their level of qualification. It’s more about their personal characteristics at that point. [Eric, CFO, pharmaceutical company]

The type of degree is seen as more important than the institution, although prestigious institutions do seem to give an advantage (also found by Moore et al., 2016). Because of the specific nature of many analytical tasks and technologies of laboratory positions, a close relationship between the subject of a candidate’s degree and the role is crucial. Yet in this occupation, a degree represents more than just a level of competency. It also serves as a credential aiding the positional (dis)advantage of candidates. For some large pharmaceuticals an upper-second-class degree (2:1) has become the absolute minimum. One could argue this is perhaps a quality assurance measure. Yet with a growing number of highly educated scientists, the degree has become an effective way of ‘weeding out’ large groups of candidates applying for laboratory positions. An employer shared his experience on why it is often more difficult to recruit a graduate than it is to recruit a PhD: Whilst a lot of adverts will go out with ‘graduate plus industry experience’ or something along those lines, we would normally get a PhD applying for the role. So whilst we are not discriminatory in that way, it’s difficult to . . . it’s quite unusual to have graduates with experience apply for roles [ . . . ] if we specifically want a graduate it is more difficult for us to attract them. [Kevin, CEO, biotechnology company]

This quote indicates not only that candidates with doctorates are making it harder for graduates to find employment at their educational level but also that the concept of a graduate-level role is a rather relative and fluid notion. Employers of financial analysts were looking mainly for a minimum threshold. One financial analyst recalls from his own experience: . . . they were looking for someone who had graduated from a decent university, sort of a red-brick top-20 university with a 2:1. The subject wasn’t necessarily important

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Recruitment and Selection of Graduates as long as you could demonstrate that you had transferrable skills from that degree, and someone who was looking to start professional qualifications, so sort of an entry-level graduate position really. [Clifford, analyst, jewellery company]

Financial analysts applying for roles for the larger, more prestigious (investment) banks in the City of London will require a very strong academic background. Natural sciences degrees are in favour. Here, qualifications can be seen as signifiers of worth based on their exclusivity, as opposed to the skill set acquired during HE. We know from previous research on elite positions that this is directly linked to socioeconomic and cultural reproduction (Rivera, 2015): I mean a firm like [name of top global investment bank] usually looks for top degrees from top schools, I don’t think they actually advertise that on their job, most big firms do; they usually say a top degree from a top programme. [Roy, analyst, investment banking]

Joe, a finance recruiter, says educational requirements of his prestigious clients are directly linked to scarce educational credentials: We’re talking, usually because of the competition, let’s say you’re educated in the United Kingdom, you’re going to have to have a minimum 2:1 degree or a firstclass degree from a recognized, probably top-10 university. You’re going to have to have exceptional academic grades, mostly As, and you’re obviously going to have a strong GCSE background. . . . You have a great advantage if you’re coming from Oxbridge because there’s a strong pull towards attracting graduates from Oxbridge, and that’s a fact. It’s still recognized as the top universities to actually be educated within.

For press officers the role of qualifications has the least relevance for suitability of the four occupations. There was a consensus that a degree was enough to provide a basic credential needed to compete for a role in PR. But in no sense was it strongly valued as a provider of skills or as an important source of distinction (as we will see in chapter 5). One manager describes how educational achievement does not differentiate candidates very well in the selection process: On paper so many people now are absolutely on a par with each other, if everybody has those qualifications then you tend to look for something else and what else is in there. So yeah, I would absolutely look to work experience and personality and willingness to learn, I think that’s the danger with anybody, and I was subject to actually the same at the time, is that you assume that you’re at the end of your education, whereas you might forget, you absolutely mustn’t forget you’re absolutely at the beginning of your career and effectively now a new blank sheet of paper and everybody’s in the same boat really to start with. It’s the extra add-ons which are really important I think if everybody’s got the same qualifications. [Janet, PR manager, car manufacturer]

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For PR roles, university achievements do not tend to be covered in much detail within the recruitment and selection process. Job performance is not associated with academic performance. Grades and educational institution were seen as secondary concerns: Education is really low on my priority because some of the best people that I’ve worked with haven’t got degrees but they have done a lot of different jobs. [Dawn, head of press, theatre company] I was one mark off a first, but do I think it made any difference if I got a 2:1 or a first? No, I don’t think it does make any difference at all. I think once you’ve got a degree you’ve got a degree, especially in my line of work. I mean if you got a 2:2, I would have been disappointed, but again I don’t think it would make that much of a difference. [Ellen, press officer, trade organization]

In a labour market in which levels of education and hence qualifications are abundant, qualifications have become a much weaker distinguisher or signifier of unique talent as they are more or less ubiquitous. Qualifications only provide weak signals of suitability. Some evidence suggests recruiters judged graduate applicants with low academic qualifications as highly employable if they have high amounts of work experience and extra-curricular activities (Cole et al., 2007). Qualifications in the elite labour market have moved towards markers of acceptability.

Acceptability Who counts as an acceptable candidate depends on both individual perceptions of recruiters as well as company-specific characteristics. The case studies show that a strong occupational dimension also exists. Social fit was deemed important for employers in all four occupations but was expressed in somewhat distinct ways. Acceptability can at the minimum just be about being able to work without any conflict or grievances (‘I think what they’re mostly looking for is someone that you can spend seven or eight hours a day with, and get on with’ [Judy, business analyst, global bank]), but can be the basis of essential social skills and abilities to perform one’s work. Despite its importance, acceptability is assessed through gut feeling in often very little time (‘You only meet them for half an hour but you get the sense of who they are [ . . . ] whether you’d work well together’ [Emily, press officer, global charity]). The strong emphasis on technical skills and qualification (suitability) for laboratory scientists is matched by the need for social fit to work in a team environment in laboratories. Companies in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry actively recruit on personality in order to get the right fit with the 56

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future team members. Reflecting on his experience working in various laboratories, recruiter Oliver reveals: I think they [large companies] possibly have more of a focus on personality and team fit, rather than technical knowledge. Yeah it’s looking at . . . it’s looking at their kind of hobbies and interests. So some labs you go to are very outgoing, they socialize together, they go down the pub on a Friday together after work and there’s quite . . . that social network there. So it’s finding people for that who are social and kind of get involved with sports or kind of societies at universities. So it’s looking at that on their CV. It’s also looking at what interests they have. So some sites have kind of football teams and kind of . . . there might be a lab football team. So if you’ve got people who are interested in football, when they go to interview they can talk about football. And therefore if they then strike up that personal relationship with the person interviewing them, the chances of them getting that job are a lot higher if you’ve got a shared interest. So you may have kind of half a dozen graduates who’ve all got the same skill set, all chemists or whatever, but if one turns up and has got a similar kind of interest to the lab manager or a similar interest to other people in the lab, well ‘I want to work with that person’. [Oliver, science recruiter]

Another employer lays out the type of employees he prefers, emphasizing attitude and getting along with other people: Well I think it’s very important that they work hard and are team players in the sense that if, you know, someone else needs some help to finish off what they’re doing that, you know, they will have the tendency to step in and help with that. In a lab there are quite a lot of sort of chores that need to be shared out, and often it’s very much left to individuals to proactively do their share and, you know, people get pretty upset if people aren’t seen to be doing their share, you know, keeping the lab tidy etc., if people are messy and don’t tidy up after themselves, all these things tend to irritate other people in the lab and so all those things. And then, you know, just . . . I was going to say being sociable, that people don’t . . . don’t necessarily need to be, you know, extrovert and involved outside work, but people need to be just, you know, sort of easy to be around I think. [Kevin, CEO, biotechnology company]

Mainly through conversation during the recruitment and selection process, employers and recruiters tend to ascertain to what extent there is social connection between candidates and the company (culture) or relevant teams within it. CVs can also play a role. In general, workers need to be likeable or agreeable to fellow team members who spend long hours with them. Related to this is the search for a ‘team player’, which overlaps with social fit: . . . but it’s really I am just looking for a fit within a team and knowing absolutely what would be complementary to the team. [Ian, lab director, biotechnology company]

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Laboratory-based scientists are expected to show a range of additional qualities, for example motivational traits such as enthusiasm: There’s nothing better than someone being enthusiastic about their project, kind of what their project involved. Because then if they got enthusiastic about that they’re going to be enthusiastic about working for you. [Oliver, science recruiter]

For software engineers, social fit and personality are key components within recruitment and selection decisions. Companies are not always looking for the absolute technical best but someone who can do the job and will make a good employee whose social characteristics are aligned with those of the company. This can be defined in counter-intuitive terms. Attributes such as ambition, for instance, can work against a candidate; in a small, flat-structured company a highly ambitious programmer will not be satisfied and thus may not be considered. Jennifer, the IT recruiter, reflects: For me, my job is to understand with every client exactly what sort of personality would fit in here, what do they want, because as well, some companies don’t want somebody who’s going to be very ambitious and wants to climb the ladder because they have a very flat structure. They need somebody who is very, very passionate about programming, loves the job so much that they want to do it all the time, but they’re happy being just a developer and that’s it, they don’t want to be a manager, because some companies don’t have that room for progression.

Other types of fit relate to dress code or attitude, which was deemed as either conforming to or against company cultures: ‘If they turn up for the interview in a suit and tie they’re not going to fit.’ These informal work cultures were quite common. Software engineering roles in particular sectors such as the financial sector were seen as more serious. For a more software-centred organization, acceptance of introvert and/or ‘nerdy’ personalities was seen as inevitable and broadly accepted (yet too many of them posed a management problem). Stephanie, for instance, comments on the role of social fit in her recruitment strategy: Basically we do make sure that we think that socially they would fit in. But we are quite happy to have oddballs and weird people because it’s more the IT. It is definitely not seen as a sign of weakness. It’s a good thing to actually be a little bit eccentric.

The significance of personality in acceptability was outspoken for financial analysts. Social adaptability and extrovert behaviour are seen as desirable traits, and socially ‘active’ persons are understood to have the right personality for some analyst roles. Similarly, getting on with other people will enable workers to perform their role more effectively: I mean, we all know the better you are socially the better you’ll get on internally as well and the better you’ll be able to help other people and get them to help you. [Joe, finance recruiter]

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Recruitment and Selection of Graduates I think being personable is the key, because no matter how much skill you’ve got and what you bring to the table based on your experience, everyone is only going to want you in their team if they like you, right, I mean I interviewed with probably like thirteen to fifteen people, and you know, if one of them had said, ‘Look, I don’t like this guy, I’m not going to be able to work with him’, that probably would have affected my chance of getting the role. And you know for a fact that they’re not going to just look at them for their skills, it’s really more on how they got on with them and whether they were personal, and see I think a lot of the character traits are just that you bring a certain confidence without being arrogant, and you know you can be personal. [Roy, analyst, investment banking]

In addition to sociability, financial analysts, both employers and workers, mentioned a wide range of personality traits that were beneficial within the selection process such as perseverance, flexibility and adaptability, independence, and passion. One analyst reflects what was required to access the company when he entered a competitive graduate programme: I think they were really looking for kind of a certain type of personality, a certain type of person, so quite young, quite eager with energy, obviously smart and able to cope with a little bit of the pressure, and working with people that they haven’t met before, and being grilled on the relatively intense questioning. I think they were also looking for people that they would be able to mould and they were a bit adaptable, and would be OK, moving to different countries, taking on different things, maybe being a bit flexible. [Danny, finance analyst, large multinational company]

Yet, there were no formal tests or any other objective instruments to test whether acceptability was sufficient. Despite being important it came down to an overall feeling acquired throughout the process. Likewise for press officers, acceptability was largely concentrated around personality. Alastair, a press manager for an Internet company, emphasizes that being comfortable with other people you have not necessarily met before is key to being an effective communication professional. Therefore, he is looking for: . . . someone who tends to sort of have a personality that makes them that they’re easy to get on with, because often you’re thrown in a room where you don’t know anybody, you’ve got to ask them some difficult questions, or you need to persuade somebody to do something that you know they don’t want to do, i.e. go on TV and do an interview, and so you do have to be, kind of, naturally persuasive, but in a nice way.

The Relationship between Suitability and Acceptability Jenkins (1986) observed that suitability merges with acceptability in some situations (also observed by Curran, 1988). For recruitment and selection in 59

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the four graduate occupations this is very much the case. Soft skills remain key skills for performing the job (see chapter 6) and not surprisingly employers in the four occupations are actively looking for both motivational soft skills (e.g. enthusiasm, positive work attitude, commitment, dependability, willingness to learn) and interactional soft skills (e.g. friendliness, teamwork, ability to fit in, and appropriate grooming and attire) (Moss and Tilly, 1996). Some have observed that soft skills are now, or perhaps always have been, also fundamentally part of graduate work (Tholen et al., 2016). Soft skills have strong elements of both suitability and acceptability. They represent key abilities in order to perform in the job as well as qualities that employers use to actively discriminate against candidates, based on perceptions of fit in their team or wider organization. Apart from soft skills, there are other demands that neither are specifically technical nor relate necessarily to social characteristics of a candidate. For instance, for software work-readiness is a major asset. Among the engineers there existed a strong sense that employers were looking for individuals that could ‘hit the ground running’. Employers were perceived not to be willing to invest in training. Contractors are expected to be fully productive not long after commencement. For permanent recruits only a short period of adjustment and training was incorporated: Yeah, the ideal is that they come in and they can be functional within a week, you know, after a week-long intense induction, that they can start kicking out code at that stage. [Robert, HR, IT company]

Related to the work-readiness is adaptability, given the technological changes in software engineering. Learning quickly was therefore a valued characteristic. Many employers are seen to also value a ‘proactive nature’ or self-starters: In terms of personalities, again, it’s that proactive nature, not waiting to be told what to do but actually being able to think, ‘I don’t know the answer to this, I’ll go and find it for myself. I’ve had this problem, here are my suggestions for a solution, what do you think?’ That type of character. [Jennifer, IT recruiter]

Other employers stressed the importance of characteristics such as adaptability or brightness.

Conclusion This chapter has shown in pithy terms that recruitment and selection of graduates are performed through various processes using various logics and procedures.3 It is not in essence a rational matching process between the needs of the organization and the skills and knowledge possessed by individual 60

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graduate workers. It is more like an exercise in which employers try to make sense of their organizations, their workforce, their products, and their skill requirements. Here, recruiters make choices about how candidates may align with their preferences and their understandings of what makes a good worker for the relevant position in a particular organization. The process of selection and the demand of skills within recruitment and selection are not directly driven by qualifications and hard skills but by a more ambiguous set of criteria of suitability as well as occupation-specific dimensions of acceptability (see also Gorman, 2015). The process of finding the right candidate in all four occupations is contextspecific. This can, of course, be explained by the variety of tasks and job demands but the great variety must also be associated with employer and organizational preferences. A structural general uncertainty of what they are looking for and what signals could adequately act as proxies for job demands affects graduate recruitment. Qualifications alone can certainly not provide clear information about the candidate’s suitability. University qualifications certify or signify without too much certainty or reliability some of the abilities, skills, and characteristics that some employers aim to find. A recent vignette study showed that compared with Dutch employers, English employers in the field of IT view education mainly as a signal of trainability and do not rely on occupation-specific fields of study (but did value grades) to differentiate candidates (DiStasio and van der Werfhorst, 2016). It seems that educational qualifications are in these cases merely screening thresholds. Graduate qualifications can certainly provide important signals (e.g. within the elite labour market) but not as assumed in the dominant graduate labour market discourse. Recruiting and selecting graduates may for many employers not be necessarily any different from the process used for non-graduate positions. Gallagher and O’Leary (2007) argue that the traditional divide between extremely personalized recruitment for highly skilled jobs and relatively standardized recruitment processes for low-skilled ones is no longer in place. Corporate employers may still have extensive graduate recruitment processes based on a variety of tests, interviews, and data analysis using a quasi-scientific approach. Yet the graduate status of the occupation does not fundamentally change the game of recruitment and selection and remains local and situated. Graduate workers are recruited and selected according to fluid notions of value and labour market worth. Job requirements do not structure the recruitment process in a deterministic way. A variety of options exists. Windolf (1986, p.238) finds that different firms recruit workers with different levels of skill and background characteristics for very similar types of jobs. Depending upon how the firm decides on these options, the outcome of the recruitment process and also the impact of the firm on the labour market are different. 61

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The choice of a particular recruitment strategy depends upon organizational, institutional, and social characteristics of the organization (Williamson and Cable, 2003; Gardner, 2005), including ‘product and service specification, employee relations, work organisation, job design and the relative advantages of “train or hire” strategies towards skill’ (Keep and James, 2010, p.33). The recruitment and selection parameters continue to shift. In particular, the role and meaning of the qualifications within the process are not set. A large-scale study on the perceptions of graduate recruiters perceived blurring of the skills and attitudes that potential employers see as being available in graduate and non-graduate recruits (Pollard et al., 2015, p.65). This was due to ‘the perceived variability in quality of graduates and uncertainty whether talented young people would still choose the university route’. What the role is of HE within graduate work is explored in chapter 5.

Notes 1. An issue with survey as well as the experimental approach is whether real-life recruitment and selection occur as the findings predict. Although there is some evidence to suggest that they do (Hainmueller et al., 2015), it remains a problem that what employers report when interviewed (in a study) is not necessarily what they would actually do (in real life) during the recruitment and selection process (Pager and Quillian, 2005). The issue of the hypothetical bias is difficult to avoid although in some cases field experiments are used to circumvent this problem, yet these tend only to examine the recruitment process. 2. Brown and Scase (1994) focus specifically on the graduate labour market and add capability to suitability and acceptability, signifying the potential to rise to managerial positions encompassing leadership and charisma. According to the authors this has become of increasing importance in the shift from stable, bureaucratic organizations to more flexible career trajectories in which workers’ pathways to the top depend on their being identified as talented. 3. This chapter has not covered other important sources of employability such as extracurricular activities and work experience. It also has not distinguished the role of grades and educational institutions in much detail. It also has not outlined the importance of age, gender, ethnicity, social class, and career strategies of candidates nor does it say much about the experience of the recruitment and selection process. These all were to various extents pertinent in the recruitment and selection process. Similarly sector, company size, and other employer characteristics shaped the recruitment and selection process.

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5 The Role of Education

Introduction Recently, the BBC (2015) reported that accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers is to stop using A-level grades in its recruitment and selection process for graduate recruits.1 It had used UCAS scores (which are predominantly based on A-level results) as a filter to weed out candidates.2 The method was deemed unsuccessful as a tool to identify talent. Removing this educational signal from the process would improve social mobility and diversity as the emphasis at the company is to ‘create a fairer and more modern system in which students are selected on their own merit, irrespective of their background or where they are from’. This particular decision of one of Britain’s largest graduate recruiters is interesting. The company juxtaposes merit required to enter their prestigious workforce with educational ability (pre-university). There are other examples. Accountancy firm EY declared it would no longer consider degree results (Garner, 2015). Law firm Clifford Chance even introduced a ‘CV-blind’ recruitment approach in which interviewers would not be given any educational information about candidates. These initiatives are being implemented to prevent any bias towards the independent sector or Oxbridge in aid of breaking social barriers and increasing social mobility. But recruiters also increasingly acknowledge that degree scores fail to give employers an accurate assessment of a candidate’s potential. Endorsing this, publishing firm Penguin Random House UK removed any requirement for a university degree for all new jobs (Penguin, 2016). Of course, many companies do still consider degree or A-level results (and UCAS scores). However, it signifies at the minimum ambiguity regarding the relationship between educational outcomes at secondary school and recruitment and selection procedures of graduate recruitment. Are university-level performance and qualification also subject to re-evaluation, or do they still represent solid markers of labour market value and meritocratic worth?

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In chapter 2 we have seen that within various debates, HE is perceived as both the keystone of the modern economy as well as the solution to many social and economic problems. Within the imagined graduate labour market, there are particular assumptions on what HE does within the labour market, how it functions, and the meaning of credentials. Common assumptions within media, policy, and academic circles are that: • University-related skills and knowledge provide access to the professional classes. • Qualifications are badges of suitability for professional and managerial jobs. • Credential closure is decreasing as access to credentials is increasingly based on merit (e.g. performance) rather than ascribed status. • Educational credentials are interpreted as signals of merit within recruitment as well as within graduate careers. • The increase in HE qualifications serves a market need not credentialism. This chapter assesses whether HE within the four occupations indeed does what it is assumed to do according to this dominant discourse. The chapter aims to elucidate what the meaning and value of graduate education and university qualifications are within the four graduate occupations under investigation. It shows that the significance of HE differs between them. I will first examine how we can describe the meaning that HE has within these occupations. After this, I will examine whether the university degree functions as a credential and finally to what extent HE drives career progression.

Meaning of HE For those working in the four graduate occupations, HE does not necessarily play an important role in their day-to-day working lives. Individuals may not be the best judges on how their HE experiences have shaped their labour market trajectories and ability as a worker. Yet their reflections, perceptions, and stories remain nonetheless valid and insightful. Software engineering is often thought of by engineers as something that HE cannot really teach. One can teach the principles of software engineering and one can teach you how to code within formal education. Although this may sound like an appropriate preparation, the actual work development of a software engineer takes place on the work floor. Engineers emphasized that software engineering is a dynamic process within commercial and social constraints that cannot be replicated or taught within HE: 64

The Role of Education You can learn the fundamentals, you can learn how to program in C++, but you will never learn how to work in a software engineering environment from university, because working with your mates at university, studying with your mates at university is different—the pressures and the time constraints—of when you’re being paid to write code. I think the real software development skills will come when you’re actually developing software [ . . . ] you’re not going to be developing any substantial software whilst you’re there [at university], you’re only going to be developing software when you’re being paid to do it in a job. [Jeffrey, software engineer, publishing company]

The schism between what is taught in computer science courses and what is needed to be able to work was deemed considerable by almost all engineers. They often thought that IT courses are not in touch with the corporate environment or not willing to engage with it. As a result, the curriculum was deemed to be insufficiently associated with the actual requirements and developments in ‘the market’. Hugh, who works as a software engineer in a medium-sized IT company, reflects on his own experience of his software engineering course: So it wasn’t that they were preparing us for the market . . . actually the philosophy of the university was let’s say against tying the university too close to the companies. They wanted to keep the environment let’s say company free, and they wanted to give us just . . . to give us the notion of things, and not the actual handson experience on some specific tools of some companies.

Thomas, an IT consultant, recalls: I was at a meeting a year or so ago with some universities discussing how they would be attracting students to their agile software development courses. And what they were discussing was fine, but it was clearly driven by marketing considerations rather than equipping these students for ‘the market’.

UK IT courses certainly differ from each other and some mainly focus on engineering on an abstract and theoretical level (and for some companies the theoretical side is highly relevant in the type of software they produce). But for many companies the skills associated with software engineering degrees are too basic or not fit for purpose: I know a lecturer in computer science, I think he’s at Uxbridge, and he’s saying the amount of kids that go out with a degree nowadays that can’t even code [ . . . ] Computer Science degree, and they can’t string two lines together . . . and they don’t need to because Computer Science now is an abstract theoretical . . . But more fundamentally, it is not merely a divide between ‘theory and practice’. [Richard, chief technology officer, IT company]

Many engineers argued that HE courses provide students with an engineering foundation on which further practical development can be built. They are not 65

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seen as providing full preparation for the labour market, but more a general grounding: It pains me to say it, because I know a lot of degrees don’t teach relevant subjects. . . . But it seems nowadays that many employers will want a degree just as sort of a stamp of approval that you are educated to that level. [Jeffrey, software engineer, publisher]

Engineers feel that IT courses do not give enough breadth and/or depth to deliver a thorough preparation for the job. This is not to say that there is therefore no value in HE, but that engineers who have completed the courses were very modest about their contribution to their professional development: So they were not getting into too much detail, they were just trying to give us a basis, and it was up to us to you know decide what we really want to do, where to go, what to follow, and it was up to us to elaborate more. [Thomas, IT consultant] Shall we say it gave me potential. Which means that they taught us . . . they were teaching us that there are more than a few different paths to choose . . . like software, hardware, system engineer, digital signal processing . . . and all other stuff. [Peter, software engineer, IT company]

Likewise, for laboratory scientists the educational requirements do not always reflect the skills demands of the jobs (‘I don’t really feel that it prepared me well enough for the workforce, work field’ [Sheila, lab technician, biotechnology company]). Many scientists have worked in roles where their educational background was only loosely related to the requirement of the work. Sophie, an ex-lab technician in a biotechnology company, recalls how her degree in Biochemistry did not provide much help in getting to grips with one of her first jobs but that this was not considered to be problematic: . . . it was a microbiology site, and I hadn’t done that much microbiology in my degree. A lot of it I felt like they could really have just got anybody in and trained them to do it, because it was . . . I didn’t really need to have an understanding of what was going on.

Many employers aim to minimize the provision of training and want their new recruits to hit the ground running. This means that they are often looking for candidates with specific experience of particular techniques and equipment. Scientists themselves reflect on the value of their education in instrumental terms, specifying specific modules that were useful, perhaps underestimating the value of their general training. Yet within the scientific community the meaning of HE was, again, clearly understood as something useful but not giving workers the skills or knowledge necessary to work within biotech or pharmaceutical companies: 66

The Role of Education When you do a degree it’s so sort of wide, the range of subjects that you cover, it’s really a basic knowledge and a basic ‘Are you capable of learning new skills, are you capable of thinking outside of the box?’—that kind of thing. So it prepares you in that way, but I don’t really think that it goes into too many specifics. [Dominic, scientist, pharmaceutical company] Obviously, practical skills you know in the lab and learning what to do in a lab it sort of prepares you for . . . but even then you learn new techniques whatever company you go into. [Barbara, ex-senior scientist, pharmaceutical industry]

In a similar vein, financial analysts strongly believe that the training and the acquisition of occupation-specific skills occur on the job. HE courses, even those in finance, provide mainly a general preparation to start work: I’m not sure because what I have discovered is like with my degree and especially with the Master’s, it’s not like it gives you a specific knowledge that you can take and use directly to work but it gives you the mindset. So I think it gives you the background, the base for you on how to think rather than a specific skill for your job. [Denise, financial analyst, unemployed] It taught me how to research and read, but in terms of in the actual job itself, what I learned at university, in terms of what information I learned at university, it wasn’t really that relevant. [Tony, senior financial analyst, IT]

Unlike software engineers and lab scientists, graduates from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds enter the occupation. This makes the link between subject knowledge and the occupation rather nebulous. Although a significant share of analysts enter the occupation with finance-related degrees, many do not and this does not prevent them from mastering their trade or becoming successful. Often numerical skills are deemed sufficient as a base to establish oneself within the occupation in combination with a higher degree. Andrea, a finance business analyst working in a finance company, illustrates this as follows: We have an intern now. She’s coming from a chemistry background. All she had to do was to demonstrate that she’s actually financially very sound. She had to take mathematical, analytical, verbal, and whatever tests, and she passed with flying colours. They interviewed her and she sounded so intelligent—thirty minutes’ interview and one test—and that was enough for her to get in.

One of the reasons for this is that many job-related skills are taught through professional qualifications as awarded by bodies such as the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Institute or the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA). These training courses are more tailored to the occupation (and carry much more value within the labour market, as we will see later). As discussed in chapter 4, it depends on the preference of the employer whether education is 67

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deemed important (one analyst from experience knew that elite global investment banks usually look for ‘top degrees from top schools’). The role of press officer has been undergoing change in the last two decades. Not only has the role itself transformed, now incorporating and interacting with social media and online entities, but PR as part of the organization has also become more prominent, leading to a rapid growth in employment for press relations roles. Traditionally, there has not been a strong relation with HE and thus the occupation is still trying to find out how formal education can provide the industry with meaningful vocational preparations or, as we shall see, powerful credentials. So those graduates working as press officers were rather unsure what their education means for their professional development. As writing is a substantial component of their role, many mention that it had developed their written English (‘I mean, the writing of quite wordy essays and dissertations is hugely useful in PR’). Although one English language graduate said, ‘I don’t think there’s much more I can see as a direct link from my degree and what I do now [Eleanor].’ Another officer, Dorothy, commented, ‘I’ve learnt more on my first day at work than I did during my degree.’ PR as a demarcated academic field is relatively young and has not been fully ‘established’. Similarly, among PR professionals there is great cynicism about what PR-specific degrees offered at universities can contribute to the development of PR professionals. It is often felt that transferable skills can be developed at many other programmes and that the skills needed are developed at work, not in formal education: I would go for an English graduate over a media relations graduate, I think. head of media relations, manufacturing company]

[Lucy,

I’m not a particularly big fan of the PR university degrees that people do; I think that I’d probably rather someone explored a passion, and then had done some interns or had some experience in PR I’d say, get a traditional degree, or at least get a traditional element to your PR degree, so get psychology, get it with English as a major or a minor in it, so that you have something. I think it helps with credibility. [Alastair, press manager, Internet company]

Where Work-based Skills Are Learnt Another issue with the portrayal of university education as the key developer of skills and knowledge for graduate occupations is that the graduate workplace seems more adequate in teaching the job-relevant skills (much like apprenticeships do within lower-skilled positions). Cranmer’s (2006) study on the employability efforts of universities showed that efforts of universities to provide students with work-relevant skills were far from successful. Others have found that skills deficiencies in new graduates are employer-specific in 68

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nature. Mason et al. (2003) stress they are ‘related to areas of skill and knowledge which are best acquired (or can only be acquired) after starting employment rather than beforehand, for example, product knowledge and the knowledge and skills needed for working in this particular organisation’ (p.14). Many software engineers commented that formal education is an inefficient way of learning to code and to work on the job. The best education is seen as working-on-the-job. Here, some lament the wastage of time in choosing the HE route: I think anything I learnt at university for that could have been done in perhaps three months. So you look at the three years’ work and you think well, I could have learnt all that in, you know, a three-month course and gone straight in two years earlier kind of thing. [Winston, software engineer, IT company] I’m done six years of graduation, postgrad, and I think it was a waste. I think if I had been just put into a job I wouldn’t have wasted six years, because I think most of what I learned was on the job anyway. [Bob, senior software engineer, IT company] You have people who have a natural ability in your so-called bedroom coders and people who’ve done it from a young age. Then you have the people who have tried to learn it through university, and it’s hit and miss, you have some good and some bad. [Nick, senior software engineer, tech company]

Due to the fast-changing nature of IT, HE cannot teach future engineers the knowledge and techniques used in the (future) workplace. HE is not fully equipped to deal with these changes because of its distance to the commercial field and its inability to change curricula that quickly: I think things move in technology and computer science, things are always moving so you always get new languages when it comes to programming languages. [ . . . ] at university we were taught like waterfall models of the software engineering process, but everyone uses Agile now. [Nick, senior software engineer, tech company] Well what I learnt on the degree itself is of no real use to the software engineering job that I do now. But I think that’s . . . you know that’s just the nature of working in a dynamic industry. [Tristram, software engineer, contractor]

This is confirmed by other studies of IT work that have found that formal education cannot provide the cutting-edge skills that many workers require (Strathdee, 2005; Adams and Demaiter, 2008). Of course, those who have stressed the importance of lifelong learning have already acknowledged that formal education must be seen as an ongoing process rather than a set period at the start of a career (Watson and Taylor, 1989; Harteis et al., 2014). Yet at this point in time HE’s role in lifelong learning is limited in software engineering. 69

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This notion that HE is an inefficient way to learn the trade is shared by many of the laboratory scientists. Many mention the lack of capacity to teach lab-based research. Kevin, a CEO of a biotechnology company, explains: I mean the sort of skills that we’re looking for with sort of organization, commitment, attention to detail, I don’t think correlates terribly well with the ability to, you know, sort of write essays and get a particularly high-grade degree, so I’m not sure there’s a big correlation between, you know, what grade of degree they’ve got and how effective they are. If they come straight from university these days they rarely have done much in their lab. So there is one set of students which stand out and they are the ones that have done sandwich years, where they have done a year in industry. [Sam, head of pharmacology, pharmaceutical company] I would say 80% of the skills I learnt on the job, because whichever research role you do, there’s a different technique involved, so you can’t possibly learn all of those at university. [Ella, ex-senior scientist, biotechnology] They haven’t had the range of practical experience that industry expects and some of that is because they don’t have the latest facilities. [Eric, chief operation officer, pharmaceutical company]

For laboratory scientists, it is experience that will ultimately teach you how to master the role. This comes (by definition) with time: You do need practice, you have experience to do the job, so you start off pretty slow and gradually skills build up over time like anybody else’s. [Trevor, senior scientist, biotechnology company]

Credentials So HE has different meanings for different graduate occupations. But to what extent do university qualifications serve as credentials, that is, educational legitimation of advantages that empower graduates (or groups of graduates) within the recruitment and selection process, work process, and career progression? How much sway and power do the university credentials of software engineers, scientists, financial analysts, and press officers hold? And what do the qualifications represent to employers and workers? In other words, what is embodied by university qualifications within occupational contexts? Is it culture, skills, or perhaps the more elusive ‘graduateness’ (Tholen et al., 2016)? Conflict sociologists such as Max Weber (1978) (and after him Collins, 1979 and Parkin, 1979) have tried to show that educational credentials are mainly cultural rather than technical and are used for exclusionary purposes rather than to increase productivity. As Brown (2001, 20) writes, for credentialist 70

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theorists the degree is ‘an abstraction from the actual substantive knowledge of degree holders that delimits which authorities may question the substantive competence of degree holders. Thus, formal qualifications are linked to positional power in jobs.’ Credentials are thus relevant for graduates seeking advantage over other graduates and non-graduates; for employers and recruiters to gauge a candidate’s cultural capital; but are also used by competing occupational groups for exclusion and providing cultural entry barriers. Individuals and groups thus monopolize opportunities and create advantages whilst upholding the myth of individual merit and technical competence. We will now turn again to our four occupations and, within them, the power the degree has to create advantage and how educational qualifications are used strategically and relationally.

Degrees as Means of Access Educational credentials such as degrees can function as a necessary condition to be able to compete for high-skilled professional or associate-level jobs. There are no legal barriers for employers to demand particular educational qualifications if they deem them necessary. For those without the required credentials, the recruitment and selection process is closed. In other cases, the educational requirement may not be explicitly stated but would be implied or understood or would be applied during the recruitment process, again, within the recruiters’ discretion (Brown and Hesketh, 2004). It is not always clear what the degree represents or symbolizes in its function of a means of access to particular groups of jobs. Employers may wish to exclude non-graduates as the academic preparation HE provides cannot realistically be gained elsewhere (e.g. medical professions) and the educational demands are therefore key and non-negotiable. Yet as the base level of the sorting mechanism it can become a rather crude method of judging merit. Closing off opportunities to all non-graduates certainly does not necessarily have to be based on work-related relevance (e.g. skills or work experience). The evidence from the four case studies shows that the degree certainly functions as a gatekeeper to the competition for jobs. It has furthermore been seen as a form of credentialism as many workers’ role itself in a strict sense could be performed without a university education preparation. Workers acknowledged and accepted that their occupation has become open to only graduates but few thought this was justified (or fair). Software engineers felt that one could master the skills of coding outside a formal learning environment. Some see a degree as unnecessary in relation to the work process, others see some value in it (as described before). Yet 71

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foremost, engineers felt that the degree mainly provides access to the occupation. One engineer reflected on the degree as a means of access: It’s the minimum level you are accepted at. The subject matter is rarely relevant. GT: So you could do History as well? I wouldn’t be surprised. Maybe not the Humanities, but something sciencerelated. [Mason, software engineer, financial company]

From this quote we can see that the demand for degrees at point of recruitment has some relation to degree-specific skills and knowledge (be it an emphasis on mathematics or logical thinking) but it remains loosely defined (‘We wouldn’t be looking at somebody who’d been studying English literature’, Ewart, software engineer). Although some employers do demand an IT-related degree, the degree generally was accepted as a means for new engineers to be able to compete for software engineering roles. I have found deep ambiguity regarding the necessity of this. Many doubt that this is actually useful or reasonable. Reflecting on a non-graduate colleague, software engineer Frank remarks: I don’t think he has actually got a degree, but he does know what he is doing and he has been working for numerous years. So I think turning around and saying ‘You need to have this particular rubber stamp so you qualify’ seems kind of like a bad idea because you would exclude him.

For laboratory scientists, having a degree is even more critical to be considered for a role. The degree is more important than the institution and many employers do not tend to scrutinize the education qualification in the selection process (unless it is for entry graduate positions). One employer explains: Qualification is one of the first things you look at, it’s a qualifier to get into the process, largely. Once people are in the interview process, then it’s unlikely we would consider their level of qualification. It’s more about their personal characteristics at that point. [Eric, CFO, pharmaceutical company]

For financial analysts, university degrees seem to provide access to the occupation, but interestingly no longer exclusively and in an increasingly provisional way. A recruiter expresses the role of qualifications as follows: I think the way now that university is changing and with all the fees it will change the demographics of who goes to university. We have already noticed that a lot of people are opting to do other things and other courses in place of going to university. We do have clients that do ask for a degree and they shortlist on that basis, but equally we have plenty of clients for whom it’s not important. [Angela, finance recruiter]

There is indeed a much wider range of educational trajectories that can give access to the occupation, which seem to ‘dilute’ the signal of the degree as an 72

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access pass. Any degree that has a fair amount of statistical analysis was deemed as the best educational background. But certainly entrants with a variety of educational backgrounds enter the occupation each year. Interestingly, for the role of financial analyst, grades as well as educational institutions are thought as discriminatory devices that can provide or bar entry. In particular, for the finance sector there is a requirement of a minimum 2:1 degree, and preferably a first-class degree from a recognized, highly ranked university: Going to a good university I think is quite important for getting your foot in the door, otherwise you need to just do a lot more work to get your foot in the door. So say if this person wasn’t from a top university, then I would definitely recommend them working a lot harder to meet people in the industry, and make sure their CV is actually seen by someone. [Lee, ex-analyst for a major global investment bank] So again, how would they select people? They’re going to select on their academic backgrounds initially. It’s that simple. [Joe, finance recruiter]

Among press officers, there is not a clear consensus regarding the need for a degree to enter the occupation. Officers do observe a trend that employers increasingly include degree-level education in their job requirements. At the same time, some press officers believe it is still possible to enter the occupation without a degree, but the gap is closing: There’s no way that you need a degree to start off in a communications department. [ . . . ] if you’re at an organization that will invest in you and invest in your professional development, as an 18 year old or a 17 year old, you can definitely do this job. [Dylan, PR and policy manager, trade organization]

What Do Degrees Signal? According to the dominant understanding—informed by human capital theory—of the labour market for graduate workers, university degrees represent a set of learnt individual skills, knowledge, and abilities within the labour market and labour process. Opposing voices highlight degrees’ contribution to the relative nature of employability. Instead of an absolute foundation, they signal how well a candidate academically ranks compared to his or her competitors or how the exclusivity of their degrees may relate to their cultural and social background. For software engineers, it is understood that their occupation is a graduate occupation and that a degree is a prerequisite despite the fact that many employers do not explicitly list academic qualifications but instead focus on skills and experience. A degree thus serves as an important signalling device of basic programming competence, to some extent in line with human capital theory. One engineer commented that one of the reasons she did a degree was 73

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to say: ‘This is the evidence I can do programming.’ This skills-based understanding of the signal of degrees was common for software engineers: If they see a degree in Computer Science or software engineering [ . . . ] then it makes it much much easier because you can go well . . . you know you’ve been taught how to design programs. You know that the courses actually teach you how to do design, how to actually structure. [Jack, software engineer, biotechnology company]

Yet employers do not always need the degree as a proof of ability to code. Often work experience will provide this information (in a more accurate way). Instead (and in line with signalling theory), some feel that university graduates come with other useful characteristics: They tend to be more professional, they tend to be a bit more reliable, the fact that they’ve been through a degree has shown that they can be structured in a work pattern, that they can sit down and meet deadlines, they can deliver to target, all kinds of very core and key important things for us. [Robert, HR, IT company]

This signals a certain degree of graduateness attached to the degree (Tholen et al., 2016), meaning a set of non-academic characteristics developed during the HE experience. Adams and Demaiter (2008, p.359) observed that for IT workers, education is important for the ability and willingness to learn that a degree implies rather than the skill it confers. Similarly, for laboratory scientists the degree represents some skills and knowledge but in a very indirect and rather blunt way: I think a lot of the time what the degree kind of represents is your ability to work to a certain level. [Nigel, senior scientist, biotechnology company]

Yet unlike human capital theory predictions, the degree is only able to signal a very rudimentary or partial skill mastery. Even if the signal were to be functional and skill-based, it is not a terribly powerful signal: I mean the sort of skills that we’re looking for with sort of organization, commitment, attention to detail, I don’t think correlates terribly well with the ability to, you know, sort of write essays and get a particularly high-grade degree. [Owen, scientist, pharmaceutical company]

For financial analysts, degrees embody a credential much more in line with credentialist theory. We can observe the degree as proof of generic academic suitability: My degree was to give me the bare basics of what I need to learn, to be able to walk into someone’s office, shake their hand, have a light conversation about it, and hopefully get a job and learn on the job. [Esther, senior financial analyst, law firm]

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But more pivotal is that a degree signals social suitability (as discussed in chapter 4). Speaking of the influence of social background, analysts stress elite degrees may signal little more than social background: I think people at the top universities, I mean so many of them come from a privileged social background anyway, so I don’t know, it’s hard to see how social background plays a role separate from education. [Lee, ex-analyst for a major global investment bank] As much as they have a tokenistic minority on their graduate literature, to my knowledge and throughout my time at university everybody I ever met was white, middle class and did a degree, a 2:1 in economics most of them. Or finance. They won’t change. [Ben, financial analyst, public sector]

For press officers, the degree signals so little that neither credential theory nor human capital theory grasps their signalling quality. Perhaps because its vocational requirements are so differently defined from traditional academically defined requirements (such as thinking level), the meaning of degrees is still under development. Talking about the selection process, Dawn, head of press of a theatre company, comments: That they are personable means a lot more than someone who’s got, you know, a double First and A-star grades, because a lot of those people can’t string a sentence together.

Credential Inflation In opposition to the idea that degrees are directly a signal of job-relevant skills and knowledge, availability of degrees seems to have influenced the demand for degrees. There is plenty of evidence from the four occupations that employers increase their educational demands due to the increase of graduates within the labour pool. In particular, for laboratory scientists, the educational requirements have increased over time (whilst the technical complexity of the jobs has not fundamentally been altered). One scientist revealed that some of the large pharmaceutical companies now would only accept candidates with an upper second degree as the absolute minimum. Similar was the experience of Sheila who works as a lab technician in a biotech company: I think in the past like for a technician role employers were happy to take somebody with an A-level in science or vocational qualifications in that area. But I found that when I was searching they wanted a minimum of Bachelor’s degree for laboratory technician work.

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Many companies tend to recruit candidates with PhD degrees for entry-level graduate positions. For occupations such as press officers where a considerable share of (older) workers are non-graduates, a rapid graduatization is taking place. Increasingly, employers demand graduate degrees to be considered for entry-level roles: It’s not a requirement at the moment but I think within the next five to ten years it will be. But yeah, I think that’s just the way it’s going to go and everybody who works in a communications environment will be a graduate. [Stanley, deputy director of communications, government]

Individual employers may have particular experiences with candidates/workers with particular educational backgrounds. This helps to explain why degree-related signals are so heterogeneous: But I think a large number of clients would like people to have degrees, and I know clients . . . end clients . . . where they’ve mandated even for contractors that they wanted an upper second in a Maths degree. [Tristram, software engineer, contractor] One employer wanted to know all the O-level grades. [Leo, scientist, biotechnology]

Yet nowadays employers are able to demand degrees as a general requirement without incurring recruitment difficulties. In a time of labour market supply abundance, this may make sense as graduates as a group can be seen as more suitable than non-graduates. Economists have observed the phenomenon of statistical discrimination in the labour market (Phelps, 1972; Arrow, 1973; Lundberg and Startz, 1983). Observable characteristics of individuals such as sex, race, or educational qualifications are thought to be serving as a proxy for unobservable productivity-related characteristics such as employee behaviour or willingness to learn. Economic models of statistical discrimination highlight employers’ rational response to uncertainty being to use group estimates as a means of dealing with the problems of uncertainty. As a group, graduates may be seen as more able or represent better employees and thus influence productivity. Sociological and social-psychological models, by contrast, question the accuracy of group-level attributions, hinting at the role of individual employer bias (Tomaskovic-Devey and Skaggs, 1999; Moss and Tilly, 2001; Pager and Karafin, 2009). Employers are able to exclude non-graduates for various types of functions based on individual or social bias. Rick, a senior financial analyst in the gaming industry and who did not attend university, shared the following: Sometimes, as I said, they might think they will be getting the right person in their eyes, but sometimes I think that people who don’t have qualifications are overlooked very, very quickly because that’s a company policy. In certain

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Credential Half-life Another dimension to the university degrees credential is its seemingly short lasting power. The further workers advance in their career, the less they can negotiate advantage within the labour market on the basis of it. For more experienced workers, the value of a degree disappears almost completely. This is accompanied by a sense that one can be very successful without a degree. Paul, a senior software engineer, told me that he has not been asked about his degree since his first job. Peter, another software engineer, answered when I asked him about the value of a degree by also highlighting the rapidly declining value: Well it matters, it certainly matters in your first job [ . . . ] After moving to your second job after that it tends not to matter that much. So after let’s say two or three years of working in the industry it stops being important.

Winston, a software engineer, revealed: I've got a brother who’s two years younger than me. He went to Southampton University to do electronics and computing and dropped out. [ . . . ] Basically he had to retake some of his papers after his first year and then he had to retake his second year and effectively just failed. But he managed to get a job at the Met Office and it was probably only two years until he caught up with the graduates that were taken on at the same time.

The sentiment that HE declines in importance in both recruitment as well as the work process was shared by lab scientists and financial analysts: Experience is more important than the degree as you sort of work on. [Ella, ex-lab scientist, biotechnology company] I suppose the higher the level that you are working at it does becomes less important. I think the education is almost a stepping stone. It will lead you into a good entry-level role and then you can work your way up and get more experience. [Angela, finance recruiter]

Work experience can compensate for education over time: But, you know, I think once you’ve sort of started your career and once you’re a couple of years in, you know you can sort of position yourself and show your ambition and you push certain things that people with top degrees might not do. [Roy, financial analyst, investment banking]

Those new graduates with finance or accountancy university degrees are perceived to have an advantage as their skill set is more attuned to the demands of

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the jobs. But this advantage quickly evaporates. Ex-analyst Lee explains that in his graduate programme there was a wide disciplinary intake of graduates. Some had accountancy or finance backgrounds, others did not. He reflects: But then I think two, three years later, I didn’t see much correlation between what people had studied and how well they did, so a lot of people who say had studied engineering, they were doing very well in terms of their job. They just had a lot more to learn maybe in terms of the technical skills at the outset, but if they were fast learners, if they were good at the job, they weren’t any less successful.

So not only the value of the degree declines, also its relevance to the work process changes over time.

Education and Labour Market Advantage From examining the value of university qualifications, it becomes clear that any type of credentialism is partial and contextual. The advantage graduates enjoy over non-graduates and the advantages certain graduate groups and individuals hold over other graduates are not set in stone and need to be (re-)established through various (often discursive) practices. I will demonstrate this by outlining four examples of contingency in the value of HE credentials. These relate to the value of Master’s degrees, the role of PhD qualifications for lab scientists, the role of professional qualifications for financial analysts, and the position of non-graduates within the competition for graduate work.

Master’s Degrees The contingent value of Master’s degrees can be exemplified by the employers’ and workers’ perceptions of them. In economic models, additional years of relevant formal education represent increased human capital such as knowledge and skills (according to human capital theory); graduate workers with Master’s degrees, as opposed to solely Bachelor’s degrees, must create advanced labour market positioning. Workers themselves have a range of reasons why they wish to pursue postgraduate degrees; career advancement is certainly one of them (as well as self-fulfilment) (Stuart et al., 2008; Morgan, 2014). Yet advantage can also be based on distinction, signalling higher relative employability due to the educational scarcity of the diploma within the labour force. Education can be seen as a ‘positional good’ (Hirsch, 1977). If Bachelor’s degrees were to become ubiquitous, their relative advantage in the labour market would diminish. Master’s degrees may also not provide advantage if their status and reputation are low within a specific occupational field. A recent study found that graduate 78

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recruiters feel that most employers do not differentiate between higher and first degree graduates (Pollard et al., 2015, p.12). For our four occupations, this logic is only partly applicable. First of all, there is a distinct limit to how far additional formal education really is required or useful. The so-called ‘skill in the job’ does not require additional years of formal education. Many employers and workers find very little use for postgraduate degrees. Consider the following reflection of Andrew, a software engineer working in a large IT firm: You know it’s an MSc that you might want to do if you were going to go off and like become a researcher in obscure areas of programming language theory. I mean I don’t regret having done it, but I didn’t find it directly applicable. And certainly yes, if I was going to have done it for career reasons I would have taken different options.

The previous quote also indicates that as a credential, the Master’s degrees in his field are not particularly strong. Financial analysts and press officers felt that Master’s qualifications were not very important within their chosen fields. Many lab scientists do acknowledge the role of education in their professional development but do not regard Master’s degrees as particularly relevant. They feel their industry does not reward them and another year of formal education could not help them become better scientists: I don’t think there’s much difference between a BSc and an MSc student. It’s more to do with the project work they’ve done, the lab work they’ve done. Generally, MSc students have got more of that, ’cause they would have done a BSc project and an MSc project, but . . . is it worth doing an MSc? [Nigel, senior scientist, biotechnology company]

Although some employers would allow postgraduate entrants to compete for more senior roles: . . . so they would be competing against people with two or three years’ laboratory experience. So it kind of just gives them a little bit more of a head start. [Ian, lab director, biotechnology company]

Especially larger companies use various occupational levels within their scientist workforce (in some cases more than six). Entry graduates would start at the lowest level and would rise up the ranks over time as their work experience increased. The previous quote suggests that in this case new graduates with Master’s degrees would be able to compete with scientists of a high level and thus effectively there would be a trade-off between education and experience. Whether this employer values Master’s students as a genuine skill upgrade or whether they want to increase the application pool for more of these positions, we do not know. 79

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PhD Qualification for Laboratory Scientists A specific and special case of credentialism takes place within the laboratory work. PhD-level qualifications are becoming the norm for many of the available research roles within pharmaceutical and biotech companies. We saw earlier that graduate jobs are difficult to fill due to the large number of applications. Many laboratory scientists believed that the educational requirements have increased over time: Since I originally I guess came into the industry, the baseline then was perhaps graduate-level scientists. Very much now it’s PhD-level scientists I would say is a basic entry requirement for most positions that I see coming along, certainly in the science sector in pharmaceutical and biotech. [Laura, scientist, biotechnology company] When I graduated perhaps there were 15% of graduates that went on to PhDs, now 50% of graduates are going to PhDs. [Sheila, lab technician, biotechnology company]

Yet the roles that workers with a doctorate (initially) perform do not necessarily require doctoral training. Qualification inflation certainly seems to have occurred as scientists were not sure that the complexity and the knowledge intensity have changed. James, a lab manager within a biotech company, explains: They’ll just be doing the basic work, so quite a lot of you know the donkey work just setting up experiments and then the analysing of them would then be passed on to the people with the PhDs who’ve got the full expertise in actually, you know, how to read the results and everything like that.

Much more than the Master’s degree, the PhD does provide relevant training. It is subsequently treated as an alternative to, and by some as an extension of, regular work experience: PhD is an intensive training period. It is good for assimilating technical expertise in specific areas, but also understanding how that small area fits into the bigger picture in a short period of time. It doesn’t mean you are a perfect person by the end of it by any stretch of the imagination, but it does make up for a number of years of being exposed. [Sam, head of pharmacology, pharmaceutical company]

It seems that the doctorate as a credential continues to signal relative work preparation, but within educational expansion it has in particular affected those graduates with lower qualifications. Growing credential inflation has shifted the value of Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees without fundamentally changing the job requirements or the suitability of these graduates. As a result, there is a lot of uncertainty about what their educational qualifications represent and what their value is or should be. 80

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Professional Qualification and Financial Analysts A third example of how traditional education credentials are in flux and occupation-specific is the emergence of professional qualifications within the occupation of financial analysts. For analysts, the traditional role of HE as an educator of the professional classes has been replaced by other professional forces. In the case of financial analysts (as well as accountancy), a range of professional organizations such as the CFA, CIMA, or ACCA offer courses tailored to the occupation. Analysts understand these courses as the route to establish oneself within the occupation: Everyone’s from different backgrounds, but everyone, as soon as they finish university, they all go away and do a course towards the accountancy qualification. [Jonathan, ex-financial analyst, bank] They [employers] don’t look for anything else. You have to be ACCA or similar, that’s all. And then you have to pass the tests and even for the job that I’ve just started. [Andrea, finance business analyst, finance company]

For Angela, a recruiter for the finance sector, the professional accreditation has become a prerequisite for progression: I think ideally clients want to see a degree and then an entry-level position and then you start your qualification and that is when you can sort of move up the ladder.

The professional qualifications have not only to some extent replaced HE, but are offering qualifications that serve as credentials, closing off opportunities to other graduates seeking a career as a financial analyst. The main role of the qualification is to signal distinction based on work-readiness: I think if you have done your accountancy qualifications it proves to employers that you can do it, that you are committed to it. [Troy, senior financial analyst, public sector]

Although the qualification provides basic but useful knowledge and skills, they can be acquired on the job and often many analysts have already developed these whilst working before they commence the programme. The example of professional qualifications shows that traditional graduate credentials such as Bachelor’s degrees can be sidelined by professional educational credentials. The meaning and value of various university degrees and professional degrees are, again, contingent on the stakeholders within the labour market.

Non-graduate Competition University degrees have become the norm to access employment in our four occupations. But what does this mean for non-graduate workers and their 81

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future within them? It seems that the great influx of graduates into the labour market has made HE a prerequisite to enter many skilled occupations. Yet experienced software engineers without university education can still find plenty of opportunities: I had a feeling that perhaps if I wouldn’t have had the degree but I would have had three or four years’ commercial experience they wouldn’t have cared. I think a degree nowadays is . . . it’s almost as common as GCSE—so many people are coming out of university with degrees and there’s just nothing to separate them, apart from commercial experience. [Thomas, IT consultant] But I have come across one or two recently that you could sort of describe as the apprenticeship route—which is rare but with sort of open source software is probably going to become more common, that you could find people that have just been writing computer programs since they were small. [Jack, software engineer, biotechnology company]

For financial analysts, the non-university route is open with the help of professional credentials. One analyst reflects on this possibility with optimism: GT: Is it difficult for someone to enter the field without a degree? Not necessarily. I think if you can . . . we certainly have candidates that haven’t got a degree and they will study for AAT [Association of Accounting Technicians] and then they will start their CIMA studies. So often they would have done A-levels or equivalent and they will do their AAT qualification. I think it’s down to choice. [Angela, finance recruiter]

It is worth realizing that in some companies, graduates and non-graduates work as financial analysts alongside each other. Ben, who studied Physics at an English Russell Group university, graduated with a lower second degree (2:2) and subsequently started an AAT apprenticeship in accountancy which is primarily meant for school leavers at the age of 18. The AAT has also, according to Ben, become much more of a ‘second chance’ for people with 2:2s. The choice to pursue the apprenticeship after being interested in working in finance felt slightly denigrating. He reflects: When I got a 2:2 it was a little bit of a . . . in plain English a kick in the bottom. Many people as you are probably aware, they get a 2:1. [ . . . ] So I really realized with 2:2, because the job market was so challenging, I had to make a decision very, very quickly. What I was going to do, how I was going to do it. I think I probably worked harder looking for the job than I did in my degree in the first place.

Once starting work as an auditor, Ben noticed that those graduates he was working with acquired the chartered qualification and were put on a scheme and treated differently. He continues: 82

The Role of Education When you first start you do the exact same job. You do the exact same clients. There is no separation at all. The only difference when you first start off is there was in my office a £5000 pay differential. So in my first job I started on £15,000 and they started on £20,000. That pay gap increased over the three-year period that you were training. People who were doing the chartered qualification found themselves promoted quicker and they also found themselves with the more prestigious clients.

The differentiation between first-tier and second-tier accountants and analysts is thus related to the type of professional qualification they have, and indirectly to their academic performance within HE. The distinction between types of graduates is seen as unfair and can cause tension within the group of graduates deemed inferior: I found it inequitable because prior to going into accountancy the only thing separating me from somebody else was I got a 2:2 and they got a 2:1. I found it particularly irritating because there were people with 2:1s in frankly undemanding degrees. Bloody hell. I don’t want to say sociology. [ . . . ] We had somebody who did music as a degree. Things which were not in any way related to anything numerical that would get put through the graduate scheme. [ . . . ] A lot of the people who got 2:2s did extremely demanding degrees and got unlucky. [Tony, senior financial analyst, IT]

For press officers, there is an apprenticeship route but this has a mixed reputation: I’m just slightly worried that the apprentice focus might only emphasize the craft element of the job and it becomes a little bit like nursing rather than being a medical practitioner [ . . . ] the apprenticeship is probably a way better route for learning the craft skills of public relations. You’re in the workplace, you’re just adding a little bit of kind of conceptual stuff to your day-to-day practical skills. A university is probably a better future proofing, it’s better for future proofing than for training for a specific job. [Fred, PR educator]

Here we can see the signalling function of university credentials most clearly. Unrelated to the mastery of skills, credentials in PR represent a more able worker. Apprenticeship and apprentices lack the status university education provides. Irrespective of the abilities of non-graduates (and those with low degree classifications), they are the ones who tend to lose out in the competition due to the social status of their educational background. Yet this is not to say that the worth of their credentials is not contested. The distinctions between graduates and non-graduates are ultimately socially constructed. Within a competitive labour market, workers, managers, and employers continue to challenge, question, and oppose particular valuations and understandings of university qualifications. 83

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Conclusion How can we define the role of education in the labour market? First it is important to consider that the role of education is different for each occupation. Rotman et al. (2016) rightly proposed that future research should attempt to identify the factors that determine the positionality of education in diverse settings. One of the settings I have tried to highlight in this chapter is the occupational setting. For software engineers, the role of HE is complicated. Although it is a very skilful occupation and requires constant learning, the role of HE is limited. Here, lifelong learning is a crucial component within the job. HE, however, has a very modest role as a skill provider. At the same time, HE has become the main route to access the occupation. University degrees only have ‘power’ at the early stages of the career and even then are largely secondary to real programming experience. Credentialism is not much of an issue. For the training of laboratory-based scientists, HE is vital. Yet scientists get trained constantly and continue to renew their knowledge and update their skills. The role of HE is considerable but specific. It provides a type of grounding that companies do not offer, yet it only encompasses an initial moment in scientists’ education. The rest takes place within a company work floor and field-specific site. Credentialism is becoming a real issue and many young people consider obtaining a doctorate degree in order to have a successful career. For financial analysts, HE plays a minor role in the provision of the occupation-specific skills, although many benefit explicitly from numerical skills as well as generic skills. There is some evidence of credentialist closure, in particular in the top end of the labour market. Professional qualifications repudiate HE in both the provision and certification within the occupation. Press officers see the role of education in their occupation in even more uncertain terms than software engineers, scientists, and analysts. The required writing and communication skills are mainly attributed to work experience. The fast change within the occupation and the lack of professional roots make it hard for PR to produce or reify a connection with HE. Instead, there are very few educational credentials that can signify worth within the competition for jobs. Unlike occupations such as estate agents, it is understood that this is a graduate occupation but its precise association is under negotiation. HE does not at this point in time play an important role within the occupation. Over time and with the growth of the occupation, the relationship with HE may become more stable. Many of the assumptions of the dominant discourse are flawed or only partially true:

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• Qualifications are not badges of suitability for graduate jobs. They signal initial readiness to learn. Employers in the four occupations accept that HE can only teach some of what is needed. • Credential closure is not decreasing. In our four occupations, it either has never been really relevant or it is increasing (laboratory scientists). Credentialism in its widest form is still relevant as non-graduates are finding it increasingly difficult to find the same opportunities. • Educational credentials are not necessarily interpreted as signals of merit. Degrees, grades, and institutions are understood as signals of worth if they are seen as relevant by employers. How they are judged depends on the valuation and experience of these employers, not as an accepted justification of labour market worth but as cognitive aids in the recruitment and selection process. For many positions, educational signals are of minor importance and at most only one of many signals used to establish the right candidate, at least within the British context. As Brynin (2002) suggests, employers may have trouble distinguishing candidates based on educational credentials. Also, employers and workers together constitute new meanings. • Increase in HE qualifications serves both a market as well as credentialism. The market demand is, however, mainly driven by individuals desiring to attain tertiary education (in order to access the graduate labour market or for other reasons). There is little evidence to suggest that for our occupations an increase in formal education was deemed necessary to keep up with the skill demands of the job content. Does this mean that credentialist theory is right? Is HE no more than a justification for inequalities and social closure within the graduate labour market? Credentialist theory claims that credential requirements exist because of organizational recruitment uncertainties as well as the reproduction of middle-class advantage. Credentials are not so much activated by the demand for concrete work skills and knowledge, but upon finding candidates with similar, (school-taught) cultural dispositions. Credentialist theory projects the phenomenon of ‘credentials inflation’ as a process where the greater the number of workers holding qualifications, the lower their value becomes (Collins, 1979). This chapter has aimed to demonstrate that this value is not that easily captured, as individuals will compete to challenge or confirm particular definitions or classifications. Of course, workers seek qualifications in order to access privileged positions. Yet it is not always clear how these qualifications contribute to labour market advantage. Within a mass system of HE, credentials also lose much of their value to employers and employees alike, certainly several years after graduation.

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Notes 1. A-levels are subject-based qualifications in England and Wales based on exams taken by children aged 17 or 18. Obtaining A-level or equivalent qualifications is generally required for university entrance. 2. UCAS scores (or tariff points) are an entrance selection tool for universities, predominantly based on secondary education grades.

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6 Skills and Knowledge

Introduction What are graduate skills? Do workers have a unique set of work skills that define their group? And if so, to what extent are these associated with higher education? In chapter 3, I outlined some of the assumptions of the dominant imagined graduate labour market. The graduate labour market is often understood as that part of the labour market characterized by high skills and high knowledge intensity and that is perceived to be needed and used in an increasingly complex economy. HE is understood as the developer of these advanced skills. For instance, the ILO (2012, p.13) writes that occupations at Skill Level 4, of which skills and knowledge are obtained at HE: . . . typically involve the performance of tasks which require complex problem solving and decision making based on an extensive body of theoretical and factual knowledge in a specialised field. The tasks performed typically include analysis and research to extend the body of human knowledge in a particular field, diagnosis and treatment of disease, imparting knowledge to others, design of structures or machinery and of processes for construction and production. Occupations at this skill level generally require extended levels of literacy and numeracy, sometimes at a very high level, and excellent interpersonal communication skills. These skills generally include the ability to understand complex written material and communicate complex ideas in media such as books, reports and oral presentations.

The current understanding of the skills needs of the labour market too often treats educational requirements as proxies for skills themselves (Grugulis et al., 2004; Korczynski, 2005). As a result, the growing need for ‘higher’ skills has been perceived as axiomatic of the modern workplace. This chapter shows that most skills in graduate work are not associated with HE and that within the job setting, there is limited space to use the hard skills graduates have developed during HE.

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Skills Used in the Work Process Which skills are required to perform the roles of software engineer, laboratory scientist, financial analyst, and press officer? Predictably, a wide range of skills come into play for those working in these four occupations. Relying on selfreport for identifying the skills needed is notoriously difficult (see Spenner, 1990). Workers can be biased on which skill they use in their work or on their importance. For this reason, my conversations with workers about their work may not reveal a complete or fully accurate representation. Observational data may have been of great value here (although it comes with its own problems). It would be equally wrong to fully dismiss workers’ accounts of the work they do. As such, we do gain an understanding by analysing workers’ accounts, albeit it is partial and subjective. Following Cockburn (1983) and more recently Hurrell et al. (2013), we can distinguish the skills that reside in the worker; the skills that are required in the job; and socially constructed skills.1 Moreover, the skills possessed by workers are not necessarily the skills used in their jobs and not all jobs are valued equally either. In this chapter, I will mainly examine the third approach to investigating skill requirement, accepting that skills can only to some extent be objectively defined. Skills are negotiated socially within the society and the workplace. People’s understanding depends on the value system that allocates jobs and rewards to workers. Skills are foremost socially constructed. They are gendered (Blackmore, 1997; Hochschild, 1983; Phillips and Taylor, 1986) as well as shaped by social class and ethnicity (Moss and Tilly, 2001; Zamudio and Lichter, 2008). Although knowledge is intertwined with skills, it will be examined separately throughout the chapter. We will first turn to technical skills before dealing with the soft skills used at work.2

Technical Skills: Graduates as Knowledge Workers? Technical skill, job-specific abilities, and know-how are required in nearly all jobs in the modern labour market. Graduates working in our four occupations certainly use technical skills throughout their jobs. For the lab scientist, software engineer, and financial analyst, the technical base of their tasks in theory should revolve around the application, diffusion, manipulation, and creation of knowledge. As such these workers may serve to some as prime examples of knowledge workers, as outlined in chapter 2. Knowledge work is associated with a perceived shift from routine operational work to more high-skilled and complex work (Barley, 1996; Frenkel et al., 1995; Alvesson, 2004). University education is likewise associated with the production, creation, and codification of knowledge both in its scientific sense 88

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as well as in its aim to teach this knowledge and create knowledge through teaching. Yet there remains debate over which knowledge and skills define knowledge work. Proponents argue that these are of a specialist and distinct nature in terms of for instance manipulating symbols, concepts, and information (Despres and Hiltrop, 1995; Lee and Maurer, 1997; Reich, 1991), or the ability to use tools or technology (Barley and Orr, 1997; Bell, 1973; Kubo and Saka, 2002).3 More fundamentally, the emphasis is on theoretical rather than contextual knowledge. Warhurst and Thompson (2006, 787) state that ‘the central characteristics of knowledge work are that it draws on a body of theoretical (specialized and abstract) knowledge that is utilized, under conditions of comparative autonomy, to innovate products and processes’. In other words, the technical skills are deeply embedded primarily in theoretical knowledge. However, work in general relies on a wider range of knowledge. Following Blackler (1995), Lam (2000) distinguishes four types of knowledge:4 (1) Embrained knowledge (individual/explicit); formal and abstract knowledge through individual acts of cognition and learning (2) Embodied knowledge (individual/tacit); applied, practical, bodily and context-specific (3) Encoded knowledge (collective/explicit); codified language and information (such as rules and standards) distributed through members of organizations and societies (4) Embedded knowledge (collective/tacit); social practice and shared belief and norms. The first type we normally associate with knowledge work and so we can assess to what extent the technical skills used in our four occupations are directed by utilizing or transforming embrained knowledge. I will also evaluate the associations made in terms of autonomy and innovation.

Lab Scientists On first sight, scientists in laboratories come arguably closest to the ideal of the knowledge worker. For lab scientists, embrained knowledge seems most important. Subject knowledge is a necessity, yet a lot of how-to knowledge is embodied knowledge that is gathered through experience. A lot of the laboratory-specific knowledge is encoded through rules and procedures and embedded through company culture. Many of the attributes and skills perceived to be needed to perform the job are typically associated with the so-called knowledge worker. To engage with the experimental 89

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design and to analyse its outcomes, scientific knowledge and analytical skills are certainly required. Yet within the narratives of the scientists’ descriptions of their daily activities, these ‘thinking skills’ and drawing on abstract knowledge and deductive reasoning are not used for the majority of their day: You have to have reproducible results and you have to be able to repeat things over and over and get the same result over and over again. And that’s, you know, one of the skills really. And all these people who think you go into research and it’s really exciting and you know you’re like Dr Frankenstein—it’s not, you know, if you haven’t got the mindset to do the same thing day in day out, and occasionally get one good result, then you probably shouldn’t go into a lab research job, ’cause it isn’t quite as exciting as they make out on CSI, you know. It is very mundane, but then interspersed with that you get, you know, exciting results and then you can carry those on. But I’d say yeah, 80% of it is fairly repetitive. [Ella, ex-lab scientist, biotechnology company]

There exists a strong symbiotic relationship between embodied knowledge and day-to-day research activities as expressed through descriptions of skill needs like these: [you need] technical skills in being able to handle microorganisms, to do aseptic technique, to know something about, you know, microbiology. [Kevin, CEO, biotechnology company] I think understanding how assay work, how do you construct assays. How to get the right outcome, how they work in terms of understanding what . . . what good data means because you can have a data but how do you know it’s a good data. [Maria, scientist, biotechnology company]

There is also a strong manual side to the work. This is not only intrinsic to the process of experimentation but also is part of the enjoyment for many scientists: You’ve spent whole day setting up this assay, preparing cells, spreading cells a few days in advance, and finding you have a result, and if the result is positive it’s fantastic news, it’s kind of almost yeah, I’ve done it, it works and things like that. [Maria, scientist, biotechnology company]

Related to this, the standards under which scientists use their technical skills are equally essential within a laboratory environment. It represents a general approach to work regarding quality control, precision, or integrity. For Ian, a lab director in a biotechnology company, technically good scientists are those who can follow the correct procedures, record the data from the regulatory point of view, and work with an attention to detail. Sally, director of research in a biotechnology company, shares a similar appreciation for procedural consistency and precision: 90

Skills and Knowledge . . . and then I would say the single most important thing after that is just sort of data integrity, being absolutely certain that they . . . you know, the right things have gone into the right pots, and that the data that’s, you know, being derived from the experiment really does, you know, derive from, you know, the right compounds and so on and so forth, it’s that, you know, that diligent experimentation to make sure you can . . . you can believe the numbers that come out of it.

Although creativity itself is not a skill, we have to understand that how skills are exercised does depend on the creativity allowed in the role. Creativity and an innovative approach influence how roles are performed and structured in terms of skill use. Although most roles rely on scientific skills, the creative or innovative or explorative dimension that is perceived as inherently associated with scientists’ work can be very muted in many of these roles. Dominic, who works for a global pharmaceutical company, remarks: I mean this company here bangs on about innovation all the time—they want to be innovative, they want to be leading edge . . . and it’s very much . . . very important to the company to be a leading-edge company. Now it doesn’t mean that every single individual has to have a creative spark, you know, as long as there are sufficient creative sparks. And that may be . . . I don’t know what the ideal is . . . 10, 20, 30% of the overall head count has to have some, you know, good creative knowledge and ability to find things and generate ideas. Whether it’s chemists coming up with novel ways of making chemical molecules or biologists finding new ways of probing biology, or mathematicians, you know, ways of crunching the numbers—you have some people in those disciplines who do that work, but there may be another body of 40 or 50% who are good disciplinarians at turning handles and doing some of the legwork . . . and you may have other people who have strengths in other areas. So I think although the industry has to be creative, it’s not necessarily every individual that has to have that best creative spark.

Brown et al. (2011, p.81) describe how through technological and corporate change, so-called knowledge work itself is also changing. According to the authors, we are heading to a future where only a small share of workers within companies will be ‘given permission to think’, consisting of senior researchers, managers, and professionals (the so-called developers). Many knowledge workers would, however, fall into a much larger category of demonstrators who implement or execute mostly standardized knowledge. Their technical skills are exercised within boundaries of the role. Warhurst and Thompson (2006, p.795) likewise observe that, ‘high-level skills, core strategic knowledge and organizational competencies in manufacturing and services are concentrated in small sub-sections of expert labour and senior management’. Routine activities such as preparation are accepted as necessary but also acknowledged as repetitive and not as particularly innovative nor creative. Work-specific abilities that scientists mentioned as pivotal to their roles are qualities such as the ability to follow instruction, to do things repetitively and 91

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to the same standard every time, attention to detail, being observant, accountable, cautious, hard-working, adaptable, flexible, and the ability to work both in a team and on your own. One can say that these characteristics are not skills and, therefore, should not be included in the skill demands of the job. Yet, these are personal qualities that are productive, they can be developed (expandable), and they are recognized within their social context and thus could be seen as skills (see Green, 2013). They are crucial in performing the job, which means not all graduates, regardless of their academic performance, are suitable for this type of job.

Software Engineers: Problem Solvers? Some academics have regarded software developers as key examples of knowledge workers (Reich, 1991; Scarborough, 1999). Others have emphasized that the routine content and the management practices exclude them from this category, and so their work has been interpreted to be closer to traditional manual and technical work than to professional work (Marks and Baldry, 2009, p.61). Marks and Scholarios (2007, p.99) note that they are more akin to ‘skilled service workers—teachers, lawyers or accountants—than manual workers or engineers, as they work with their minds rather than their hands. On the other hand, they also produce commodities and share characteristics of both industrial and service work.’ Kunda (1992) explains that proficient programmers are part engineer, part artist and this sets them apart from production. The knowledge used is mostly embrained (e.g. abstract ideas and algorithms) and encoded (languages and client procedures) but largely embodied (individual doing) and embedded (based on the community of practice of software engineering). In all aspects of their work, engineers engage with the knowledge created by other engineers, supervisors, architects, clients, and users. They transform this knowledge into code. They also receive code and transform this into communicative information towards other stakeholders. The software engineers I interviewed worked in a wide variety of companies, sectors, and dissimilar settings. Yet the essence of the technical skills they use is surprisingly similar. The essence of software engineering is to find solutions for problems through principles of software engineering and producing the right code to accomplish this. Jack, a software engineer working in biotechnology, sums it up as follows: So my interest is in how do I make computers do things, make them do interesting things, and how do you organize software and how does the computer really know what it’s meant to be doing.

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Depending on the particular role of the software engineers, they need to be able to understand coding. This requires knowing and understanding a programming language. The aim is to code efficiently and effectively, without any mistakes: You need to be able to write efficient, tidy, standards-conformant C++ code which when peer reviewed will not show fundamental flaws. [Jeffrey, software engineer, publishing company] There’s knowing and understanding the language you are actually using. software engineer, IT company]

[Frank,

. . . managing to effectively define the nature of the software problem, and then break it down into suitable pieces of . . . suitable smaller fragments that can then be solved. So I would say the main skills are in, you know, being able to pick up a document that explains what a system’s got to do, which will have a software component. And, you know, ascertaining what the software requirements are to meet the system and then to actually, you know, design the system such that it will meet those requirements. [Tristram, software engineer, contractor]

There are multiple languages to choose from. Popular languages are Java, C, C++, C#, and Python. Their usage and popularity change over time and some are easier to learn and to use than others. Learning a language takes time, and programmers become better at programming with time, regardless of the language. Many observe that their command of coding improved starkly over time. Engineers comment that it is not so much the language but the principles of coding that need time to develop. Many learn new languages over their working lifetime whilst working without too much trouble (‘I don’t find any of them sort of that conceptually difficult, it’s just a matter of like learning the syntax and learning how they work’ [Andrew]). Others specialize in a specific coding language (e.g. C++, Python, or Java). A good code can be regarded as a thing of beauty, admired by software engineers. Many young engineers examine the code produced by senior engineers and try to learn from it. There is broad consensus that problem solving lies behind much of the work of the software engineer. The software process commences with a particular problem aiming to fulfil the need or requirement of the user/client, and the engineer (or software architect) comes up with a design and then turns the design into efficient code, combining programming and software engineering principles. Some use puzzle analogies. Engineers describe the problem-solving aspect as the following: It is sort of easy to sort of start programming and stuff and then realizing you had sort of done it slightly all wrong and so you have to do a lot of sort of re-factoring. You have to be quite good at imaging how it is all going to go together in your head so you can work out whether you are sort of working it on the right track or not. [Bruce, software engineer, IT company]

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Graduate Work . . . idea of if you have a relatively complex problem to solve, breaking that down into sensible components and sort of solving the individual components, making the modules that you’ve written or that you’ve designed together. [Ewart, software engineer, IT company] You sit down and analyse the system till you know what each component or each part of each component does. And then you write something to execute that. [Jacob, software engineer, contractor]

From this, we can see that the key skills involved are analytic skills: deconstructing and assembling parts of the problem and through the medium of code finding solutions. Similar to the scientists, there exists a divide between routine and creative tasks. For many engineers, a minority of their time is spent coding and more is spent checking the software. So, certainly not all of the work relies heavily on problem solving. Many tasks are rather repetitive and seen as tedious such as administrative tasks, updating databases, tweaking values, reading up support calls to customers—and are even not codingrelated. Some parts are experienced as rather monotonous, such as detecting faults (bugs) within the software. There are of course other technical skills involved. Other skills that were mentioned were adaptability—the ability to grasp new technologies and master them—time management, research skills, and related to these, the ability to learn. As expressed before, skills and knowledge are developed slowly over time. The ability to draw on your own knowledge base rather than having to rely on others is seen as part of this process.

Financial Analysts: the Power of Numbers The techniques of financial analysis are performed through numerical skills assisted by computing software. The level of mathematical complexity differs from role to role but is regarded as more intricate than pure accountancy. A lot of the numerical ability relates to having an affinity with numbers and an overall understanding of what numbers mean: All of the computers and spreadsheets that are used pretty much do the maths for you behind the scenes. But you’ve got to be able to sort of run your eye over something and make sure quickly whether it makes sense or not. [Clifford, analyst, jewellery company]

Yet the majority of their job is not spent ‘crunching’ numbers. Analysts stress that it is the interpretation rather than calculation that is key to their occupation. There is a strong analytical component but also an almost intuitive ability to understand numbers, what they mean, and patterns between them: 94

Skills and Knowledge Financial analysis is what you should be able to see from the numbers. If you have five numbers, you should be able to identify patterns in order to analyse the financial statements. [ . . . ] if a person gives you ten numbers, the financial analyst will just try to make out patterns from it. That’s the numerical skill that you want. [Boris, financial analyst, banking] I think it’s very important to be numerate and very comfortable in being . . . I mean you don’t need a maths degree. You don’t need to know advanced mathematical techniques or statistical techniques that some of the economics do also. I think certainly being numerate is very helpful so you can kind of make sense of something when you don’t have a spreadsheet in front of you. Just something sounds about right, you do the calculation in your head and do whatever. That is all helpful. But I don’t know whether people are more numerate than other people, or it’s just kind of intelligence and being able to process things in your head. You can say somebody is good at chess or something and think five or six moves ahead. That is not numeracy but that is the same thing, people can process something in their head without sitting down and working something out on a computer. I think it is quite a similar technique people like me use in a meeting or something where you are trying to make sense of what you are being told and if that sounds right or not. [Troy, senior financial analyst, public sector]

A financial analyst needs to manipulate numbers in order to understand patterns, regularities, and irregularities and to find new and insightful ways to answer questions others may have about the data. Related skills are to understand what numerical data is required, where to get the information, how to manipulate it, and how to repackage this/present it: You need to understand what the other wants, to be able to be clear on what information they want and the skills to get it. [Judy, business analyst, bank]

This interpretative aspect is seen as a very creative aspect. IT skills were also mentioned by many. In particular, mastery of Microsoft Excel was deemed important but not always present in new recruits as this analyst conveys: Excel skills is usually what’s lacking. At the end of the day, if you’re looking for a financial analyst role, you’re bound to get involved in looking at spreadsheets at some stage, an interpretation of them. So you might be involved in manipulation of financial data or data in general. A lot of graduates apply for jobs without any experience whatsoever of Excel, or very limited skills. It’d be very useful if they could manipulate models, and this is not often taught or picked up. [Joe, finance recruiter]

Other role-specific technical skills are time management, prioritizing, accuracy, ability to write professionally, and being detail-oriented, among others. In addition, analysts frequently use embrained knowledge such as knowledge of econometrics and general economics (in particular macroeconomic knowledge). More importantly, there is industry knowledge which is key as it 95

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forms the foundation of financial analysis. Understanding the market, sector, and company is part of the expertise financial analysts have: So having the knowledge about your industry is obviously critical, you need to know what’s going on. But the ins and outs of it you can’t know until you get there. [Denise, financial analyst, unemployed] I think that’s part of the knowledge that’s necessary, and then I think you also need to know how companies finance themselves, so you need to know what instruments they can use in terms of bonds, in terms of equities or hybrid instruments, so I think you need to understand that pretty much for any financial analyst role . . . . I think you also need to know something about the industry that you’re looking at, so say you’re looking at a telecommunications company, I think you need to know as much as you can about the industry, its competitive dynamics, so maybe knowing some frameworks for how to analyse an industry. [Lee, ex-analyst for a major global investment bank]

Related to this is understanding business and finance in general. This may not be fully explicit and to some extent may be rather embedded because business or commercial acumen is more individual and very tacit.

Press Officers: Knowledgeable Workers? The technical skills required for a press officer are centred on communication. Despite being largely social in nature, communicating is a core technical skill for occupations such as journalists, politicians, and commentators (Elias and Purcell, 2013). Writing is the cornerstone of a PR professional’s skill set. The need for clear, crisp, and precise English was expressed by many of those in the occupation. Press releases, for instance, need to be written in a particular form and using language targeted for intended audiences: Being concise but explaining something well and in a concise and efficient way that is not complicated and something the general public will understand. [Patricia, senior press officer, charity]

In addition, press officers need to be able to deal with information—to understand, process, and repackage it. PR professionals need to come to terms with increasing data available on their audiences and the impact of their PR strategies. Dylan, a PR and policy manager for a trade organization, explains: You need to have analytical skills; you need to be able to understand that data is key, so what social and digital is doing for you is like producing reams and reams of data about lots of different things—you need to be able to interpret that and analyse that and adjust your communications messages accordingly, based on that data.

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Other important skills that are supportive of or ancillary to the main communicative technical skills include being able to work under pressure, attention to detail, and being proactive, among others. Another key skill that is identified by some is strategic thinking: . . . cut through the noise and to focus on what’s actually the important point, and I think that clarity of thinking then comes through in people’s writing and in the way they can shape everything, from producing PR collateral, all the way through to the way they can express themselves in a meeting. [Alastair, press manager, Internet company]

There is potential for press officers to use a lot of knowledge. Being able to digest lots of (sometimes) complicated information quickly is key within some organizations: I could do my job without being able to just reel off 1000 facts about the company, because if you receive a call from a journalist and it’s complete nonsense, you need to explain to them why it’s nonsense. [Mildred, media manager, utility company]

Most press officers do not have to have any specialist information as there are experts within the organization that they can request information from. Finding the right information can require some research skills but it is not seen as overly challenging. Yet over time, most press officers become very knowledgeable about their industry, the organization, and related fields. Press officers themselves do work with and transform knowledge but it is their understanding of how the media works that distinguishes them. This knowledge is inherently related to social skills and relationships with journalists and other media stakeholders: . . . an understanding of what the medias need really, an understanding of how their landscape works, because, you know, basically they will come to us looking for information and we need to understand why they’re looking for that and what sort of information we can provide that will make it worthwhile. [Janet, PR manager, car manufacturer] . . . how it works and what newspapers’ agendas are and what makes a story and what journalists are looking for. [Eleanor, senior media officer, transport organization]

So, although there is not necessarily embrained knowledge and there is limited encoded knowledge (depending on the organization), there is tacit knowledge about media and journalists (embodied) as well as embedded knowledge about the norms and values within the stakeholder and media landscapes. The technical skills are the product of an interplay between dealing with texts or messages (messages/interviews/press releases/tweets and internal communication) and with interpersonal skills (which we will cover later).

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Job Control and Creativity One of the perceived characteristics of knowledge workers is to work under conditions of relatively high autonomy and to at the minimum have the ability and opportunity to innovate products and processes. Although not in itself a skill, job control, the ability to decide how to do one’s work (and the pace at which to do it), influences how skills are exercised and how much scope exists for skill development. The case studies, which only examined workers’ subjective job control, indicate that most graduate workers perceive their own control to be high. Yet there does not seem to be anything specifically about graduate work that indicates the need or practice of high job control. The lab scientists I spoke to tend to work under conditions of comparatively high autonomy.5 Most scientists are not monitored very closely and do not work under direct management. Most scientists in the case study would formally meet with their managers once a week. They have considerable freedom to plan their own activities when they want to. Kevin, CEO of a biotech company, explains how much his scientists are managed: they tend to have a sort of weekly meeting on a Monday morning and the sort of . . . you know, workload for the week would be discussed at that meeting. They certainly can input to that discussion, but basically out of that meeting comes pretty well the plan for the week, and, you know, then they’ll get on with it. So I guess on a day-to-day level there’s nobody really standing over their shoulders, you know, watching what they do—once, you know, once that plan’s been set up for the week they’d more or less get on with it.

The software engineers in the study also express that they work with reasonable amounts of autonomy. In certain cases, their supervisors do not have the knowledge or understanding to closely manage their activities, in other cases the company they work for deliberately provides a relatively high level of control. Once more, this control is restricted by other aspects of the work process. They can be free to work as they wish, but are given defined tasks to do within strict deadlines using particular program languages and technologies not of their choosing: I tend to just have one or two things, sort of I will work on this, work on that. Apart from that I am more or less left on my own to do that work. Given a couple of days a week to work on a problem. Sort of code gets submitted and I sort of review it. So I get a bit of feedback there. But you are free to sort of decide how you progress on. [Bruce, software engineer, IT company] At the minute I have quite a lot of autonomy. In general, I think software engineering maybe isn’t that autonomous because everything has to be quite precise, and often there’ll be like a company style or guidelines where you have to write your code in a certain style, and there’ll be regular meetings with

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Skills and Knowledge supervisors where people will look through each other’s codes and say, oh, I think this is wrong and stuff. [Hugh, software engineer, IT company]

A pivotal question is whether autonomy is needed to work as a software engineer. Andrews et al.’s (2005) study of software start-ups found a high degree of rationalization and structuration in the work of software developers, even in the small-scale firms. Some believe that the work intrinsically requires discretion and creative freedom to a high degree, comparable to craft work (‘Sometimes there’s nobody there to help and you have no choice’ [Ewart, software engineer, IT company]). Others disagree. The autonomy of the financial analysts and press officers I interviewed was large within the confines of the role. They are able to plan their own work and work independently towards deadlines but are controlled in the tasks they perform: They don’t care how much time you put in, or whether you have a two-hour lunch break, as long as by the end of the day you have some productions then that’s alright. [Simone, investment analyst, finance company]

Analysts respond to queries and ‘assignments’ from other stakeholders. For those not working within finance itself, their role is often regarded as a support function. As such, their activities are not highly monitored but are limited to what stakeholders/clients want them to analyse. Talking about management, Danny [a finance analyst in a large multinational company] and Boris [a financial analyst in banking] explain: . . . they impose restrictions or request ourselves to slow us down or, we almost don’t see the value of our work even though there often would be value, but we might not just see it. [Danny] I’m not able to make my own decisions, but I am able to suggest a lot of things to them. [Boris]

For press officers, there is very little room to really innovate the work process but there is a lot of autonomy in many organizations to work independently (albeit being part of a team). There tends to be a division of labour that encourages independent and self-directed work. Donna, a press and communication manager in a science organization, describes her workplace thus: It is fairly autonomous. Myself and my boss do the press and marketing side and we have another colleague who does the social media and the website. Between myself and my boss we do split media stories so even though I’m still quite new, I’ve had individual reports that are solely my responsibility to get in front of the media in as many ways as we can. It’s exactly the right level of autonomy that I would want which is quite a lot.

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Yet this relatively high autonomy within our four occupations needs to be put in perspective. For the scientists, the work procedures were often rigid and the parameters of tasks set and written down or codified. This is acknowledged and accepted by the scientists themselves: So that’s just to, you know, run the day-in day-out everyday sort of lab things— I wasn’t allowed to make huge decisions. [Ella, ex-lab scientist, biotechnology company] GT: Do you have a lot of autonomy in terms of doing the work the way you want to do it and when you want to do it? No, not really. You can choose which way round you do it in a day maybe but if it needs to be done, it needs to be done. [Jason, scientist/technician, biotechnology company]

Other, more experienced scientists have perceived autonomy but in their description the autonomy is exercised within strict work parameters: Oh yeah, I have full autonomy, yeah, so it’s up to me to find the most optimal way that’s . . . there’s various parameters how you can judge whether your assay works well. For example, doing assay development you can judge whether it’s performing well or not, and it is up to you how you set it out, because you have understanding of how A and B should equal C, for example. Whether you add A first or B first, it’s up to you to decide how you construct your assay as long as you get C. So, in that respect it’s up to you how you do it. [Nigel, senior scientist, biotechnology company]

There is a tension between what a scientific occupation ideally could be and the actual experience of it. Workers accept that they work in a creative industry but acknowledge that a large part of the work is not creative. Exscientist and now recruiter Oliver explains: I think science is a creative subject, it’s solving problems, especially in research and development.

But later in the conversation he argues: There are those who are happy doing the routine work, the routine quality control work. They know how to do it, and that’s what they enjoy doing—there’s no creativity there. And I think it’s just . . . if you have creativity and you’re a scientist—that’s the hardest profile to find, because a lot of times creativity and science don’t go hand in hand.

This last observation is poignant. Although creativity is of course not the same as autonomy, for many scientists autonomy may not be inherently required if their job role does not require creativity. Similar to the laboratory scientist, there is great heterogeneity in the autonomy and control given to software engineers: 100

Skills and Knowledge I have freedom of implementing things the way I want and I have freedom of proposing new ideas, and I will know that . . . we will definitely discuss them and they will not be dropped upfront. In some other companies it’s more strict—the engineers are not expected to bring their own decisions or they’re not expected to skid from the actual schedule and uh . . . it’s a little bit difficult for the engineers to express their own will. [Peter, software engineer, IT company]

In some roles there is very little continuity or involvement in the end product: . . . you kind of get moved from one to another . . . which means that until you’re wrapping up at one project you don’t necessarily know what’s going to come next. [Andrew, software engineer, IT company]

It was also suggested by some that, perhaps unsurprisingly, senior engineers receive more autonomy than junior engineers. Engineers work on other people’s projects where they have limited control. Working for large software companies such as Intel also required a standardized way of working. Testing, which makes up a lot of the work, is seen as monotonous and repetitive. Related to control is creativity, the potential to innovate and to create something new. Most of the engineers strongly felt it is a creative job, because problem solving, finding solutions to software problems, is what their role is based on. However, there are boundaries to creativity here as Bob, a software engineer, describes: No, I think the creativity lies with different languages and maybe different type of sector that you’re working in, but there’s limited creativity, I mean, you can’t really go beyond much. I think the creativity lies in that if I’m working in one language and then I go on to another language, the design systems of that language are completely different, so I need to learn it and I need to like figure out how to do things with it and maybe design new things in that, so that’s kind of creating new things using something else, but once you know that then I don’t think there’s much creativity beyond that.

Thomas, a software consultant, admits: Most of us aren’t that creative, that dynamic, that inventive . . . and it’s dreary work.

Technical Skills: Conclusion Technical skills, which are often equated with graduate skills, cannot be understood without looking at the work context in which graduates work. The role technical skills play depends on occupational parameters (as well as organization and sector, which lie outside of the scope of this chapter). There is little that unites graduates in their use of technical skills or their relation to knowledge across these occupations. A few observations can, however, be made: • Technical skills can be low skilled. Lab scientists perform many routine, simple tasks. 101

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• Technical skills are quite elusive and cannot always be codified. Software engineers rely on their problem solving that develops with experience and is hard to teach. For analysts, using mathematical principles and sophisticated software remain key technical skills; their job also revolves around ‘discovering’ patterns and understanding what the numbers are ‘saying’. • Technical skills cannot be distinguished from soft skills or are soft skills (communication). The technical skill of finance analysis cannot be separated from the need to communicate the analysis to others. Although analytically distinct, for analysts, soft skills and technical skills merge in the work process. For press officers, communication is the key technical skill. • Routine is part of most graduate work. In all four occupations there is plenty of routine work, as observed for many jobs deemed knowledge occupations (see Alvesson, 2004; Fleming et al., 2004). The conducting of experiments, the production of code, the analysis of financial information, and the engagement with the media are all performed through reliance on competencies and abilities that are job- and/ or occupation-specific and are, at the very least, experienced as being complex and involving high use of skills. Technical skills are, in a traditional understanding, observable and measurable. Yet the stamina and precision for bench work are hard to measure; the problem solving that goes on within a software engineer’s head is hard to observe; the numerical skills of financial analysts only become meaningful in combination with the much more tacit and embodied industry understanding and commercial acumen. The kinds of expertise that workers in these four occupations have are, to some extent, technical in the traditional sense but are more often much more linked to wider performance of a role than an aggregate of individual tasks that can be measured and observed. A popular typology separates cognitive and interactive skills (as well as physical skills), juxtaposing thinking activities (e.g. reading, writing, problem solving, numeracy) and communication (Green, 2013, p.22). Although this opens up the possibility to go beyond the technical/non-technical dichotomy, it does not deal properly with soft skills. The knowledge work paradigm is right to point out the importance of knowledge in most graduate work. Yet software engineers, lab scientists, financial analysts, and press officers all use a wide variety of knowledge (embodied, encoded, and embedded) and not dominantly embrained knowledge. I also observed significant variation in and between the roles, and also need to acknowledge that not every worker within an assumed knowledge occupation is in fact a genuine knowledge worker (Thompson et al., 2001; Fincham, 2006; Benson and Brown, 2007). The assumed autonomy is largely

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defined by their tasks (lab scientists, press officers), the purpose of the work (software engineers), and their role within the organization (financial analysts). Blundell et al. (2016) observe an overall increase in job control, and theorize that the increase of graduates induces firms to transit towards a decentralized technology in which decision making is spread more widely through the workforce. Other research confirms the overall growth in job control over time, and that job control is higher for associate professional and technical occupations than for professional occupations. For instance, sales occupations (a predominantly non-graduate occupational group) have relatively high job control (Holmes and Mayhew, 2015, p.20). We will now turn to another group of skills used in the workplace: soft skills.

Soft Skills Labour market researchers have observed a shift from technical to social skills in modern workplaces (Warhurst and Thompson 2006; Grugulis and Vincent, 2009). How can we understand the meaning and usage of soft skills within the four graduate occupations? When we talk about soft skills it is important to realize that the term is relational and there is a spectrum of skills that are deemed hard (numerical, physical) and those that are deemed soft. The latter revolves around behaviours, dispositions, characteristics, and attitudes that are needed. Moss and Tilly (1996, p.253) define soft skills as ‘skills, abilities and traits that pertain to personality, attitude and behaviour rather than to formal or technical knowledge’. The authors usefully distinguish motivational soft skills (e.g. enthusiasm, positive work attitude, commitment, dependability, willingness to learn) and interactional soft skills (e.g. friendliness, teamwork, ability to fit in, and appropriate grooming and attire). There is an ongoing debate about what can count as skills and some have suggested that many of the qualities that are now commonly identified as soft skills are not skills (Lafer, 2004; Payne, 2000). According to these authors, the fluidity of the definition of skills has made the term rather meaningless. However, it is not within the aims of this chapter to outline the debate on the value of the concept of soft skills. Despite the existing indeterminacy of defining and measuring them, it is worth examining what, where, and how soft skills are used and how they are understood within graduate occupations. I will focus on three main areas of soft skills, relating to Moss and Tilly’s interactional skills: communication skills, social skills, and social fit.

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Communication Skills Communication skills, the ability to convey and share information to others effectively and efficiently, were deemed required for all four occupations, although not to the same extent. For press officers, I have earlier explained that communication can be viewed as a core skill and technical in nature. The distinction between hard and soft skills in this occupation is hard to make. For financial analysts, being able to communicate effectively within their organization is fundamental to performing their role. Analysts present ideas and findings frequently within their own company and may have to convince others to appreciate their ideas. Financial analysts and press officers both have to communicate with a wide audience of industry experts, outsider stakeholders and, in some cases, clients. This requires being a good listener and having fine-tuned social antennae to understand others: I think one of the biggest stereotypes about sort of accountants and analysts is that they’re guys that sit behind their screen with their glasses on all day and they don’t really integrate or communicate around the office. But one of the most important skills for a financial analyst is someone that can communicate around the office. [Clifford, analyst, jewellery company] I have to speak to so many different people, and it’s really hard to get information from some people, because people can be very guarded about what they have, especially in this industry, it’s a very closed-off . . . conversations will shut doors, kind of . . . they never really discuss the financials of the firm openly, they just don’t do it. So, if you want to know anything, you have to really be in there with people. [Esther, senior financial analyst, law firm] You can’t really be shy in this industry, or too shy. You’ve got to be able to communicate not just with players or other players that come from the Premier Leagues, but also the home-grown players, are a bit more down to earth, then also the directors and chairman at the club—you’ve got to be able to communicate and get your point across, ideas across, and hopefully your ideas will get selected and then we can market them. [Martin, media manager, football club]

Communication is often crucial to working in a collaborative environment such as a laboratory. Likewise, many software engineers work in teams so in order to work effectively, communications were deemed a necessity. For lab scientists and software engineers, communication skills were, however, not frequently mentioned, but if they were they were associated with career opportunities. The highly technical nature of their output requires software engineers to explain to others, both experts (fellow coders, coding architects, managers) and non-experts (clients, managers), their work and make them understand the requirements. Many engineers admit that not all engineers are naturally gifted but do acknowledge the need for precise and clear communication in most roles: 104

Skills and Knowledge . . . software engineers, we’re all a bit weird, but yes you have to have communication skills, you have to have the ability to work in a team. You can’t take weirdness too far. [Ewart, software engineer, IT company] Because the code can be so complex, it’s quite hard to explain to someone exactly what you think the software is doing as opposed to what the software is actually doing, and you might have to put something up for them. And I think being able to talk to people about that and get it across to them is quite important. [Susan, software engineer, oil and gas industry] There are a lot of times when you have to explain why something works or doesn’t work to somebody else and communication skills there are very important. Explaining why something is complex and will take a long time to implement needs communication skills. Managers very rarely will just accept ‘Because I said so’ as an explanation why you can’t fit a development into a certain time available. [Paul, senior software engineer, manufacturing]

Social Skills Being able to work together with other people effectively or at a minimum to cooperate with people, whether customers, supervisors, or colleagues, shapes job performance in most modern jobs, in particular in interactive roles. For graduate workers in our four occupations, social skills are extraordinarily important. To various degrees, their roles are defined by how well they can work with, influence, understand, identify, respond to, interact with, and perhaps most importantly, connect with other people. Two insiders in science recruitment reveal: They’ve got to get on with their colleagues.

[Oliver, science recruiter]

Teamwork is a must-have for most positions. So, if you don’t work well as part of a team, why would you want someone kind of in your lab. [Ian, lab director, biotechnology company]

For financial analysts, understanding others is key as many stakeholders have different agendas and interests and may not be willing to share information or cooperate. This requires institutional knowledge but also a particular social sensitivity: You deal with other people, say traders or people who do sales, who may have a different view because they’re compensated directly on the amount of business that they do, maybe not so much on the risks that they take. [Lee, ex-analyst for a major global investment bank]

Maintaining relations can therefore be crucial to being successful: Knowing the right people to contact, like setting up a network is really important, so rather than sitting there for ten minutes going right how am I going to get

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Similarly, building relationships is also key for press officers, particularly maintaining a network of journalists and stakeholders within the company sector and external media. The ability to convince others tends to be associated with sales or marketing roles, yet for those who work in PR the art of changing people’s minds is central in the day-to-day job. A lot of the success of the press officer hinges on the ability to create a newsworthy story or convince others to report about their organization in the way the press officer wants them to: What’s hard is to convert why a company wants to promote into something that’s seen as newsworthy by journalists who aren’t being paid to promote it, you know. You’re not an advertiser, it’s not just a case of negotiating a fee for your story to appear in the media. You have to persuade people to run it as genuine objective news. [Fred, PR educator] You need to show that you can influence people, you can be enthusiastic about something and say this is a really good story or this is really important, this person’s looking into this and this is why it needs to be in your newspaper or magazine. [Donna, press and communication manager, science organization]

Social Fit Chapter 4 highlighted the prominence of social fit as a recruitment and selection criterion. Predictably, this reflects its function within the workplace. In environments such as the laboratories, this fit was constructed around notions of collegiality and team spirit. The social fit within the laboratory environment is perhaps for this reason expressed in rather functional terms (as opposed to, for instance, social class or gender). Whereas for software engineers, the importance of social fit was deemed variable, it was all the more important for financial analysts. Organizational cultures make social fit key to performing the role. To be accepted and to get on with others in the organization will make it easier to obtain the right data as well as communicate their analysis to internal stakeholders: So I think the culture here is a massive, massive part of it, and I think it’s enough to be at the stage where if you don’t fit into the culture, you probably wouldn’t stay in the business. [Danny, finance analyst, large multinational company] I think the culture is a big thing. So, during the daytime you just go to work and try to perform well, but after work how do you have a better relationship with your colleagues, do you go to pubs with them, do you talk about the sports, do you talk about the TV show they watch over the weekends? And I think that, for me, is the hardest part. [Simone, investment analyst, finance company]

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Skills and Knowledge It helps with team bonding if another person slots in and they’ve got the same sort of ideas about stuff. I mean it’s not that—I mean my team is very varied, we had people from all over the world, and different religions, and different everything, but somehow we were all kind of on the same grain in that we wanted to do well in the city, and all this kind of stuff. And I think some people fit better into teams than others, and yes I do think there is an element of social fit going on, definitely. [Denise, financial analyst, unemployed]

A particular sociability was also desired for those working directly with customers: You probably do need to be more outgoing and have a more easy manner socially if you’re going to be in front of customers. . . . Clearly, they don’t want to think you’re smooth, smarmy, and totally superficial so there’s got to be depth there as well but, nonetheless, you have got to be able to be at ease making presentations and communicating and listening to what companies are saying to you about their strategic needs and the problems they’ve got. [Michael, ex-analyst, academic]

For press officers specifically, sociability with work contacts (e.g. journalists, CEOs) was deemed to be aided by a particular natural outgoing personality or a type of emotional labour in which workers need to regulate their emotions to achieve organizational goals found in various types of service work (see Wharton, 2009): Being likeable, having the kind of personality where people don’t mind explaining to you more or they want to tell you more. If there is a press officer in the company who was really grumpy and who nobody wanted to approach, your work would suffer because if you were working in the policy department, you might be disinclined to chat with her about whether a story might be of interest or not. Whereas if you’re open and friendly, people do want to come and talk to you and you get better results because that way, you do find stories that are better and do get coverage. [Donna, press and communication manager, science organization]

In other words, it seems that a particular sociable performance is deemed necessary to be able to effectively communicate and interact with others. In extremis, Mildred (media manager, utility company) put it as follows: I often say that our job is 99% personality, 1% skill, because if you’re not the type of person that wants to talk to people about things, then it’s probably not going to excite you as a role.

The idea that soft skills are important within the modern workplace is not new and should not be surprising. They are not merely additional skills to supplement the hard skills, they are fundamental skills in themselves. Furthermore, soft and hard skills work in tandem together to fulfil a set of tasks. Darr (2004, 107

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p.58) has observed that social and technical skills are inseparable in contemporary work organizations. His study on engineers involved in sales work in computing shows that the analytical distinction between social and technical skills is only valid on the analytical level. In reality, they cannot be separated and are interdependent. For our four occupations, it has likewise become clear that soft skills are embedded in hard skills and knowledge. Both types of skills work in harmony. Although we analytically distinguished them, within the work process it is much harder to see them and/or to value them independently. The software or code written by engineers can only be understood within the continuous conversation regarding feasibility, costs, and requirements with supervisors, fellow team members, and customers. Press officers transform technical knowledge and information into media messages through the social work they perform with stakeholders such as journalists. The best example of where soft skills merge with hard skills comes from the financial analysts who have to work with numbers and people in equal measure. Conveying their interpretation of numerical data is a deeply social activity. In the following two quotes, both analysts explain that in their field a successful analysis is one that is conveyed to others in a convincing and meaningful way: So, say whether you have company accounts or financial models, I think you always have to try to synthesize them into a story, and I think you also have to be curious and ask questions, because you’re never given everything that you may want to know, and you have to dig into things and see what else you might need, so I think you have to be quite resourceful as well. And then I think you need good communication skills to convey the results of your analysis, so it’s not good enough I guess to have great analysis if you can’t write it up properly in an accessible way, or present it, whether it’s a small forum or a large forum. Whatever you need to do, you need to be able to communicate the results. [Lee, ex-analyst for a major global investment bank] You need to put that into a report, to explain that to people who don’t have a finance background in fairly simple terms. I think I am probably stronger in that respect than doing the sort of technical spreadsheet-type work. As you progress and you become more senior you do less of the spreadsheet stuff and more of the interpreting and the communication skills; presenting reports that somebody else might have written or done the analysis to support what’s written. So in terms of my role, probably to come up with answers, quite a small portion I would say, between 10–20% is actually sitting in front of a computer and doing spreadsheettype analysis. [Ben, financial analyst, public sector]

Graduate roles such as these rely on mixed skill compounds, making hard/soft skill dichotomies increasingly untenable.

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Conclusion So what are graduate skills? This chapter has juxtaposed reified notions of graduate skills, often characterized by notions of abstract and higher-level thinking, knowledge intensity, and complexity, with the perceived skill requirements for those within our four graduate occupations. I will conclude with five observations. First, graduate skills do not necessarily relate to HE. Based on a case study of estate agents, I have argued with others that in many occupations which are traditionally non-graduate, what matter are a wide range of soft skills and not the skills associated with HE (Tholen et al., 2016). For these occupations we ought to be referring to the ‘skills of graduates’ rather than what are believed to be ‘graduate skills’. Graduates in our four occupations use a wide range of both technical (and hard) as well as soft skills. Not unlike estate agents, they are heavily reliant on social and communicative skills to do their jobs. Again, this may not be surprising to some, but it does deserve reflection. Although we know that students develop a wide range of skills at university (Little et al., 2008; Jackson, 2016), the skills used at work in our four occupations are only to a limited extent developed at work. Also, if soft skills are just as important as hard skills, and many skills are indeed unlikely to be developed in HE, how distinct are graduate skills? As long as the skills of graduates are equated with ‘advanced’ thinking skills, we will remain in a circular thought pattern in which the skills of graduates are perceived as high skilled because they are performed by graduates. A second point is that skill requirements of graduates need to be understood in a contextual and socialized way. Here it is important to repeat Darrah’s (1994) criticism of the literature on skill requirements. First, there is the risk of decomposing workers or jobs into bundles of characteristics and skills that measure what is important about work. This creates an abstracted profile of their skills’ characteristics, but it does not mean they all use them or need them. In addition, there is a risk that one separates skill from social context. Technical skills only become meaningful within job roles. Technical skills remain largely developed on the job and are often job-specific. Although some of the key skills may be developed within university education, academic disciplinary knowledge is ancillary. It is not surprising that many employers are not fundamentally concerned about what type of degree a graduate has. They are far more interested in work experience and other experiences that could indicate them as suitable workers. The skills that graduates bring with them into the workplace and the skills that they are expected, encouraged, and allowed to use in their roles vary and change over time, depending on employer (including managerial and technological) decisions.

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Third, knowledge is applied in different ways within the four occupations. In the same vein, knowledge is important in all four occupations but not just abstract and theoretical embrained knowledge. Graduate roles require the use of all types of knowledge: social, tacit, and contextual. For instance, for scientists, embodied knowledge within the laboratory setting; for analysts, encoded knowledge in the form of organization standards and industry-specific understanding. Press officers explicitly use embedded knowledge in dealing with a tight-knit press community with distinct norms and customs. As such, graduate occupations cannot be defined as having a special relationship with knowledge as proponents of the knowledge work paradigm would have it. Fourth, skills are socially constructed. As part of an ongoing negotiation of what skills represent, they are presented and understood in an active way by workers, employers, educators, and other stakeholders (trade unions, government actors, colleagues). Skills are continuously (re)defined, evaluated, valued, and contested and defended. In particular, within the labour market for graduates what counts as high or advanced skills is determined by a constant struggle for status, employment opportunity, and financial rewards. Warhurst et al. (2017) observe a significant shift in the social construction of skill. According to the authors, skill is increasingly based on ascribed status (based on social category) rather than simply achieved (expressed through, for instance, qualification). These ascribed skills are often acquired through socialization and are creating space for employment discrimination today. At the same time, the lines between achieved skill and ascribed skill are growing progressively fuzzier. The authors write: Key characteristics now considered as skills, such as attractiveness, articulateness, ability to ‘relate well’ with customers, co-workers and managers and so on, are highly dependent on the beholder or the party being related to, and his or her own preferences, biases and expectations. (p.74)

The idea of ‘graduate skills’ represents a good example of how individuals and groups can define and classify particular characteristics, symbolically dividing high-status work from lower-status work. Through associating particular skills with HE, these become strategic assets for various groups and individuals in the struggle for professional recognition and closure as well as occupations that want to be positioned as graduate occupations (see Tholen, 2016).

Notes 1. See also Noon et al. (2013, p.112). 2. This chapter does not cover where the skills are developed (James et al., 2013), e.g. at work, at university, school, or at home. The available data from the project

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Skills and Knowledge emphasizes the importance of work rather than university as a site of learning workrelated skills and knowledge. 3. Others focus on innovative capabilities. Vogt (1995, p.33) defines a knowledge worker as ‘a person with the motivation and capacity to co-create new insights and the capability to communicate, coach, and facilitate the implementation of new ideas’. Other theorists define knowledge work mainly through the lens of the organization, the knowledge-intensive firm (e.g. Alvesson and Robertson, 2006; Robertson and Swan, 2003). 4. Lam (2000) identifies four of the types of knowledge, explicit–tacit and individual– collective dimensions of knowledge, creating four typologies: embrained knowledge (individual and explicit), embodied knowledge (individual and tacit), encoded knowledge (collective and explicit), and embedded knowledge (collective and tacit). 5. Some studies have found a general decrease in job control in research work. A study by Gleadle et al. (2012) found that large high-tech firms changed their postbureaucratic forms of organization to more traditional and hierarchical models to manage R&D engineers as a response to increasing international competition and other financial pressures.

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7 Graduate Occupations

Introduction What makes graduate occupations distinct from non-graduate occupations? This question is increasingly salient in times when over-qualification and underutilization of skills are thought to be widespread within Western economies (ILO, 2014; Congregado et al., 2016). Policy debates on the (economic) value of higher education and who should pay for it habitually rely on occupational data in order to ascertain (future) demand for HE. In order to determine whether there exist supply or demand issues within the labour market for graduates, we need to know what counts as a graduate job or graduate-level job; in other words, what jobs are acceptable, suitable, or match graduates’ skills, knowledge, and abilities. Yet there is no consensus about what constitutes a graduate occupation. The rather idle notion that a graduate occupation is an occupation that is dominated by graduates (i.e. a high proportion of graduates) still breathes life in policy circles but luckily is rejected by most scholars. The latter have used various indicators to define the concept. Practically all contributions use standard occupational classifications (usually at the four-digit level) to distinguish graduate from non-graduate occupations. Within these classifications, all workers are classified into one of 840 (US), 535 (UK; Standard Occupational Classification—SOC2010), or 436 (ISCO-08, International Classification of Occupations) detailed occupations according to their occupational definition. Occupations are then classified into groups according to ‘skill level’ and ‘skill specialisation’. In establishing these skill levels, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) (2010) writes: Skill levels are approximated by the length of time deemed necessary for a person to become fully competent in the performance of the tasks associated with a job. This, in turn, is a function of the time taken to gain necessary formal qualifications or the required amount of work-based training.

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The ONS (as well as the International Labour Office—ILO) distinguishes four skill levels with the fourth, in which our four occupations belong, relating to what are termed ‘professional’ occupations and high-level managerial positions in corporate enterprises or national/local government. Occupations at this level normally require a degree or equivalent period of relevant work experience (ONS, 2010, p.2).1 A traditional and oft-used classification is based on an overlap with the first two major ISCO/SOC groups—Managers and Professionals (e.g. Macmillan and Vignoles, 2013).2 Another type of classification is directly based on skill use and/or requirement. Key contributions within the UK context are made by Peter Elias and Kate Purcell. Purcell and Elias (2004) divide all occupations from the SOC into five groups based on a survey of 4500 new graduates. They named the group of conventional graduate jobs ‘traditional graduate occupations’ and give solicitors, medical practitioners, HE and secondary education teachers, professional scientific and technical specialist occupations as examples (p.7). The authors identify three other groups of graduate occupation: • ‘modern graduate occupations’, which came into being after the 1960s (e.g. management, work in IT and creative vocational areas, primary school teaching); • the ‘new graduate occupations’, access to which has recently changed as an undergraduate degree is needed, which had not been necessary in the past (e.g. marketing and sales management, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, management accountancy, welfare work); • ‘niche graduate occupations’ where most workers are not graduates, but within which there are stable or growing specialist niches which require skills and knowledge acquired at university (e.g. leisure and sports management, accommodation management, nursing, midwifery). Elias and Purcell (2013) update this classification by examining the extent to which they utilize specialist, orchestration, and communication expertise. The authors identify three types of graduate occupations: experts (those in knowledgeintensive occupations that require specialist HE knowledge and skills); orchestrators (those who use knowledge to evaluate information, assess options, plan, make decisions, and coordinate the contributions of others to achieve objectives); and communicators (those who draw on advanced interactive skills). Green and Henseke (2014, see also 2015) identify statistically derived indicators of graduate occupations based on skill survey data (thus self-identified) examining the skill requirements of jobs. Following the knowledge economy orthodoxy, the authors state: We conceive a graduate job to be one where at least a substantial portion of the skills used are normally acquired in the course of higher education, its

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The authors’ development relies on data on whether workers felt their degree was essential in performing their role and to what extent occupations involve high-level literacy, professional communication, self-planning skills, supervisor responsibilities, specialist knowledge, the need to develop new skills and knowledge, and high or advanced computer use. It is obvious that in this measure, graduate work is equated with high-skilled work. The authors confirm this, writing: When combined into a summary measure the variables do yield a measure of the extent to which high-level skills are being required, making the job appropriate for a graduate to do it. (p.13)

Other authors highlight autonomy and work conditions of workers as a defining feature of graduate occupations (e.g. Holmes and Mayhew, 2015).

What is an Occupation? Within most occupational classifications, those who use work in the same role, performing the same tasks or duties, and to some extent skills, education, and/or training, are grouped together in respect of skills and clustered within the same occupation. According to the ILO (2012), ‘An occupation is defined as a set of jobs whose main tasks and duties are characterised by a high degree of similarity’ (p.11). This definition assumes that tasks and duties can be taken at face value and identifying these jobs is relatively unproblematic. This may not be the case. Brown (1978, p.56) aptly emphasizes the socially structured and socially recognized nature of these work activities. Along the same lines, Anteby et al. (2016, p.187) offer a wider understanding, regarding occupations as: socially constructed entities that include: (i) a category of work; (ii) the actors understood—either by themselves or others—as members and practitioners of this work; (iii) the actions enacting the role of occupational members; and (iv) the structural and cultural systems upholding the occupation.

So occupations are fluid conceptual categories defined by those within and those outside it. They and the activities associated with them are imagined in particular ways in order to make sense of what a group of workers share or have in common. However, we can also imagine it to be functional within a discursive battle for status. Occupations are not merely analytical classifications but are meaningful concepts that are used to divide, allocate, and direct labour (Damarin, 2006, p.431). Apart from task and skills, the occupational grouping may be based on educational credentials, common culture, gender, race, social class, or a combination of these, as well as composed through 114

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organizing efforts of groups of workers (e.g. trade unions) and organizational structuring.3 Actors within the graduate labour market may try to legitimatize what counts as a graduate occupation in order to maintain their position within established hierarchies. This chapter examines the notion of the graduate occupation by exploring what those within each of our four occupations share in terms of work activities, and how their graduate status is constructed and maintained. It contains three parts. The first shows that what employers ask depends on the type of organization and the skills that are being used within the labour process. Task, duties, and skills are therefore not so easily grouped and neither is job title. After this, the chapter examines how those within our four occupations frame the notion of graduate occupation, showing how educational requirements can be socially constructed. Finally, the end of the chapter expands on ongoing professionalization processes within our four graduate occupations.

Within-occupational Differences Too often, we assume that work characteristics are largely shared between those within the same occupation. There is evidence that the tasks performed by those with the same job titles are rather large and there exist international differences (Tijdens et al., 2013). There is a lack of systematic investigations into the factors that cause variation in work tasks and skill requirement within occupations. For our four graduate occupations, company and sector characteristics influence the work process and specifically which skills are needed and utilized. Furthermore, the definitional boundaries of the occupation are far from clearly defined as job titles can hide large differences within them.

Company Size Laboratory scientists working in pharmaceutical and biotechnological companies are not thought of as an independent occupation. In fact, I have created this group for the purpose of the study. Within the SOC2010 classification they would be classified as biological scientists and biochemists (2112) and chemical scientists (2111). Many scientists have had experience working in both large and small companies. According to them, working in a large (multinational) company has significant impact on the job role. There tends to be a much narrower division of labour in large companies. Scientists who work in small companies mention the wide variety of activities within their job role as opposed to working in a large company which very 115

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much narrows the number of techniques used and according to the use of strict regulations. Small companies on the other hand are seen as flexible and innovative: I think the larger the company the more narrow the role. I think if you’re in a smaller company your role tends to be quite broad and you can do a lot more things, and probably move around a little bit more and get lots more experience [ . . . ] if I was in a big company I wouldn’t be able to do the breadth that I do now. [Rick, senior financial analyst, computer game company] There’s so few people here, you’ve got to know all the techniques. ex-financial analyst, bank]

[Jonathan,

I guess in a smaller company one of the differences is that you have to get involved in a broader range of things. [Ben, financial analyst, public sector] You’ve got a company in Oxford and the CEO still goes there and kind of cleans production equipment because it’s got to be done, he’s got nobody else to do it, so he goes in and gets stuck in with it. [ . . . ] And he looks at people who are not precious about ‘my job title says I do this, I only do this’—they want that kind of . . . that flexibility, that adaptability to go and get involved in various different projects, ’cause it’s got to be done. [Roy, financial analyst, investment banking]

Contrastingly, the work organization in large pharmaceuticals is seen and experienced as rigid and isolated: Big pharma they’re kind of . . . they’re a lot more rigid, almost stuck in their ways really. [Nigel, senior scientist, biotechnology company]

So, depending on the size of the company a different skill set is required. For larger companies, automation means repetitive work: I worked at Astra Zeneca, because they’re big and they have more money you’re allowed more space, so I would have a whole bay for myself to organize my activities and I’ll have my sets of machines, my sets of pipette, my set of dispensers, everything is mine, and I’ll have some kind of auxiliary people who’ll remove rubbish and remove everything, so it is quite easy but in some ways it’s quite . . . isolated probably not the right word but you feel like you work on your own more . . . you will have a specific set of skills but very narrow ones . . . although I did screening I didn’t have to grow cells, there was a department that will grow cells for you, or prepare membranes for you, and you just use that as a reagent and it goes ready in your assay. Again we had a department who prepares compound ready for you on a plate. So all you do is add A to B and C is done, but it was big quantities of everything, so although I was only adding reagents one to another it’s the numbers that kind of hit you. [ . . . ] You get specialized in different skills because . . . because it’s large numbers I had to use automation, and again it’s a different set of skills, because automation you have to look after, you have to make sure that every tape dispenses exactly the same, that there are no errors, and automation breaks, you come in in the morning you’ve put 200 plates in it, it’s

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Graduate Occupations done 2 and stopped [ . . . ] It’s kind of like a big huge giant that wants to move but moves very slowly, so it’s not as flexible, but it’s very defined structure because, again, they have to keep the company going. And like here, for us to decide what assays we want to use for our screening, it’s just three, four people, we sit down together, we come up with ideas, they’re inputted into the system and then confirm it with email. There it’s all done by managers, they just come to you with a presentation and a big meeting and say this is what assays our group should run, that’s what’s agreed by some committee. [Maria, scientist, biotechnology company]

The work performed in smaller companies is manual and more control is given to workers to work according to their preference. There are fewer formal rules and work itself is seen as more informal. For instance, it is easier to communicate with others in the company. The latter translates into a slightly looser management style. Scientists thought that workers in large companies were less able to demonstrate their creativity and are more constrained by organizational rules and regulation and specialized division of labour. Software engineers, who are part of the programmers and software development professionals (2136) within the SOC2010 classification, similarly noticed the influence on organization size in relation to the work process. Comparable to the scientists, for software engineers, working in small companies entails a wider role. The level of specialization and division of labour in smaller software firms is lower. This has severe consequences for the engineers’ autonomy and level of creativity expressed in their work: In larger companies the work is much more structured. You have a job description—this is what your job description is and you stick to it . . . And so it tends to be in small companies much more fluid and a wide variety of tasks, so you might be called a software engineer but you do a lot more than that . . . ended up doing sort of IT admin sort of tasks and various other sorts of other things that a regular software engineer in a big company would never do. [Jack, software engineer, biotechnology company] Everything was signed off and you haven’t really got a lot of scope for making it up, for being creative. [Winston, software engineer, IT company] If our developers wanted to work in Citibank they would earn more; they’d be much more controlled in what they do and the work wouldn’t be as interesting. [Rose, manager, IT company]

Sector-dependent Differences For software engineers, the creativity the work allows depends on the projects assigned, coding language used, and on the organization one works for. Contract researchers looking for creativity can choose those projects in which creativity is likely to be required. For some sectors, software engineering 117

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is deemed to be more standardized or the work to be more repetitive than for other sectors: In established engineering sectors like marine engineering, avionics, the need for high-quality defect-free proven correct software requires what we would think of as a software engineering approach with lots of checking, quality control, visibility of quality control, just like you would expect in any other precision engineering discipline—it’s sort of equivalent. On the other hand, if you’re going to the telecoms providers, they need to be able to move very fast, as for example the handset market develops, and you need to be able to offer features that don’t necessarily work particularly well but are there. So agile software development is very important for them. [Thomas, IT consultant]

For financial analysts in particular, the role changes according to industry. On a basic level, analysts are still involved with analysing figures, numbers, and statistics in order to provide insight for their organization. The skills of a financial analyst are therefore transferrable, in theory, between companies and sectors. But in reality, the chosen industry influences the knowledge base as well as the skills base. Analysts feel it is therefore hard to switch sectors as a lot of sunk costs in acquiring knowledge and experiences have already been made. Changing will mean starting at a low point on the career ladder. In addition, the knowledge developed is rather industry-specific as expressed here: Um . . . I think ultimately I’d like to stay in a similar industry, in the retail industry, ’cause I think that’s what I understand now. [Clifford, analyst, jewellery company]

And the same goes for skills: And you come across a lot of ways to analyse different industries if you are working as an equity analyst in an asset management sell-side company. Whereas if you are working just in a telecom company or in a food company or in a bank, then you’ll just be into that field, into just one sector. You won’t have a view if you want to analyse the water company if you are working in a bank and if you’re a banking financial analyst . . . some of the skill set and the analytical skills required will depend on the sector. There are certain sectors that will demand more skills compared to the other sector, and if you’re moving from sector to sector, it is also really important you gain the experience in the sector as well. If you go to an airline industry, it will be a whole new ball game compared to IT. GT: Why is that? Because you’ll be looking at different sorts of analytic compared to what we are doing in IT. Although you know the basic skills will still be the same, you know you’d be looking at, I don’t know, the on-line fuel consumption versus, you know occupancy on the flight etc. This kind of target comparison compared to a different industry. [Tony, senior financial analyst, IT]

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As a result, many financial analysts fear that they are stuck in a certain sector because of the specificity of their skill set, a topic we will come back to in chapter 8 on graduate careers. Within large financial organizations, the role of financial analyst depends on the company division or department. For press officers, sectors also influence the skill requirements of performing the role. Although the basic skills seem the same everywhere (communication skills, interpersonal skills, and writing skills), the organization one works for shapes how you use these skills. For instance, working in the public sector such as in a government department or aligned government bodies is seen as distinct from working within the corporate or commercial environment. Government workers do not have a product to sell but may want to increase the awareness of particular campaigns, policies, or legislation. Comparing public and private PR, Fred, who is involved in training PR professionals, notes: So I think there is quite a big difference between promoting products, i.e. marketing-led public relations, PR with ultimately marketing or sales objectives, and public sector role and non-profit sector public relations, which is more about changing attitudes and behaviours.

Working for government PR also is deemed to require a different skill set which is needed to communicate with different audiences. The budgets of large consumer-based companies are much larger and so campaigns will be more ambitious, demanding strong organizational skills. Working for charities is in some ways similar to working in the public sector due to the need to convince audiences of a particular cause and actively be involved in fundraising. Patricia, who is a senior press officer of a charity that raises money and increases awareness of a particular disease, told me: If you are working for a milkshake brand your press releases are to sell milkshakes. If you are writing about [name of disease], you try and make awareness of the topic and change people’s minds.

Within some (often smaller) organizations the work of a press officer is very close to marketing, i.e. promoting and selling products or services. In some companies, press officers are even part of the marketing team. Marketing and PR objectives and practices can even converge: Let’s say you go and work for a company, a private sector company that makes cars. You know, it’s fairly easy to know ultimately what the purpose is of your press office function; it’s essentially to promote the cars, you know, which further down the line you can measure by sales or measure by reputation or by something else, but ultimately sales. [Lucy, head of media relations, manufacturing company] That’s meant that, maybe if you’ve had a marketing department of ten people and a public relations department of five people, you look to cut both of those

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Graduate Work departments in half, and forming a marketing and communications department where everyone kind of shares roles and responsibilities between different things. [Dylan, PR and policy manager, trade organization]

Nominal Fluidity Graduate occupations may be understood for analytical reasons as a homogeneous grouping. Yet the variety within the occupation in skill requirements and job tasks should be pivotal in our understanding of graduate occupations. Another issue that makes occupations less reliable categories of skill clustering has to do with the difficulties of defining jobs and creating titles, leading to uncertainty between job titles and job content or nominal fluidity. For instance, the job title of financial analyst is somewhat recondite. Among those who call themselves financial analysts much ambiguity exists about what a financial analyst is and who can or should call him- or herself one. Within the current SOC2010 classification, those workers who call themselves or are named ‘financial analysts’ can be classified as either Finance and investment analysts and advisors (3534), Management consultants and business analysts (2423), or Chartered and certified accountants (2421). Which of these three would fit a worker best currently depends on the company as well as the job tasks, but also with which he or she identifies most. Some analysts would not be certain where they would fully fit, and financial analysts can be found within all three occupational groupings. The confusion that exists is articulated by analysts in various ways: A financial analyst, it’s quite a vague term as well, it can mean anything, so you can be being a financial analyst and doing a completely different role to someone else who is a financial analyst. So you could each be working with different products. You could even be within different departments within the company, so you can be in finance, or you could be somewhere else, in banking, because there are so many different products, you could be looking at someone else, and you could be the financial analyst for that department, finance department. [Jonathan, ex-financial analyst, banking] And there are numerous types of management accountant, some of which are financial analysts, some of which will just call themselves management accountants, some of which will call themselves financial accountant, some might even be treasurers . . . so it’s a very broad-ranging kind of career. [Clifford, analyst, jewellery company] So there is probably a big difference in perception even within the financial analyst umbrella of what exactly your job is and which department you’re in, and there are differences in pay specifically that’s very quantifiable, but there are also I think other non-quantifiable differences. [Judy, business analyst, global bank]

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Graduate Occupations It is an umbrella term. It’s very difficult to say I am a finance analyst. People say ‘Oh I know that’ because different finance analysts do different things. I mean even in my team some people do financial modelling. Some people do financial reporting. [Ben, financial analyst, public sector] So there is a lot of confusion, because in my department as well there are a couple of qualified analysts, and my role and their role is the same. A financial analyst has an understanding of the accounts, but accounting is just a part of the financial analyst. It’s not the complete financial analyst. [Boris, financial analyst, banking]

Similarly, within PR there is also significant room for interpretation of what defines and separates job titles such as external communication manager/ officer, media (and campaign) manager, external affairs manager, public relations manager, inter alia. Press officers observe that with the rapidly changing (social) media landscapes, job titles have become less instructive about actual job content. Of course, an occupation is a collection of ‘jobs’, a set of tasks performed by employees which are often workplace-specific and thus their titles may vary accordingly. The occupation on the other hand is ‘a broader membership in a shared community that spans across jobs’ (Anteby et al., 2016, p.188). The question becomes what it is that is shared and how these jobs are designed by employers and interpreted by workers, managers, and other stakeholders.

The Social Construction of Graduate Occupations The skill-based or educational definition of graduate occupation described earlier does not do justice to the social dimension of categorization. This is not to say that the skills and educational qualification required are meaningless. Quite the opposite. They are quite crucial. It is the objective and politically neutral projection of what a graduate occupation constitutes that is questionable. Take the example of UK registered nurses (Tholen, forthcoming). Relatively recently in the UK there has been a great shift in the educational requirements for entering registered nursing in which HE replaced the apprenticeship system of nurse training with formal nursing degrees. Nursing now is an all-graduate entry profession. Similarly, there has been a strong push from recent governments to get graduates to work in nurseries to raise standards in early years education. In 2007, the UK government introduced Early Years Professional Status (EYPS) accreditation which is only accessible for graduates, in order to create a graduate-led workforce in the early years sector. Similarly the UK government supported a scheme to attract more graduates to enter the prison service. Justice Secretary Liz Truss justified the decision by emphasizing 121

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she wanted to ‘ensure that we attract the most talented and dedicated individuals, from the widest possible pool’ (BBC, 2016). Although an important justification for the education upgrade relates to the growing complexity or knowledge intensity of these roles, increasing the need for advanced education, at the same time their struggle for recognition as a graduate occupation is pushed forward by the increased educational requirements. For instance, as a response to the announcement that all new police officers in England and Wales will need a degree-level qualification, Giles York, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for workforce, commented that they: will help modernise the service and improve our ability to attract and retain really good people. It is also fair and right that police officers, as professionals, receive the recognition and accreditation they deserve, meaning the public will continue to get the high quality service they need. (Dodd, 2016)

Ultimately, it is these occupations’ social status and recognition that will make them de facto graduate occupations. The graduate occupation is, like any other occupation, socially constructed and needs to be seen as a group of workers that are associated with what it is graduate work is deemed to be about. This association could be achieved through HE credentials, relatively complex work, or perhaps higher wages. In any case, this social construction of the graduate occupation is achieved within society by its members but equally by those within the occupation. How do lab scientists, software engineers, financial analysts, and press officers understand their own occupation? How do they discursively delineate it as a graduate occupation and distinguish it from other, lower-status, occupations and roles? I will for each of the four occupations provide an example of how its graduate status is socially constructed through its members.

The Issue of Demarcation: Lab Technicians and Graduate-level Scientists The difference between a (junior) researcher and a lab technician is not always clear within the workplace context. In other words, what are support services and what are core activities is sometimes hard to determine and distinguish by looking at the division of labour. In very large pharmaceutical companies some research roles are quite menial, repetitive, and/or specialized, such that they could be easily understood as ancillary. Furthermore, in very small companies without technician support, scientists perform both roles. Talking about the division between technicians and scientists, one postgraduate technician revealed: GT: Did you expect to go into science when you finished your Master’s? Yeah, I expected when I graduated, you know, I’ve done this great course, it’s really interesting. That I’d be able to get . . . I was expecting to be a scientist, like that

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Graduate Occupations would be my role. And that didn’t happen straight away. And I wouldn’t say . . . my job role is classed as a scientist, but what I sort of expected a scientist to be doing, I don’t think I’m 100% there yet. I think I’m sort of halfway between a laboratory technician and a scientist. [Sheila, lab technician, biotechnology company]

This double role as technician scientist is quite common amongst junior employees and not necessarily experienced as problematic. Another technician, Jason, told me, ‘I’m doing the scientist role and a couple of days I’m doing the lab technician role. I’m happy with that.’ In other workplaces, job titles disguise the discrepancy between technician and scientist. The quote shows also the credential inflation currently affecting the lower scientific role within the pharmaceutical and biotech sectors. It is often unclear what the tasks of the technician are or should be. This fluidity between graduate and non-graduate roles does not depend on the complexity, skills, or knowledge involved but on the company-specific characteristics and management practices: I’ve read about labs where you might have say research labs where there’ll be scientists doing say research, and then you have a technician who supposedly like is involved in the running of the lab and looking after equipment and reagents and things . . . but I’ve never been in an experience like that. So where I was at [company name] and where I was at [company name] it was just that was everybody’s title, you were just lab technicians and it was relatively basic scientific work. At [company name . . . ] I think it’s . . . job titles are a bit flexible. They brought me in and called me a technician, and basically what happened was I was just doing the same work as everybody else, although I was more junior, and after a while I was like ‘I think I’m the same as the people called scientists’ and they were like ‘Yeah you might as well call yourself a scientist’—and gave me a bit more extra money for it. [Sophie, ex-lab technician, biotechnology company] GT: What would you say is the difference between a scientist job and a lab technician? That area is a bit grey. Um . . . the trouble is . . . ’cause I work across a broad range of industries . . . I know lab technicians that pay 15K, but then I’ve got a company office who calls someone a kind of chief technician paying up to £29,000. Two different profiles. And to use the terms ‘lab technician’, ‘lab scientist’—what one company would call a technician, somebody else might call a scientist. And it’s hard to make that definition as what is a technician, what does a technician’s role involve compared to what does a scientist role involve or an analyst role involve. And so for me when people are talking in kind of broad brushstrokes like that, it’s like where do you draw the line between technician and scientist? What is the technician role and what is the scientist role. So you go from GSK to Pfizer—they might call the same job two different things. And so it’s very hard to say what is a lab technician compared to what is kind of a lab scientist. [Eric, chief operation officer, pharmaceutical company]

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Not only are laboratory technicians increasingly becoming university graduates, their role is often mixed with so-called scientists both nominally as well as occupationally. Other research confirms that the division of labour between professionals and technicians in reality is rather fluid and the result of negotiation and interpretation (Bechky, 2003, Cohen, 2013). Yet independent of the job tasks and graduatization of the occupation, it was clearly deemed a non-graduate job within the company hierarchy and paid far less.

Software Engineers: Labour of Love? Software engineers do not always regard their occupation as a graduate occupation, not because they do not feel it is skilled or they feel it is more suitable for non-graduates, but because they have a special relationship with programming itself which shapes their identification and reduces the role of education within their occupational identity. Many of the engineers have been coding or taking a deep interest in IT technology from an early age: Well, my dad’s a software engineer so I’ve seen him do it and I’ve been interested from that and I started working with him when I was about 15 and I really liked it, so I went for it as a degree. [Susan, software engineer, oil and gas industry] I was 15 years old, I had nothing to do on Saturdays, I was a typically withdrawn sort of child. So I used to spend my every penny of pocket money renting a computer, hiring a computer for a couple of hours on a Saturday morning. And I started writing little programs to do aspects of war gaming that took a lot of reading up in tables and things. [Jacob, software engineer, contractor]

For many it represents a hobby as well as a professional activity. And some engineers are involved in small or elaborate software development projects: I have a piece of work that I am working on for myself and have been for the last sixteen, seventeen years. [Ewart, software engineer, IT company]

Some of the engineers convey a strong passion and pride in their field; for them software engineering is part of their lives and they strongly identify with the activity, seeing it as their purpose in life: I think it’s partly you have it in, some people don’t. Not everyone can do what I do. It’s like not everyone can be a surgeon. Some people have that, it’s a combination of passion and natural talent and hard work as well. [ . . . ] I experienced colleagues that don’t have the same kind of passion and enthusiasm as I do, and some people that say oh I’m here just for the money, or you know I wish I weren’t here, or whatever. And that is frustrating, especially when I know there are people that really want to do that kind of work that can’t get in. [Nick, senior software engineer, tech company]

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For a sizeable share of workers, software engineering is not just paid employment but part of a loving relationship with computers and software. As the role of formal education is rather small, for those in the profession the concept of ‘graduate occupation’ is far removed from their personal histories and identity as well as how they understand the occupation. Although the educational requirements are increasing, engineers construct their occupation as one in which formal education has little relevance due to the importance of informal learning.

Financial Analysts: the Thorny Relationship with Accountancy On top of the indeterminacy of what financial analysts do and do not do, there is a complex occupational relationship between financial analysis and accountancy. Many analysts feel that in practice it is difficult to distinguish the two: The lines are really blurred at this moment in time. lyst, gaming industry]

[Rick, senior financial ana-

For a long time I didn’t think there was a difference. public sector]

[Ben, financial analyst,

As a result, financial analysts feel that their occupation as a graduate occupation is ‘diluted’ by its close association with accountancy, a more well-defined established occupation whose graduate status is less established. Many analysts nonetheless do have a straightforward accountancy background and changed direction to the financial analyst role over time. Either their role could have developed this way within an existing role or they have applied internally or externally for these positions. Those analysts who work within the finance sector are often the farthest removed from the traditional accountancy roles, but those working in other sectors struggle to make their position distinct from the accountant’s role. This leads to frustration about accountants using the analyst job title: They’re confused in a way that the chartered accountants and qualified accountants doing CIMA and stuff, they consider them as financial analysts as well, which is not part of the financial analyst, because they’re two different departments completely. The role of the chartered accountant or a qualified accountant is to produce the financial numbers. The role of the financial analyst comes up in the work of the chartered accountant or qualified accountant because the financial analyst role is ideally to understand what the numbers are, to analyse those numbers, taking into account the big picture, and then solving the problems that they have got and providing solutions. [ . . . ] But the qualified accountant job should be different than the financial analyst job, otherwise what’s the point of doing the qualified accounting, and what’s the point of doing MSc in finance

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[Boris,

Although there is no real debate about whether financial analyst is a graduate occupation, within the occupation there is confusion about who can call himor herself one and how workers in the occupation can distinguish themselves from accountants. Although accountancy is itself a graduate occupation, its content is deemed to be of lesser complexity and creativity and its relationship with HE is deemed incoherent (Jephson, 2013).

Press Officers: Dealing with Rapid Change Occupations change over time. Some occupations become obsolete, others less relevant and shrink, and others grow and flourish over time. PR is a relatively new area of employment and its growth has been well documented (Bernays, 1952; Cutlip, 1994). It now rivals marketing and journalism in employment size. Until quite recently, those in PR would primarily work on written media outputs such as taking in press queries and enquiries and pitching stories to journalists. The established press was the key channel through which PR sought to reach its audiences. With the advent of social media, the role of press officers has altered. As Fred explains: The press officer in the twentieth-century model, the traditional model did mostly work with the independent media through things like press releases, press briefings, and so on. That model really has changed. It’s probably reached the tipping point now [ . . . ] And that’s why also there’s a shift from a job that is mostly primarily a press officer job, like your job isn’t to talk to the public, it’s to talk to the press; now there’s an argument that public relations officers can actually talk to the public or much more directly talk to the public via, you know, channels like Twitter, alright, not mediated channels. You don’t need to go through an independent journalist to reach your audience.

In the case of the press officer, the occupation is changing, making him or her responsible for a wider range of communication, reaching a wider range of audiences, making the role of PR within organizations of greater importance according to many in the occupation. The PR role is becoming more diverse and responsible for a wide range of communication with various audiences: Now, what we’re seeing is role diversifying, people become responsible for community management [ . . . ] the diversification of different channels through which to communicate, so most of . . . when we used to see, probably, people spending 75% of their time on media relations, that’s probably now dropped to around 45% of their time. [Dylan, PR and policy manager, trade organization] The huge variety of the work I think is not in any way summed up by ‘Senior Press Officer’, the different things we’re talking about all the time, like community

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Graduate Occupations projects, new initiatives, new strategies, they overlap so much. So I suppose the variety of the work is quite astounding sometimes. [Alice, senior press officer, theatre company]

The occupation of press officer is in flux, which makes it hard to define what the job constitutes for those within the occupation. For those outside the occupation, it becomes difficult to distinguish their role from other communication or even marketing roles. The occupation struggles to exert its expertise on audiences: I think a lot of people think they can do PR, you know, and a lot of non-PR people go, I’ll write a press release, oh, let’s get the media in and do this and don’t see it as a profession and think you can just do it. And then when you have an opportunity to engage with them you get that experience of wow, I never thought about that or I never realized this was what was involved. [Dorothy, media relations manager]

Many officers feel that the value of PR and the skills involved are underestimated because of the breadth of the role and changing job content, leading to its status as a graduate occupation in continuous need of (re)construction and discursive maintenance. So far I have tried to show that how the four occupations can be imagined as ‘graduate occupations’ depends on various factors. An important factor is how close they are located to other (non-)graduate occupations. The close relationship between the graduate scientist role and technician role in particular companies and the graduatization of lab technicians have perhaps devalued the lab scientist role as a graduate occupation, in particular in comparison to advanced scientific roles reserved almost exclusively for PhDs. Similarly, those within the occupation of financial analysis face difficulties to demarcate their occupation from accountancy. With no clear educational trajectory, the link between university degrees and work is tenuous. For press officers, the clarity surrounding changing job content and purview makes it harder to make that same link. Occupational identity, i.e. the broad understanding in a society of what activities occur within a particular occupation, and what contribution that occupation makes to society (Watson, 2011, p.337), shapes occupational classification. The social construction of graduate occupation becomes a battleground for both status and identity, just as job titles serve as ‘prominent identity badges’ (Ashforth and Kreiner, 1999, p.417). Formal education is not always what defines a graduate occupation. As we have seen, for software engineers, their occupation is certainly skilled and knowledge-based yet it is not directly linked to formal learning but with selfstudy, personal development, and personal intrinsic interests and goals. What distinguishes a graduate occupation from a non-graduate occupation is fluid and changes over time, but also who counts as being located in the occupation 127

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(e.g. who counts as a financial analyst or press officer) is not set. Or as Damarin (2006, p.458) put it: Pure ideal-typical occupations with well-defined groups of workers and stable work jurisdictions are rare in the empirical world, which is instead characterized by fuzzy and fluctuating distinctions among categories of workers and tasks. However, much research on occupations, focused on topics such as skill shifts, gender differentials, or mobility, ignores this fuzziness or discounts it as residual static.

Occupational categories and their relationship to HE are made through social interaction and symbolic means, as much as by analytical classification by researchers.

Professionalization A distinct type of graduate occupation is the profession.4 Although some observe a demise in the traditional professions (e.g. Kritzer, 1999; Evetts, 2013; Susskind and Susskind, 2015), professions continue to occupy a special labour market position and benefit from their elevated status. Darr and Warhurst (2008) observe that within the management literature the idea of knowledge workers comes rather close to the ideal type of the classical profession. Others have argued that the demise of the concept of a knowledge worker does not necessarily affect the future of professions (Švarc, 2016). HE traditionally plays a pivotal role within the professionalization trajectories (Tholen, forthcoming). Some graduate occupations are already professions and use their links with HE to monopolize and maintain their professional status as a body of knowledge unique to the profession. Some non-professional graduate occupations may be striving to become a profession or more like a profession. Other non-professional graduate occupations are not moving towards that professional status. How much scope there is for professionalization depends on many factors such as organization level, area of expertise, as well as existing professional structures and willingness of the state to support them. How can we understand professionalization within the graduate labour market? How to define professionals is a matter of debate within as well as outside the sociological literature. A functionalist interpretation dominated sociological discussions of the professions from the 1930s well into the 1960s. According to the functionalist mode of thinking, professions and professionals are distinct analytically and empirically (Goode, 1957; Greenwood, 1957). Drawing on Durkheim’s (1957) ideas on the moral basis of professionals within society, the functionalist theoretical orientation gave a prominent place to professions

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as one of the institutions that sustain social order (Merton, 1958; Parsons, 1939, 1951). Not satisfied with the ahistorical and singular perspective of the earlier functionalist writings, a new perspective saw professionalization as temporally and spatially contingent and foremost process-driven by power struggles between distinctive groups set within a broader political economic context. The idea emerged that in fact what professionals distinguish from other occupations is power. Professions were now seen as organized interest groups seeking scarce resources such as wealth, prestige, power, and autonomy, trying to eliminate competition and establish barriers to entry rather than being an expert occupation. The locus of discussion was on the professions’ exclusionary power and right to monopolize a particular area of work (Abbott, 1988, 1991; Freidson, 1994, 2001; Larson, 1977; Rossides, 1998). All professions are thought to involve technical, specialized, and highly skilled work. Professions have control over their knowledge base. Some have observed that often technical scientific knowledge serves as a justification and legitimization of professionals’ control over their occupation (Elliott, 1972; Freidson, 1994, 2001). Professions are therefore sometimes defined around knowledge. Macdonald (2006, p.380) writes that ‘occupations that are regarded as professions are those that have succeeded in achieving the objectives of their project—a monopoly in the provision of services based on their specialist knowledge. The counterpart of this, the quest for enhanced social status, must also have been attained.’ This monopoly is thought to be actively achieved through improving the sociocultural evaluation of their knowledge. Abbott (1988, 1991) elaborates on how acquiring a professional body of knowledge has become the basis of domination. Professions compete with each other to dominate jurisdictions or markets for services. Aspiring professions need to be able to identify, diagnose, and treat human problems in a manner that necessitates and thus legitimates the interventions of those who hold that expert knowledge. These ‘spheres of jurisdiction’ establish the identity of a profession while differentiating it from competing occupational groups. Education is important to demonstrate that the knowledge used and produced by an occupation is valuable and can underpin a claim to professionalism. This knowledge is often credentialed by a relatively high-level qualification, such as a university degree. Evetts (2003) states that ‘Professions are essentially the knowledge-based category of occupations which usually follow a period of tertiary education and vocational training and experience’ (p.397). In addition, obtaining degrees and professional qualifications in order to gain entry into the profession can provide an occupation with the tool for occupational closure. All professions can be seen to involve

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some degree of credentialism, as the overall strategy of a professional group is best understood in terms of social closure. Knowledge and education become important bases on which an occupation can establish social closure and enhance its social status. Others have observed the rise of occupations that seek the same benefits and status as the traditional professions within new organizational forms and practices (such as management consultancy and project management) (Faulconbridge and Muzio, 2008; Muzio et al., 2011; Paton et al., 2013). The knowledge bases of these corporate professions are thought to be ‘too fragmented, indeterminate, perishable and client/ context-dependent to be formalised into a coherent and portable set of credentials that can sustain traditional processes of occupational closure’ (Muzio et al., 2011, p.446). Instead of traditional credentialism, occupational closure is mainly achieved by ‘alternative types of credentials which emphasise competences, transferable skills and industry knowledge and experience’ (Muzio et al., 2011, p.451). For many workers, organizations are the main users and employers of their expertise. These new professionalization projects are intimately bound to corporate settings, interests, and practices. As the knowledge and expertise are defined by corporate boundaries and settings, so is this new type of professionalism. This serves as an alternative route for those occupations unwilling or unable to professionalize. We shall now turn again to our four graduate occupations. They are not generally regarded as professions in a traditional sense. But we can evaluate to what extent these occupations are professionalizing or would be able to do so. Alternatively, perhaps a different type such as corporate professionalism may be applicable. To do so, we will consider how well those within the occupation can pursue, develop, and maintain the closure of the occupational group. Special attention will go to the role of educational credentials.

Abstract Knowledge As understood by Andrew Abbott (1988), creating, controlling, and maintaining a unique area of knowledge is key in any professionalization project. The technical scientific knowledge involved in professional work serves as a justification and legitimization of their control over their own occupation (Elliott, 1972; Freidson, 1994, 2001). The knowledge needs to be abstract and serve as a base for occupational closure. Through discursive work towards public audiences, the occupations can convince others that their area of expertise is distinct, legitimizing a monopoly of competence by monopolizing sanctioned ‘expertise’ and its credibility with the public (Larson, 1977, p.38). Here lies a problem for, in particular, financial analysts and press officers. Their knowledge base is fragile and highly contextual. In the case of financial 130

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analysts, it is not distinct enough from accountant and other finance roles. In the case of PR, abstract knowledge does not play a large role within their occupation. For software engineering and lab scientists, they do utilize and maintain a body of demarcated abstracted knowledge. Yet for the scientists, in particular, the development, definition, and monopolization of professional knowledge occur within an organization. Especially in mid- and large-size pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies the ownership, control, and appropriation of knowledge lie with the corporation. The scientists themselves cannot redefine any problems or tasks. Their economic activities are not under threat from other occupations but from capital ownership and management structures. Software engineers in large companies face the same problems. Yet the large share of software engineers in smaller companies or working independently do rely on an abstract body of knowledge, but it is difficult to define precisely what the ‘core body of knowledge’ is because of the fragmentation in the field and rapid changes in technology.

Education Freidson (1986) stresses that a body of formal knowledge is established and maintained through the educational system. Educational systems provide training and credentials to do particular tasks which lead to privileged access into the labour market. Occupations that HE chooses as those requiring formal education and with credentials becoming prerequisites for holding jobs, become professions. Many have pointed at the use of these credentialist closure tactics (Freidson, 1970; Larson, 1990; Parkin, 1979; Weber, 1978). Larson (1977, p.30) writes that a professional is ultimately ‘a name we give to historically specific forms that establish structural links between relatively high levels of formal education and relatively desirable positions and/or rewards in the social division of labour’. Qualifications are also thought to represent a body of knowledge that is exclusive to and demarcated by the particular profession. Yet as with all credentials, society needs to be convinced that the credentials signal what the profession aims to signal. In other words, successful professions can successfully claim that the educational credential is a need to guarantee standards or that education is linked to the body of abstract knowledge. In the case of doctors and lawyers, it is accepted that their medical or legal training is the basis of their capacity as workers and is highly linked with the performance and nature of their occupation. For our four graduate occupations, only one can rely on a distinct, certified, and abstract body of knowledge, drawing on the established scientific disciplines of chemistry, biology, and medicine. Laboratory scientists, therefore, are more able to stress the role of HE within their occupation, both as educator and collaborator in research. For the other three, there are issues at hand. 131

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Various financial analysts explain the qualification issue prohibiting the occupation from being considered as a profession as follows: The thing is, about a financial analyst, is that I think it’s more aligned with being an accountant, or working with accounts. I think a financial analyst is . . . generally you’re doing a similar role to a management accountant, or an accountant, but you’re not . . . because, you know, like how it takes a lot for you to get chartered and finish your accountancy qualifications . . . I think you are doing the work of an accountant without the actual paper that says you’re an accountant, if you know what I mean, without the professional qualification of being an accountant. [Jonathan, ex-financial analyst, bank] GT: Would you say financial analyst is a profession? Probably not, no. I would say there is no professional qualification in it and lots of different people . . . I think there are lots of different professions that might find themselves in a role and call themselves a financial analyst. So yeah, you can be a professional accountant and in that role. [Troy, senior financial analyst, public sector]

As shown, currently there is little control over educational credentials in the software engineering community, or consensus over the value of formal education or even professional qualifications in software engineering. There are many different ways that IT skills can be acquired. Employment in the field is not restricted to those who have undergone professional education or training or possess specific educational credentials. Although new entrants tend to have degrees in IT-related subjects, what has been taught during HE cannot keep up with the fast-changing work environments. Professional degrees have not fully penetrated the occupation, and the wide variety currently offered by various providers makes any claim linking formal education with professional status unconvincing. The lack of certified educational credentials is also problematic for press officers. Although PR degrees are emerging, they have not been developed at high-status universities. PR degrees are not seen as a necessity in terms of work preparation. PR as a body of knowledge is rapidly expanding but does not seem to inform the profession to a significant degree, failing to become a robust academic discipline (Sisco et al., 2011).

Identity In order to become a profession, the occupation needs to become organized. An important social organization takes up an occupational identity. The group members need to be aware of themselves as an entity as well as understand the parameters of the occupation, be aware of its position, and be conscious of its own professionalization project. Occupational identities are 132

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traditionally thought to start being developed during university (Becker and Carper, 1956). But not every graduate worker draws on a distinct occupational culture which comes from within the occupation and can be used to ‘provide ideas, values, norms, procedures and artefacts to shape occupational activities and enable members to value the work that they do’ (Watson, 2011, p.218). This cultural integration has been observed in a wide range of occupations such as entrepreneurs (Larson and Pearson, 2012), nurses (Kirpal, 2004; CollinJacques and Smith, 2005), teachers (Williams, 2013), journalists (Boczkowski, 2010), bicycle messengers (Fincham, 2008), steelworkers (Mackenzie et al., 2006), and engineers (Faulkner, 2007), among many others. Two key determinants of occupational community are whether there are clear boundaries and a common social identity (Van Maanen and Barley, 1984). Clear boundaries effectively separate members of the community from non-members. Through notions of belonging members are able to recognize each other. A social identity defines the presentation of the self to others. Many of the scientists identify with the scientist label and in some cases with their industry (e.g. pharmaceutical) or field (e.g. chemist). One scientist expresses his professional identity quite strongly: I mean I used to consider myself a scientist—it was nice to think that’s what I do, you know ‘I am a scientist’. I would say if you asked some of the people down there, they would say . . . you know some would say with great pride ‘I’m an analytical scientist’ or something like that, others would be you know less bothered about that particular epithet or whatever. But um . . . I would say on the whole, people would you know view it positively as being ‘Yes I work as an analytical scientist’ you know I think it’s an interesting and you know relatively good career. [ . . . ] but you know people do enjoy it and I think associate quite strongly with it. [Ian, lab director, biotechnology company]

On the other hand, the occupational culture is ambiguous for software engineers. Some engineers feel that the community’s protean nature makes it hard to unite engineers: And generally speaking I would think that the software community is more peripatetic—it moves more than other professions like, I don’t know, accountants. Accountants build a role and a career within an organization—software people don’t [ . . . ] I mean the profession, the traditional professions, are self-interest groups primarily. Basically keeping information to themselves—do we want to do that? We don’t even know what information we need yet, so . . . and how do we cater for the unqualified but talented? [Thomas, IT consultant]

Others do feel a connection but it would be hard to talk about a tight occupational community: GT: Do you also identify with other software engineers?

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Graduate Work I think so. That possibly comes from shared vocabulary and experience and in-jokes and that kind of thing. I don’t necessarily know if I would trust somebody more because they’re an engineer or they’re not. No, I don’t know whether shared identity is that important to me. [Paul, senior software design engineer, electronic company]

Most engineers did feel their occupation is a profession.5 Many also comment on the low status within UK society of software engineers (in comparison to e.g. Germany). Some thought that becoming a chartered software engineer could have benefits—signalling to others that they were doing more complex work and to distinguish them from other engineers. Financial analysts do not tend to identify so much with their job title because of the definitional confusion described earlier. Instead, analysts identified stronger with their sector, with accountancy, or with the professional qualifications they have invested in. When asked whether he identified with the occupation of financial analyst, one analyst responded: Not so much the finance analyst, more so . . . I generally know within our wider team . . . who is an economist and who is an accountant. Not through what they do but people have a certain pride in their qualification or experience or whatever. [Troy, senior financial analyst, public sector]

Another analyst identified more with the public sector and regarded financial analyst merely as a job title rather than an occupational category: I think being a finance analyst is a job which can sit within many professions. You can be a finance analyst within a profession and your profession is being a civil servant. Being a civil servant, that is nothing like I have ever done before. Nothing like county practice or working in a company. You can be a financial analyst within an accountancy profession. You can also be a financial analyst within the profession of banking. It is different now because computers automate a lot of the learning process, but for mergers and acquisitions, for example, you can be a finance analyst on a team doing the sums on that but actually your profession is a banker. You are an investment banker. What do you actually do? Oh I’m a financial analyst. What do you actually do? Oh I’m the spreadsheet guy that makes sure this deal works. No, I don’t think it’s a profession. [Ben, financial analyst, public sector]

The interconnectivity and contextual nature of graduate work such as financial analysis make identification particularly difficult. Press officers feel their occupation is misunderstood, not very well known by the general audience, and generally undervalued. Without this understanding of the general public an occupational identity is hard to evolve or maintain: GT: What needs to happen in order to make it more of a profession?

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Graduate Occupations Good question! How do you permeate people’s consciousness as to what jobs entail? I’m not sure, there are so many jobs now that have job titles I don’t know. They’ll have job titles like change management and I don’t really know what that means. I’m not sure if you just have to have more of them for people to understand what it is, I don’t know how that would change, how people would understand more of what it is. They understand it if they work in an organization that has one or have any link to media at all but unless you did have that link, I’m not sure there’d be any way for it to become established like a journalist is. I think it’s because the description doesn’t tell people distinctively what it is. Journalist is obviously writing and doctor and lawyers are dealing with law and a press officer you’re dealing with press but I’m not sure people know enough about what that is. [Eleanor, senior media officer, transport organization]

However, there is only a loose identification for press officers with other press officers. In some cases, this has to do with the differences in ‘doing’ PR in various sectors and industries. A head of press of a theatre company does not identify with other press officers for this reason, and places her own work in a separate category: I’ve worked recently with Google, so like I slightly identified with their Head of Press, but we have very, very different roles and very different kind of objectives, just because their part is more managing the press and managing the media that writes about them, whereas here it is that but it’s also stories, getting people to write about the work we’re doing and to communicate processes and craftsmanship. [Alice, senior press officer, theatre company]

Professional Bodies A second key form of organization happens through professional bodies. In particular within the UK context they have been highly instrumental for professionalization projects (Neal and Morgan, 2000). For those UK scientists working in the biotechnology or pharmaceutical companies, there are a range of professional and semi-professional groups to join. There are the learned societies such as the Association of Applied Biologists (AAB) and Association for Clinical Biochemistry and Laboratory Medicine (ACB). Professional bodies are centred around academic fields, not so much occupations.6 Most of these professional bodies work with the Science Council to award and maintain the Chartered Scientist (CSci) status for its members. This is chartered status for all scientists (from psychologists to mathematicians).7 None of the scientists I have spoken to had any experience with professional bodies nor seemed to be aware of them. Nor did employers mention them when they discussed the educational or professional requirements within the recruitment and selection process.

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According to Adams and Demaiter (2008), professional groups in IT have been rather ineffective in creating social closure thus far. While IT credentials have been established by professional organizations, as well as by large software companies, they are rarely required for practice in the field. Somewhat similarly, the Chartered Institute for IT is a professional body for IT workers, provides IT qualifications through a small number of colleges, and offers modular BSc HE qualifications (recognized by a limited number of UK universities). The British Computer Society (BCS) also represents software engineers and provides various types of memberships (associate members, members, and fellows with distinct post-nominal titles), as well as chartered membership for those who have achieved full professional status (CITP—Chartered Information Technology Professional). Software engineers can be licensed engineers through either (or both) BCS or IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology). Both issue the title of Chartered Engineer (BEng). Membership of and accreditation through professional bodies thus remain fragmented and, according to those in the field, still not very common or even useful: I think when I first started out I did think perhaps I ought to belong to an industry body, and so I had a brief investigation into the Institution of Electrical Engineers. But really no one does that—hardly anyone I’ve ever met gets involved in that sort of thing. I know there’s the British Computer Society and I know they run events, but it’s not really on my radar. [Andrew, software engineer, IT company]

Some younger software engineers do, however, think these bodies serve a valuable purpose and will become more prominent in the future: It’s a sort of funny situation where accreditation hasn’t really seemed important. I think that will gradually get traction and I think things like procurement standards will actually be updated so that there will be requirements like chartered status for key candidates. I’m sure that will come through. [Richard, chief technology officer, IT company]

A clear example of where professional bodies are key in providing relevant educational credentials is with financial analysts. The Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) is a professional body of management accountants and the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Institute is the association for investment professionals, mainly focusing on providing accreditation and qualifications and putting far less emphasis on the wider professionalization project. Both CFA and CIMA qualifications are incredibly widespread within the accountancy and finance communities. So much that, for example, the CFA is dubbed the new MBA (Boyde, 2014). Finally, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) is the main professional body for PR professionals (next to the Public Relations Consultants Association, who mainly represent PR agencies). It provides education, research,

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a code of conduct, and various types of memberships (Fellow, Member, Associate, Affiliate, Global Affiliate, and Student). Some of the press officers had experience with the CIPR, others had not. Some had gained qualification through it and benefited from it, others who had completed it did not. There was an understanding that although the body could be very useful in providing personal development, it was rather impotent in professionalizing their occupation. Speaking about the CIPR, a PR educator shared that: Their pursuit is doomed to fail, you know. They’re committed to it and what else can they commit to do but to professionalize public relations. GT: And what does that failure lie in? Well, I suppose it comes back to the whole debate of what’s a profession and what’s an industry. And, you know, there’s a counterargument that public relations is regulated by the market and if you just regulate it by qualification, examination, you know, progress reports and/or reviews, you actually create rather a dull, narrow, false selecting group of people who are accrediting each other. [Fred, PR educator]

There is shared belief that professionalization is needed within PR to improve its reputation and occupational status. Tobin (2004) believes professionalization can make the PR industry more trustworthy. Yet few see the professional bodies in their current form as a great help in this. This is an issue for all professional bodies in all four occupations. Professional development is important and surely a part of the professionalization project, but the bodies at this point in time are not effective in organizing the workforce towards securing meaningful privilege or strengthening monopolies of knowledge and expertise. Professional bodies provide mainly recognition within the occupation. From our four occupations, there is little evidence that the recognition is effective in signalling their values, standards, or worth to society.

The Possibility of Professionalization So, is (further) professionalization not achievable for the four graduate occupations? Although there exist efforts within all four occupations to professionalize (mainly through the efforts of professional bodies), it seems that laboratorybased scientists have theoretically the best chance of becoming a profession or moving towards a profession (as the distinction between profession and non-professional occupation is a sliding scale rather than a hard dichotomy). Lab-based scientists have close ties with HE and abstract knowledge, a reasonably tight community, and collective identification. Yet the fragmentation by industry, function, and public/private divide (university vs commercial

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company) affect the utility of their knowledge base and the effectiveness of professional bodies. Software engineers have a very difficult and fast-changing knowledge base to draw on, no clear educational credentials to utilize, and no clear or effective professional bodies, but a reasonably close community of workers that do identify with their occupation. As Adams (2007, p.513) notes, the professionalization for software engineers has always been halted by the heterogeneous make-up of those within it, sharing neither educational background nor an occupational focus. There is little reason to believe this will change. Financial analysts have no clear demarcated body of abstract knowledge to draw on, too fragmented a credential landscape to be useful, and little sense of community with professional bodies being occupied mainly by professional accreditation. Press officers cannot draw on a clear knowledge base and the identity of the occupation is still under construction with ineffective professional bodies. Could our four occupations possibly be more similar to the aforementioned corporate professions? First, it is important to realize that many scientists, software engineers, analysts, and press officers do not work in large companies. The core examples of corporate professions are management consultants and project managers. Their employment within, typically, large organizations typifies their professionalization projects and their professional status is intimately bound to corporate settings, interests, and practices (Muzio et al., 2011). Many work in small companies or work on a freelance basis (software engineers) where the corporate structures are not well defined or are lacking. Second, the commercial case is often missing. Corporate professionals need to proactively engage with organizations and markets, legitimizing themselves through demonstrating their ability to add value by solving technical problems (Hodgson et al., 2015). Paton et al. (2013, p.229) state: For the corporate professions, unlike the traditional professions, the aim is to build a consensus around their professional status through marketing their activities to corporations that employ or use the services of their members, emphasizing the commercial benefits of supporting professional membership and accreditation in their area.

This consensus-building potential is absent for scientists and press officers. Research within pharmaceutical and biotechnological companies is a core activity and it is doubtful whether scientists can somehow revalue their position. The commercial importance of PR work can indeed improve but their support role within larger organizations is currently not viably valued enough to realistically make these claims. Opportunities may differ there for financial analysts and software engineers in the future. Yet the concept is relatively

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new and more work needs to be done to understand how this novel type of professionalization works within a wider spectrum of organizations.

Conclusion Graduate occupations remain a meaningful concept within public, academic, and policy contexts. Yet in this chapter I have started challenging some of the assumptions being placed on them. First of all, do occupational classification groupings capture the complex relationship between HE and jobs? The tendency to maintain a strict boundary between graduate and non-graduate occupations (using the SOC) is based on self-imposed rigid metrics. For instance, Green and Henseke (2015) calculate (using international skill use data) that keyboard operator is a graduate occupation in Poland but not in the sixteen other OECD countries selected. Legislators and senior officials are graduate occupations in all countries but Norway. Authors, journalists, and linguists also are in all countries but Denmark. Veterinarian is not a graduate job in Belgium. Although national differences surely have an influence on skill use and educational demands in particular types of work, deciding which occupations or occupational groupings represent graduate occupations is fraught with difficulties. In addition, the observed heterogeneity within occupations cannot easily be put aside. Substantive differences in skill requirements and job tasks make these classifications for distinguishing the graduate and non-graduate occupations tricky to say the least. Similarly, there is in some cases little knowledge of how job titles map onto actual job content. Graduate occupations in practice are socially constructed in a competitive labour market between groups of workers, and stakeholders with particular resources and interests, in which these actors symbolically construct the relationship between HE and the particular types of work and occupations. Occupations are fluid conceptual categories imagined in a particular way in order to make sense of what a group of workers share or have in common. But it can also be imagined to be functional in a discursive battle for status. Actors within the graduate labour market legitimatize what counts as a graduate occupation in order to maintain their position within established hierarchies, irrespective of skill requirements. In the same vein, professions are not static but emerge through active negotiations and interactions between stakeholders. Groups of workers with university education may not have either the organizational power, occupational identity, or knowledge base upon which a professionalization may bear fruit. Each graduate occupation is unique and deals with its own barriers to

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make professional advances. Examining our four occupations shows that in these occupations, professionalization projects face considerable obstacles. A key impediment for these graduate occupations is that HE credentials cannot service the professionalization project. The lack of exclusivity of formal educational credentials makes it harder to claim exclusivity for particular knowledge and skills as well as professional status (e.g. press officers and software engineers). At the same time it has become harder to convince stakeholders that the credentials and body of knowledge are worthy of professional status (scientists and analysts). This could mean that the success of professionalization projects will thus depend on the actions of other actors like the state, firms, or consumers. Licensure, in which access into an occupation is only possible through the state, is not under discussion. Certification, in which state or private entities create (educational) credentials sought by workers in order to improve their standing with employers, but where obtaining credentials is not required in order to work, is occurring to some extent in financial analysts and lab scientists as few employers decide to hire graduates without, respectively, professional qualifications and science degrees. Yet these forms of closure do little to create culturally unique occupational groups that can attain high status from their work. As Macdonald (2006, p.366) describes, ‘Knowledge and expertise can be warranted by diplomas, certificates, and degrees, but trust is no less important and will be accorded to those whose outward appearance and manner fits in with accepted notions of repute and respectability.’ University degrees are losing their associations with this respectability as well as diminishing as signals of expertise, indicating the disappearing meaning of HE within the development of a professional identity and status (Tholen, 2016). Being able to make these links to HE is of key importance in deploying and producing ‘professional discourses’ that many graduates in graduate occupations would like to adopt (Fournier, 1999). Likewise, universities being vehicles for legitimization of bodies of knowledge that is genuine, complex, or abstract is less effective for those occupations whose knowledge base is relatively new or fast-changing.

Notes 1. A specific use of occupational data relates to examining socio-economic position such as labour market and class position. For those who want to use occupational data to measure class changes, the NS-SEC (National Statistics Socio-economic Classification) is frequently used. It is based on standard occupational unit groups but also includes employment status and size of organization. Occupational classification thus signifies clusters of similar job and class characteristics. 2. Associate professional occupations are, in some reports, also included.

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Graduate Occupations 3. According to Abbott (1995), our ideal-typical understanding of occupations ‘includes three things: a particular group of people, a particular type of work, and an organized body or structure, other than the workplace itself ’ (pp.873–4). 4. The question of how to define professions continues without nearing consensus (Adams, 2015). I would refrain from dictating a definite definition of what a profession constitutes. I would argue that rather than understanding the differences between occupations and professions as solid it is more fruitful to see them as the ends of a continuum. 5. Tam et al. (2002) and Marks and Scholarios (2007) observed a strong professional commitment and identity among IT workers. 6. For example, the Institute of Biomedical Science (IBMS) is the UK professional body for those who work within the field of biomedical science; the Academy of Pharmaceutical Sciences for those working in pharmaceutical sciences. The latter’s aims revolve around (1) promotion of the pharmaceutical sciences, (2) recognition of achievements in the pharmaceutical sciences through offering Membership and Fellowship, (3) supporting students, (4) networking, and (5) education and training (APS, 2017). Apart from organizing conferences and symposia, the APS develops, delivers, and accredits CPD courses and programmes and accredits undergraduate university degree programmes in the pharmaceutical sciences. 7. To become chartered, a scientist needs to ‘demonstrate competence across five areas: application of knowledge and understanding, personal responsibility, interpersonal skills, professional practice and professional standards’ (Science Council, 2017). These competences have to be demonstrated through academic qualifications, accredited prior learning, portfolios, and assessed scientific and technical reports in order to achieve registration as a Chartered Scientist.

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8 Graduates’ Careers

Introduction Some labour friction for new graduates aside, careers of graduate workers are seen as relatively straightforward compared to their non-graduate counterparts (Sissons, 2011; Devins et al., 2014). Many believe that in an increasingly knowledge-based economy, graduates have the knowledge and skills to remain employable and therefore enjoy relatively stable and rewarding careers. The advanced knowledge and skills make graduate workers more adaptive, being able to use their human capital in a more flexible and dynamic way without constraints, not bound to organizational careers or traditional hierarchical or bureaucratic notions of career trajectory. This chapter examines what drives the careers of graduate workers in our four occupations, how their careers progress, and how they are experienced. By doing so, it explores what we can say about the nature of graduate careers and whether they live up to current conceptualizations of such careers. What this chapter does not do is provide an account of how individual career decisions and career trajectories come about and how people’s background and habitus are lived experiences that shape their careers (for more on this see e.g. Burke, 2015). Instead, it provides a partial and situated understanding of how graduate careers develop over time.

Careers Careers matter. Not only do careers influence people’s life chances and access to valuable resources, they give meaning to their lives. They are not merely the aggregate of labour market changes’ outcomes over time, but shape the life course of people and their understanding of who they are, who others are, and their relationship to work and occupations. Careers offer coherence, continuity, and social meaning to people’s lives (Young and Collin, 2000). They provide a

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source of status and identity to locate oneself within a social hierarchy. Careers provide workers’ scripts and interpretative schemes to make sense of themselves and the world of work. They give information on the relationship between individuals and social structures (such as organizations, professions, and occupational groups), the relationships of power as well as the values, norms, and expectations of the (occupational) group to which the individual belongs (Goffman, 1961; van Maanen, 1980; Giddens, 1984). Various definitions and understandings of career have emerged over time (Moore et al., 2007). A pioneer in the study of careers, Harold Wilensky, defined careers as ‘a succession of related jobs, arranged in a hierarchy of prestige, through which persons move in an ordered predictable sequence’ (1960, p.127). Other scholars thereafter broadened this definition. For instance, Arthur et al. (1989, p.8) defined career as ‘the evolving sequence of a person’s work experiences over time’ and Arnold’s (1997, p.16) definition of career is even more inclusive: ‘The sequence of employment-related positions, roles, activities and experiences encountered by a person’. Many sociologists have preferred to use a similar wide definition of career encompassing both work and peripheral experiences related to work, such as education. Career in a wide sense, in particular as articulated and proposed by the Chicago school (e.g. Hughes, 1937, 1958; Becker, 1963), offers a more holistic concept than accumulative pathways of labour market positions and includes the associated subjective feelings and personal experiences, moving beyond the study of work (Barley, 1989). For the purpose of this chapter, I will use Arnold’s wide definition of career. Traditionally, careers were understood as teleological and unilinear, having a logical trajectory, most often ‘upwards’ ‘through a series of related occupations and statuses according to a schedule. They are, therefore, associated with situations in which occupational mobility is considered the norm’ (Form, 1968, p.252). This approach emphasizes an orderly and hierarchical progression and a systematic occupational experience in which each occupation is considered as technical and social preparation for the succeeding ones. The idea of an occupational career in which a member of an occupation passes a sequence of positions during his or her life within a single occupation is based on the metaphor of the ladder. Starting on the lowest rung of a career ladder, an orderly sequence of promotions to positions at successively higher status levels follows all the way to retirement. Through step-by-step improvement of occupational status and rewards, a teleological project emerges.1 Similarly, the idea of organizational careers is that careers take place largely through (bureaucratic) organizations that rely on career systems, again based on the logic of advancement. Workers climb upwards in an organizational hierarchy, acquiring organizational expertise that equips them for more responsible positions opened up by promotions and retirement of higherplaced workers. The internal labour market provides both clarity and security. 143

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So with occupational careers, workers move from employer to employer within the same occupation, and advancement is achieved within a single organization (see Brown, 1982). In recent decades, many career researchers have felt that the concepts of occupational or organizational career models no longer are adequate. Increased competitive pressures on organizations, increased employer demands for flexibility in employment arrangements, restructuring, downsizing, outsourcing, and workforce casualization among other factors (Inkson, 2008, p.547) have altered the nature of modern careers in tandem with rapid globalization. A perceived loss of predictable careers and the demise of long-term hierarchical careers have driven many scholars to think of new perspectives of what careers include, focusing on the individual career level, stressing a flexible, nonhierarchical, dynamic nature. Since the late 1980s, a lot of the literature on careers has been occupied with coming to grips with observed decreasing organizational boundaries leading to permeable careers as opposed to traditional, hierarchical, and bureaucratic careers. The so-called ‘new career literature’ (Arthur et al., 1999) emphasizes that careers lack the traditional upward vertical motion and move across all levels in the occupational hierarchy. A prominent example of such a new perspective is the idea of the ‘boundaryless career’, extensively used by contemporary career theorists to describe modern career patterns. Proponents (e.g. Arthur, 1994; Arthur and Rousseau, 1996; Arthur et al., 2005) claim that careers are less restricted and less tied to specific organizations and move ‘across the boundaries of separate employers’ (Arthur, 1994, p.296). Instead, workers are seeking project-based experiences and competencies that exist across firms. Individuals are able to move between and within organizations and vocations with a greater ease, breaking traditional organizational career boundaries. It necessitates that workers manage actively and consciously their own career, drawing validation from outside the present employer. Unconstrained, there are no longer clear lines or boundary markings to signal career limits and no dependence on the organizational structures. Career advancement is independent, individual, and subjective. Closely related to the ‘boundaryless career’ is Hall’s concept of the ‘protean career’ (Hall, 1976, 2002) emphasizing a self-directed approach to careers shaped by the individual’s own goals and values as opposed to the objectified markers of success provided by the organization. Other concepts such as the post-corporate career (Peiperl and Baruch, 1997), chronically flexible career (Iellatchitch et al., 2003), and kaleidoscope career (Maniero and Sullivan, 2005) have also emerged. What they share are the predictions or assumptions that careers are becoming more individualized and flexible, and less linear, that the role of organizations in careers is in decline, and that the responsibility of individuals for their own careers is increasing. 144

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Over time, many limitations and weaknesses of metaphors such as the boundaryless career have been pointed out. Rodrigues et al. (2016) observe that the new perspectives ascribe unbridled agency without structural constraints to workers to pursue their careers. Inkson et al. (2012) outline various other issues such as the ambiguous and multiple definitions of boundaryless career and the lack of empirical support for the claimed predominance of boundaryless careers. On the latter issue, the authors comment that ‘several studies have indicated that, even in settings where one might expect boundaryless careers to have become predominant, substantial groups of workers are apparently still having organizational careers’ (Inkson et al., 2012, p.329) and note that ‘boundaryless careers present a novel ideal type and an appropriate model for some individuals, some organizations and some industries’ (p.330; emphasis in original). As it stands, there also remains limited evidence that there is rising job mobility amongst workers (e.g. Auer and Cazes, 2000; Rodrigues and Guest, 2010). These ideas about boundaryless and protean careers tend to be applied not specifically to graduate workers but mainly to professional and managerial workers, most of which are graduate workers. The remainder of the chapter examines how we can understand how careers are experienced and whether the metaphor of the boundaryless worker fits the career of the graduate workers in our four occupations.

Boundaries If our graduate workers in the case studies were to enjoy a boundaryless career, they would most likely perceive boundaryless career opportunities and pathways irrespective of any existing structural constraints (Arthur and Rousseau, 1996). Yet they are well aware of the structural constraints and these are fundamental in their understanding of their own employability and career options. Organizational contexts constitute the main boundaries within which most graduate workers think about careers. In some cases, the organizational context of graduate work is itself fractured and not set up to produce meaningful careers. For example, Nigel, a senior scientist in a biotechnology company, explains: In a venture capital-funded company, you know, life doesn’t go on forever so they are aware that, you know, the funds . . . you know, the funds and goals obviously are to get the company to a point that they can sell it. [ . . . ] So we have to live with that sort of lack of certainty as to the future really.

In addition, many corporations have short-term goals and this is reflected in their recruitment and HR policies. Software engineering projects often do not 145

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require permanently employed engineers, as teams of software engineers can be assembled without too much effort or cost: Given the perceived failure of software engineering to develop as a respected profession and to be seen as a commodity—you just go to a recruitment agency and buy people that have got skills, plug them in to do the work—you will find that good people often view themselves as expert games designers, transport infrastructure engineers that happen to do software and will find a career path there. The attempts for generic software professionals to find a career path I think is not working—it is stalled—’cause we don’t know what it is we’re supposed to know. [Thomas, IT consultant]

It is understood that many companies do not guarantee careers, and that in some, conversations about career development hardly ever occur. Yet within the same occupational boundaries there are (mainly large) organizations that do provide clear security and clear career trajectories for those interested in them. In all four occupations, some employers were dedicated to offering these organizational career paths. How common they are we cannot ascertain with this relatively small sample. Ian, a lab director in a biotechnology company, explains the company career ladder for a scientist as follows: So bands A, B, C, D, and E are all people based in the laboratory and delivering work in the group. A new graduate would come in as a band A for example and somebody with a Master’s might come in as a Band B. [ . . . ] so we have a very formalized structure about how it all works. [ . . . ] within the bands within the laboratory it’s actually very transparent what people need to do to get to the next level.

But he realizes the conditionality of seemingly logical career trajectories: Having said that, there’s not always the opportunity for people to move . . . it obviously depends on the business and how well they’re performing and so forth. So while people might think they’ve been a Band D, there might not be a Band D position available, and of course that’s something that we have to manage internally.

These boundaries highlighted by various workers and managers can be seen in statements such as ‘you can’t make everyone managers’ [Rose, manager, IT company], ‘and so my prospects within the current role are limited, but that’s just through the organizational structure’ [Mildred, media manager, utility company]. So even if there are established organizational career structures in place, limitations remain to be posed.

Technological Change as a Boundary Technological change profoundly shapes the content of many occupations and in some cases makes them obsolete. The fact that people outlive certain 146

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kinds of work should therefore shape our understanding of careers (as pointed out by Hughes, 1997). For software engineers, scientists, and also press officers, new technologies not only shape which and how tasks are performed but also influence career opportunities. Experience with and knowledge of particular technologies can both move forward as well as limit career trajectories. When asked what a software engineer needs to do in order to have a successful career, many software engineers framed their answers around technological innovation and adaptation: I suppose probably staying up to date with technological advances would be an obvious one. I don’t think it is . . . but then I suppose that would come naturally with the job. I don't think it would really be possible for someone to carry on doing the same thing that they were doing five years ago or something because obviously by then the operating systems have changed and the technology and everything. [Hugh, software engineer, IT company] Take on new technologies. I guess you have to be quite adaptive as things can change over the years. You have to sort of not get stuck in an old style. You need to embrace new technologies as they come along. [Bruce, software engineer, IT company]

Sam, head of pharmacology within a pharmaceutical company, expresses that particular types of roles will become obsolete whereas others will grow over time, making it difficult to know how one’s career will develop: So if you start doing map-based science straight from a degree, will you always be doing map-based science? Well there are some people now that are and they have just about got their timing right. I think they have probably been in the industry at exactly the right time in fact. I’m not sure for the people starting now whether in 20 years’ time they will still be doing it. I guess many of them, many of them will have changed. Many more will have changed their career structure and direction than people of that age in the previous generation.

Sectorial Boundaries Graduates in all four occupations spoke of boundaries of sectors. For many it is not deemed easy to cross to other sectors due to built-up (or lack of) sector- and industry-specific expertise and knowledge. The so-called sunk costs, at least in a worker’s perception, create an obstacle to changing their sector of employment. In particular, financial analysts struggle to cross sectors: So I am in the entertainment and media industry, I don’t think I could walk into a FMCG [fast moving consumer goods] role. They will take somebody who is currently working in that industry and who ticks all of the ten boxes, and who is at the right rate for them to pay a salary. It’s hard, it’s tough, it’s really tough. [Rick, senior financial analyst, gaming industry]

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Career routes across sectors still occur frequently but a penalty may occur. Boris, who works as a financial analyst in banking, told me: So it is based on the industry. For banks here, if I work for one year, I can be an AVP [associate vice president] in another bank. But if I change my sector, then obviously I have to start from below, otherwise I won’t be able to know what a financial analyst does [ . . . ] the reason is that because the company is completely different, and the basics are completely different on which the job role works.

Occupational Trajectories of Graduate Workers The workers in the study shared the most varied career stories. For instance, laboratory scientists find fulfilling and long-lasting careers within pharmaceutical and biotech companies. But here, the occupation of scientist is neither the starting point nor end point but merely is a passing stage. Various scientists I spoke to regard the scientist role as a stepping stone to various other pharmaceutical or science-related careers. It is difficult to stipulate careers within this early phase; careers are open to opportunities, as expressed by Oliver, a science recruiter: So someone I interviewed this week is looking for either research, quality control, or would look at kind of admin project work as well, more kind of desk based. I think people are keeping their options kind of more open now than they used to kind of four or five years ago.

Once established, many scientists do not stay in laboratories. Kim, an ex-scientist who now works in sales and marketing, explains: I think a lot of people will start off in a lab and will work in a lab . . . kind of first job for kind of three, four years. And then a certain percentage of those will kind of be supervisors and go on to lab managers, so very much kind of staying on the lab side. And then you might become a quality manager and oversee both the quality control and the QA [quality assurance] side of it. Then from there you can become a kind of qualified person, or move it sideways into regulatory affairs . . . project management, kind of documentation-type roles, quality assurance, move across into production, kind of health & safety—there’s so many places you can go.

So occupational boundaries do not necessarily form strong constraints for scientists, yet it is not their agency, their self-directed career planning that drives career progression. The serendipity of market forces also moves them in 148

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various directions. Thus supply constraint constitutes its own boundary within which the choices and opportunities are restrained. Temporary research contracts are increasingly common within the industries and shape career opportunities. Dominic, a scientist in a pharmaceutical company, talks about his inability to secure permanent employment: It was not a preference no, so it was driven by circumstance and the economic climate really, which is that I was out of contract in my previous position and I had to find a new post. I would prefer a permanent position and contract, but I was unable to secure one, and I got this offer of a temporary position which I took on. Which was originally based on an 11-month contract which has since been extended twice for me . . . so for a secondary 6-month contract, and then I’ve just been given another 6-month extension. So it’s still a temporary basis but they have been able to extend. But beyond that I really have no idea whether there’ll be further opportunity.

For software engineers, career paths are even more undefined and in many cases there is, unlike for scientists, no formal career progression. Their career trajectories do not follow well-trodden routes due to the relative novelty of their occupation and the rapid changes in technology leading to labour market demands and requirements that are hard to predict. So although their own expertise and experience may provide security within a short-term future, their long-term mobility is spoken about in rather ambivalent terms: I suppose you need progression, don’t you, you need to be not doing the same thing over and over again. That’s how I would define progress or a career as opposed to a job. I’m looking back at my series of jobs and wondering if it has been a career, because I haven’t managed it, I don’t feel that I’m necessarily moving forward in terms of getting higher up. I still programme, I still do what I did several years ago. [Paul, senior software design engineer, electronics company]

Many engineers expressed great uncertainty when they reflected on how their own careers were unfolding (see Bergvall-Kåreborn and Howcroft, 2013). This was particularly an issue for those engaged in freelance/self-employed work for whom organizational career paths are precarious. O’Mahony and Bechky (2006) explain that because of the lack of company-specific knowledge and employers’ lack of first-hand experience, contract workers can find it challenging to create career opportunities. They observed that as a result, learning new skills was central to how they navigate progression, often stretching their previously demonstrated competence into a new area as well as demonstrating coherence within previous work experience and skills development to employers. Yet if the work experience stagnates, so can career opportunities: It’s very easy to drop out of the software labour market . . . . it’s much harder to get back in if you’ve dropped out. So if you’ve not been in a job in six months it can be quite difficult. [Jack, software engineer, biotechnology company]

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In another case it was experienced that offshoring and competition with programmers abroad have increased insecurity for at least some UK engineers, leading to undecided career opportunities and progression (see Trusson and Woods, 2016): I think the software community is uncertain, unclear . . . certainly because there is no formal career progression, and it is being impacted massively by the expansion of the technology globally. The Indian subcontractors can undercut software development in the West, and have done. I mean I get frequent emails from organizations offering to develop software systems at just above the minimum wage . . . you know ludicrous, ludicrous claims to deliver services at very very low prices, and treating software development as a commodity. And it is a profound concern I think, profound concern. In India, Vietnam, China, I mean it is seen as a route to riches and wealth and it is undermining what we in Europe would perceive to be a profession . . . and I’m not sure that it actually is. [Thomas, software consultant]

It was also understood that there are clear boundaries and limitations of working as a software engineer. Senior roles involve more responsibility and greater experience in particular software areas. Yet ultimately, further progression is halted within the field of software engineering. Transferring to more ‘advanced’ roles such as software architect or manager is certainly possible but these require a different set of skills. Their core technical programming skills have become of lesser significance when it comes to performing these senior (managerial) roles. A minority will continue to work as a software engineer long term, while others take alternative routes, management being a popular one (we will explore this option later in more detail), which is not always compatible with the desire to remain grounded with their strong interests in software programming: To be honest, I don’t know that there is a shared view of what a career should be like. There is no clear progression. As I mentioned earlier, if you are progressing within an organization, fairly quickly you get promoted to supervisory and management roles and you lose the technical . . . and a lot of the software professionals don’t want that to happen—but that’s the route. So you get these people that are junior management, line management, attempting to retain some sort of technical capability and just getting in the way of their juniors. (laughs) So it’s unclear. [Jeffrey, software engineer, publisher]

Similarly to laboratory scientists, financial analysts may move between various related occupations over time. Although some workers will remain in financial analysis for decades, many others will move sideways or ‘upways’ to other positions, either into management or consultancies or into another position within finance: GT: Is there anything like a typical career trajectory for a financial analyst? Yeah, career trajectory relates from person to person. For example, some of the financial analysts, all they do is they work two or three years, or four years, five

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This does not mean there are no boundaries or bounded routes. Many analysts outline clear trajectories, marking established routes and shared understandings of ‘viable’ career options. Yet only a minority of employers, mainly large organizations, such as banks and financial corporations, in some cases have clear internal levels of financial analysts and thus provide focused and structured career paths: I mean in a nutshell you probably have like the financial coordinator, which is like the starting level, then we would have a financial analyst, and then advanced, what we call like a specialist, and then we will have two levels of senior financial analysts, an expert and a master. So to become a master you needed about fifteen years’ experience. [Tony, senior financial analyst, IT]

As the relatively new industry of PR matures, so do career paths. Press officer is very much seen as an early career occupation, yet there are a considerable number of press officers who have worked in the role for long periods. Many in the occupation project and aspire to work in more senior, managerial, and betterpaid roles such as director of media or director of communication in the future: So, I think people, quite a lot of people, possibly myself included, so I’m slightly biased in saying this, would see it as a path to possibly being a communications manager, so to make sure you’ve got the different elements of experience, so you’ve got media relations experience, you have brand experience, internal communications experience, which will ideally take you on to a communications manager role, which would mean you’d step away from media relations, but have the team under you doing that. So, I know that’s where a few of my peers are going. Not to say that they don’t also like doing the jobs of media relations, but I don’t think it’s something you can necessarily . . . that many people necessarily want to do ad infinitum. [Lucy, head of media relations, manufacturing company]

Going freelance is a serious option for many officers. Switching to the more commercial role of account manager in PR agencies also remains a career possibility throughout the career and is rated high in terms of career prospects: I think an agency is a good place to get into PR, because you’re working to very tight deadlines, having to work across multiple clients. You get to deal with a hell of a lot of people, and lots of different people, difficult people, fun people, laidback people, all sorts. [John, PR manager, Internet company]

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However, the corporate nature of agency work means that consultancy careers are shorter than in-house careers. Much like the protean ideal, some graduates working in our four occupations cannot rely on an organizational career path and must construct their individual subjective career projection. Even though this does not result in their subjective career constructions being without boundaries, it does mean that occupational career trajectories are unstable. Yet within organizations, there exist in the medium term career paths for graduate workers, in particular for scientists and press officers.

Becoming Management When it comes to the usage and development of skills and expertise, careers for graduate workers are not frequently linear or progressive. Not only do graduate careers transcend industry and occupational boundaries (through retraining or reinvention), their occupational routes often take a ‘turn’ into management. Managing processes, people, or organizations may need intricate knowledge and skills within their own chosen field; it signifies a distinct career change for many. For software engineers, scientists, financial analysts, and press officers, taking on managerial tasks or becoming a manager signifies a distinct role change and a departure from their previous job demands. For some the managerial phase was seen as part of a natural progression: Yeah it’s usually in at the bottom. Software engineering and then you’ve got the team leader further on up to as I said managing a department . . . and then managing engineering, and then carry on up until you make enough mistakes that they stop you there. [Jacob, software engineer, contractor]

For others, such as press officers, moving into management was seen as a considerable skill upgrade, which tends to occur with the development of PR experience. Yet for some graduate workers, managerial work felt like being deskilled. They actively reject managerial positions in order to dedicate more time to core activities, preferring to use technical over managerial skills: I’m quite happy to continue with what I have. Some people are more careerorientated and want to progress and they want to go into management and project leaders and something like that, I enjoy lab work, I don’t want to be removed from that. [Maria, scientist, biotechnology company]

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Graduates’ Careers So it’s something that I have, when I’ve been asked I’ve said, ‘No, I don’t really want to be involved in managing people’, if it’s to the detriment of getting handson with technology. [Paul, senior software engineer, manufacturing] I’ve seen too many managers, people that have become managers by accident, and I don’t want to do that. I turned down a team leader role at Reuters and said, look, I'm happy to be a technical lead or mentor for more junior team members, but I don’t want to ever be a people manager. And I’ve said that out loud. [Winston, software engineer, IT company] You do get people who are just really, really passionate about programming, they don’t want to do man management, they just want to do technical work. [Jennifer, IT recruiter] . . . when you encounter someone who’s been over-promoted or someone who’s in management when they’re clearly much happier having a hands-on role. [Andrew, software engineer, IT company]

This passion for work and intrinsic motivation (rather than earning potential) is moreover what often drives career progression. The labour of love (also described in chapter 7) is what drives several engineers. They construct to some extent self-directed careers (as predicted by the protean career theorists), yet ultimately strongly bounded within the occupational and organizational context. Engineers are actively committed to their occupation, believing this leads to career longevity and potential to excel: . . . having the interest and the innate ability and the desire to want to be a gifted programmer. That’s what’s kept me in employment. [Ewart, software engineer, IT company] Because if you don’t enjoy doing it and you’re just going through it for the motions, then all you’re going to end up doing is getting yourself stuck into a rut and finding that you’ve wasted years of your life and you haven’t really set a good grounding for yourself in order to progress. [Penny, software developer, contractor] I would say the most successful software engineers are the ones who enjoy it. [Mason, software engineer, financial company]

The emphasis on self-fulfilment and the internal criterion of success is again highlighted by the protean career literature (see e.g. Hall, 1976), yet is far less rationalized than often is assumed. Engineers lack the agency to really plan and define on their own terms.

Planning Careers It would be erroneous to think that graduate workers are fully knowledgeable about career opportunities. This is not because they lack the interest or capabilities to inform themselves or do not have the required reflexivity to deal 153

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with the information. Workers face structural uncertainties within the organization they work in or find difficulties in forming a coherent career path. Careers are often messy and difficult to plan. The skilled nature of their work and the educational requirements for their roles do not change this. An issue for many graduate workers is that clear progression is lacking. Frank, a software engineer within an IT company, sums up the feeling that the positions he has taken do not constitute a career: I’m looking back at my series of jobs and wondering if it has been a career, because I haven’t managed it, I don’t feel that I’m necessarily moving forward in terms of getting higher up. I still programme, I still do what I did several years ago.

As explained to some extent by the boundaryless career literature, in many cases organizations do not provide any clarity about or possibility for progression: No, we haven’t got a proper career structure [ . . . ] Some people have been here a long time and other people just drift in and out—stay a few years and go off to better things. [Trevor, senior scientist, biotechnology] It depends very much on the team leader or the director’s approach on how much opportunity there is to develop. (Emily, press officer, global charity)

The distinct lack of guiding logic of when, how, and what progression may occur is linked to organizational career expectations. As more senior workers progress or retire, space for progression becomes available. When these opportunities will happen often remains unclear. Although most graduates can elaborate on the qualities and achievements needed to progress in the abstract form, few were certain of how their current performance may lead to immediate career opportunities: I’m looking to keep progressing; I don’t want to remain a media manager. I do think that, within the next few years really, I should be doing what my boss does, but if he doesn’t leave, then that doesn’t really leave me with very many options. So I’m kind of in a dichotomy now—it’s do you stay put? Do you leave and get the promotion that you’re hoping for, or do you stay put, and probably start a family, which is the sort of age that I’m at now? So, I guess I couldn’t tell you, really. My heart says, ‘Go and try and get the promotion and get it in the bag before you go off and start a family’, but when you actually really like an organization, I know that they’re not always so easy to come by, so my prospects within the current role are limited, but that’s just through the organizational structure. [Mildred, media manager, utility company]

An acute problem for many working in small companies is that there is just very limited space to progress, which makes it hard to construct meaningful career plans as the opportunities in the external labour market are unclear: We can’t always meet the timelines of people’s aspirations and there’s only so long you can talk about what your plans are before people start to say, ‘I’ve waited this long, is it going to happen or not?’ But we have quite a good culture in the

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Graduates’ Careers company for developing people and those people that have managed to progress in the company feel they have at least had that. They may not have got to the areas they ultimately aspire to but they’re heading in that direction. [Eric, CFO, pharmaceutical company]

Career ambition and directive agency can only be understood within the specifics of the workplace. Self-direction in career progression provides great challenges and demands, even greater creativity: Here, I would have to create my own promotion. It would be more of a case where I would ask for a new job title but in terms of progression here, I was certainly getting that in the first instance already because I was already opening up my skills from just PR to PR and marketing. Because it is quite an autonomous role and my boss would be very supportive, I know when I do want more responsibility, she’ll be quite willing to give me that. While I’m not on a formal path, I do feel there’s progression in the role. [Donna, press and communication manager, science organization]

The lack of career opportunities can be compensated with other incentives such as higher earnings or wider job roles. Narratives on career planning range from outlining precise and well-defined career plans, mostly in the form of distinct stories of linear progression through various roles, to very loose and amorphous reflections on how their work trajectories have unfolded combined with rather spontaneous ruminations about what the future may hold, as illustrated by Bruce, a software engineer in an IT company: So I think I’m going to stay in software development because it pays better money than most other things that I could start now. Now I’ve been here too long, just anything else that I do it will pay me less.

The wide range of career approaches within an occupational community can be exemplified by examining the financial analysts. Nothing intrinsic to the occupation of financial analyst guarantees solid career progression and many careers take new directions based on opportunity and serendipity, contradicting the idea that progression is aligned through skill and experience upgrades. Many of the analysts I talked to did have a clear plan regarding where they want to be and how to get there, albeit expressed in rather uncertain terms. However, for financial analysts the lack of career structures means that analysts frame their narratives on their own individual career plans packed with feelings of hope, possibility, and agency within a work context that is filled with insecurity and ambivalence: So, I think you can work really hard, know what you want, be very, very clear about what you want, and then when you are asking for it and told that you are not ready or you are not able, just ask why? What can I do to prove that I am? Just being very kind of driven to get where you want to go but then knowing exactly

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The quote above also shows the need for personal networks and knowledge in manoeuvring and finding career opportunities. In line with the protean career literature, analysts share a distinct understanding that a proactive approach is needed in order to ‘move forward’. Without this proactive attitude, opportunities are thought to be closing and undesirable career paths can harden: Communicate what you want to do, because at the end of the day if you sit in your current role, and you might be enjoying it and it might be good for the meantime, but at the end of the day you’ve got this career path, kind of graphed, if you will, and if you’re not on that graph in the right way, in the direction you want to be going, and you know, you’re not in the right place, I think any experience is good experience, but I think you have to communicate with your management if it’s comfortable to do so, that you want to be somewhere, [ . . . ] once you’ve sort of established a good relationship with some people at work, whether it’s your manager or just sort of a mentor, you’ve got to communicate that and start getting word out so that you can kind of aim to be in a place you want to be. [Tony, senior financial analyst, IT]

Those without upward career paths are often seen as lacking focus, vision, or ambition: In my team, there was a 32-year-old guy who worked in New York. He’s a financial analyst in London doing the same job, getting the same pay. These sort of people, you know, it’s like they are not sure what they want to do. They just want to survive on-the-job basis. They are on the payroll for the past five to six years. I met another girl, she worked for Bank of America for nine years, and she was just a financial officer. They are just working . . . I think it is based on the opportunities that you have, and it is based on the goals that you have in your mind. If you have a really big goal, you can do it. [Boris, financial analyst, banking]

Many analysts believe that this type of career savviness is only exercised by a few; the majority of analysts do not have the force to so pursue ‘real’ directions in their careers. This is in particular true for early career analysts who lack the required understanding about careers and job opportunities: I think at the big banks, because they recruit people from a lot of different backgrounds. I think a lot of people go into it because they want to try it or their friends are doing it or they think it’s a good opportunity, but I think a lot of people aren’t necessarily clear on whether they want to do this for a long time or not. [ . . . ] I don’t think I spent that much time thinking about alternative jobs until much later, and I think a lot of people are like that, a lot of my colleagues were, you

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Graduates’ Careers know, the big banks recruited people, they paid very well, they sold the role on many aspects, you know, you work in an international setting, you get a lot of responsibility, you work hard but you work with smart people from all over the world, etc., and I think a lot of people went into it to try it, and then people in many cases decided to stay for a long time, and in other cases decided to do something else. [ . . . ] a lot of the people who started with me have left to do other things as well, going back to study something else or just getting a different type of job. [Lee, ex-analyst for a major global investment bank]

This does not mean that careers are purely uncontrolled individual projectiles. As suggested by Danny and Tony earlier, many analysts talk regularly with others such as line managers about the career options and what they need to do: I actually went and saw HR and said, ‘Look, I'm in this role now. Can you give me any direction of where this role could lead to?’ [ . . . ] they said, ‘Oh, you've got to decide what you want to do.’ The first move actually happened at the initiative of my manager [ . . . ] I mean they’re trained to move people every kind of two years. Not to push moving, but if you want to move, you can definitely move. They encourage career progression, definitely. [Andrea, finance business analyst, finance company]

The idea of ‘boundaryless careers’ implies that workers cannot rely on employing organizations to look after their careers. This is what many of our graduates experience. But as Cohen and Mallon (1999) found in their study on professionals who left their organizations to take up self-employment, organizations still shape careers. As opposed to the idea that individuals freely navigate their careers according to their own values and motivations, workers are often not in the position to form a coherent career plan. Career planning seems to a significant degree to be driven by organizational changes and external opportunities. In addition, outward pressures such as untenable work relations and childcare and family responsibilities also drive career trajectories.

Employability and the Competition for Jobs How do graduate workers in the four occupations remain employable and improve their employability? How do scientists, engineers, analysts, and press officers understand the competition for jobs in order to progress in the labour market?

Skills Many of the graduate workers propounded a meritocratic narrative on career progression, highlighting the role of personal ability, rather than the structural forces at play. In line with the protean career view, careers are understood 157

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as individual projects by most graduate workers but they do not give themselves overly strong agency in their narratives. Eligibility for senior positions is perhaps unsurprisingly associated with higher levels of skills and work experience. Again, the skills acquired at university are merely a starting point. Software engineers in particular understand the competition for jobs to be consensual as opposed to conflictual and positional. They do not tend to understand it as a direct competition against other competing engineers but regard its outcome as a labour market fit between their human capital and the skill requirements of (prospective) employers or the sector in general: So the most important thing is that each engineer must find its own place and find the skill set for that. And after that it is really important for any engineer to have good communication skills, apart from wits, apart from being smart. It’s really important in a company to have people that can actually understand and convey ideas and give to the other engineers their own ideas and trying to explain them and be able to you know actually communicate. So having those two skills is crucial for any engineer to be able to grow in a company and be able to reach the high roles in a company. [Peter, software engineer, IT company]

Career strategies were grounded in efforts to grow knowledge of and experience with coding languages and emerging software areas. Time after time, software engineers’ own responsibility was emphasized in their career construction. This is in accordance with Marks and Scolarios’ study of Scottish IT workers, which found that proactivity with respect to learning new technologies and self-promotion drove their progression within their firms (Marks and Scholarios, 2008). When asked about the requirements for career progression, one engineer answered: You need the technical knowledge, you need to have kept up with technologies in your own time, you need to have been willing to expand your knowledge past what you’ve gained, if anything you’ve gained, at university. You need to be willing to put the extra hours in regarding any specific problems that you may come up against, either in your personal training or at work. [ . . . ] A lot of the work I do in my personal life is based on my next job move—where I’m going to go to next, what kind of work I’d want to be doing next. [Jeffrey, software engineer, publisher]

Constant learning, skill development, and knowledge improvement were thought to improve employability. Due to the nature of the work, the change in IT in general, and in software in particular, employability is highly conditional and unstable. Two software engineers explain this as follows: I don’t think it would really be possible for someone to carry on doing the same thing that they were doing five years ago or something because obviously by then the operating systems have changed and the technology and everything. [Hugh, software engineer, IT company]

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For freelance engineers, trying to find projects that use particular kinds of in-demand technologies or that deal with particular problems guarantees the longevity of their careers. However, getting it right is difficult and is seen as walking a tightrope. Company-specific experience and knowledge may not transfer to other contexts: Usually if you change companies you tend to accumulate more knowledge because you’re exposed to different philosophies, different infrastructure, different people, different ideas, so you can accumulate more knowledge and you can get more experience like that. The downside is that if you decide to move in the future to another company they might think that because you were not staying for a long time in other companies you might not stay for long in this company, so they’re not going to trust you. [Darrell, software engineer, contractor]

The risk of specific IT skills becoming outdated is perceived as a real danger and unlike their skill-based discourse, their employability is also shaped by the labour process or market forces beyond their own reach. Often older software engineers are regarded as obsolete due to lack of opportunity to keep up to date with recent developments. Craig Barrett, former chief executive officer of Intel Corp, once claimed that ‘the half-life of an engineer, software or hardware, is only a few years’ (Matloff, 2012). Changing employer is both necessary as well as hazardous for software engineers. Likewise, great responsibility for employability is placed on the shoulders of the laboratory-based scientists, which means constant skill upgrading becomes a necessity rather than a labour market strength: Because I had various contracts every time I have an employment I have to update it with new skills that I’ve learned where I’ve extended my knowledge, and that usually helps to find another job. And not having breaks between employment, employers don’t like it when you have breaks. [Maria, scientist, biotechnology company]

For technicians especially, negotiating a wider role can increase employability, especially if they can get involved in the actual research process, i.e. moving into the terrain of the scientists, as expressed by Jason (scientist/technician in a biotechnology company): Keeping yourself up to date with not necessarily operating machines and instruments and equipment but more analysing results and data. Those two are the most important skills.

For financial analysts and press officers, there also was a strong sense that one needs to keep developing and changing, irrespective of the content of the 159

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current role. This involves looking for learning opportunities and role diversification to develop and improve. Mainly interpersonal skills were identified as key to career progression. These skills are not subject to technological change but aid personal networks and relations (for instance with superiors, clients, or gatekeepers in other organizations or departments).

Work Ethic and Networks For many graduate workers, hard work, graft, and determination are thought to supplement work experience and skills in career progression. For some like Lucy, who works as a head of media relations in a manufacturing company, a strong career focus strengthens their effectiveness: I don’t think it’s anything specific to media relations, in order to be successful you just need to be hard working, and have that focus. If you know that’s what you want to do, and just don’t stray from that focus of your stated aim, and just work hard, I don’t think there’s anything specific to being a successful press officer, as opposed to being a successful vet or accountant, or anything; it’s just focus and hard work.

For others, hard work explicitly aids positional advantage within an organizational context. Showing exceptional work ethic helps with standing out in relation to one’s colleagues: You have to almost do more than you’re paid to do. I think that’s probably the only way . . . and sort of prove yourself, ’cause there’s an awful lot of people at the same level as you, so you’ve got to sort of stand out really. And not just in a sort of technical way, but in a way that you conduct yourself and that you, you know, do your work and how you organize yourself—I think that will probably give you a little bit of an advantage over the others, to be honest. [Ella, ex-lab scientist, biotechnology company]

As expressed above, personal characteristics such as the need to be proactive and be noticed by others in the field are regarded as paramount, in particular for press officers: GT: What do you do in order to increase your employability? Secure media coverage, protect brand, and show impact from that. And show some creativity. If you’ve done something which is a bit head turning, that’s fantastic. It’s rare, but when that happens. [Emily, press officer, global charity] It’s an increasingly popular job and if you want to do well at it, you need to keep informed, be enthusiastic, and have a decent network, know other press officers, speak to journalists and a lot of people who are in the comms industry. You will often see opportunities from knowing other people, that’s always important. Just recognize that you can’t stand still if you want to progress, you need to always be looking at how to develop your role yourself rather than expect your employer to do it. [Eleanor, senior media officer, transport organization]

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In the last quote, we see again the role of network and connections, which were mentioned by many others. The relationship between social capital and job opportunities is well-established (e.g. Granovetter, 1995; Lin, 2001). And indeed for graduate workers, networks can enhance career movements, directly or indirectly. For instance, for a freelance software engineer, reputation is of key importance in securing future employment and is propelled by having a wide network of colleagues and past employers.

The Role of Education Careers for our four occupations are, as you may expect, not defined by education. Although career paths for some groups of graduates can certainly differ from those of non-graduate workers, the lack of uniformity of career progression within our occupations suggests that education level does not unify graduate workers in terms of careers. Of course, access itself to particular occupations is closed off to non-graduate workers (e.g. doctors and lawyers) or they have become increasingly difficult to enter without a degree due to the massification of higher education (see chapter 3). Within software engineering, financial analysis, and PR, educational qualifiers or experiences do not greatly shape understanding of careers nor perceived career trajectories. Consider Lee, who worked as an analyst at a global investment bank, and understands the lack of occupation-specific educational preparation to be a key factor in career fluidity: So I don’t think it’s like being a doctor where like okay, once you study medicine you’re a doctor, you’re pretty much a doctor I think in many cases, whereas I think the financial analyst role, because banks train you to do the role on the job, it also means you haven’t necessarily invested so much of your education in a specific job and you’re more free to go and do something else, so it’s a lot more transient.

An exception is that, as outlined in chapter 5, doctoral degrees for scientists distinctly open up opportunities and career paths: You tend to find in the science industry that if you’re in research and you haven’t got a PhD, there is a certain level that you can get to and that’s it—there’s a bit of a ceiling really. And I had reached that really with doing my previous role, there wasn’t anywhere else I could go. [Ella, ex-lab scientist, biotechnology company] This company is made up of probably at least 80 percent of people with PhDs. And I do feel that with a Bachelor’s I’m maybe held back a little bit, I mean it’s by no means an official policy, but you . . . you can read between the lines. I mean I’ve recently been promoted to a senior scientist like kind of about six months ago, and I think I could work here for the next five, ten years assuming the company is still here and maybe not achieve much higher than that. I think I’ve kind of reached the ceiling that my education will allow. [Nigel, senior scientist, biotechnology company]

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Most graduate scientists were not aware of the career limitations imposed by not owning a PhD when they entered the labour market. In fact, many scientists spoke of initial misunderstanding and cognitive dissonance regarding the value of science degrees in their early stage, leading to disappointment or later regret: GT: Did you expect to go into science when you finished your Master’s? Yeah, I expected when I graduated, you know, I’ve done this great course, it’s really interesting. That I’d be able to get . . . I was expecting to be a scientist, like that would be my role. And that didn’t happen straight away. And I wouldn’t say . . . my job role is classed as a scientist, but what I sort of expected a scientist to be doing, I don’t think I’m 100% there yet. I think I’m sort of halfway between a laboratory technician and a scientist. [Sheila, lab technician, biotechnology company]

Next to the uncertainty about what weight qualifications carry within the labour market, many feel that the career divide between PhD and non-PhD career opportunities is unwarranted and unfair. Yet many also understood that the educational requirements are supply-driven (i.e. if the number of qualified labour market entrants increases, employers can demand advanced qualifications, unrelated to the educational needs of the job role). They are also aware that extensive in-house training efforts and experience-based career progression are no longer relevant. Trevor, a senior scientist in a biotech company, shares: Well one of our project managers doesn’t have a degree, he just worked his way up as a lab technician over the last 30 years. He’s really good at what he does. I don’t see a problem with it really. GT: Do you think it would still be possible? Um, no, I don’t think you could do it today.

A fellow scientist, Maria, observes a shift within the role of qualifications in recruitment due to the supply of candidates with advanced educational qualifications: Companies were more prepared to pay for your education, companies were prepared to take not very qualified people and encourage their studying. Companies were looking after their employees more as now it’s kind of I think the market is saturated, there’s a lot of people out there, and companies are becoming more selective of who they want to take or not to take, and if you’re not happy the door’s open, nobody’s kind of particularly holding you.

So even within an occupation in which educational credentials do provide career advantage, education is not regarded as a meritocratic force which provides opportunities for those able and willing to invest in them; instead they are seen as shifting and conditional markers of employability driven by employer interest. 162

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Conclusion Careers should not be presented as orderly (Wilensky, 1961) and careers for graduate workers are no exception. One of the reasons is that their labour market capacities (e.g. skills and qualifications) only constitute one force that drives their progression over time. Brown (1982) argues that work histories are shaped through three interdependent factors. Firstly, ‘orientations to work’, for instance one’s expectations and preferences for the succession of employment; secondly, one’s career ‘strategy’; and thirdly, the ‘structure of opportunities’ available. Although the graduate workers seemed largely free from expectations and opportunities tied to bureaucratic careers, there are plenty of hierarchical and internal labour market options left, albeit incomplete and temporary. Are there such things as graduate careers? Given the size of the heterogeneous group there were bound to be a great variety of experiences and labour market trajectories. And indeed I found great heterogeneity between and within occupations. Whereas some graduates enjoy secure pathways, many others face insecure ones. Some graduate careers are predictable and planned, others volatile and unintended. One way career theorists have thought about modern high-skilled careers (although not explicitly graduate careers) is through the idea of the ‘boundaryless career’. From examining the four graduate occupations we can see how the careers of the graduate workers have some characteristics aligned to this view. Many workers interviewed were proactive in finding those pathways matched to their own skill development, knowledge, and expertise and were non-reliant on organizational structures. Self-direction, effortful performance, passion, and drive were all thought by many to be driving careers forward. Yet there is distinct divergence. Technical, sectorial, and occupational boundaries still exist. Many pathways are predictably driven by labour market opportunities, not by labour market agency or through strategic deliberation. Some pathways are rather undefined and lack the clear career narratives that the boundaryless professional would follow. Choices are built around set career structures. For instance, the management route seems inevitable for many workers. Their future career plans are formed around this notion. The boundaries that used to define organizational careers are often still in place in workers’ thinking. Workers interestingly still frame their own careers in terms of continuity and trajectory despite the lack of career plans or knowledge of feasible career routes that many workers experience. There is empirical evidence to suggest both organizations and workers still value and retain traditional careers (Dany, 2003). And career self-management is rather seen as a complement than as a replacement for organizational career management (e.g. Sturges et al., 2002). King et al. (2005) describe that for IT workers, careers 163

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are bounded by cognitive limits in processing information, ‘mental barriers’ consisting of socially determined perceptions of what is valued and appropriate behaviour, previous career decisions, and constraints imposed by institutional structures like intermediaries and recruiters. The authors conclude that, ‘Overall, decisions about employability are complex, and a lucid occupational identity must help to inform, and constrain these decisions’ (p.999). Occupational identity must be seen in tandem with other forces that keep people in their present occupations, aptly called ‘occupational embeddedness’ by Feldman and Ng (2007, p.353). A study on pharmacists found that occupational, organizational, sectorial, geographical, and non-work boundaries heavily shape their careers (Rodrigues et al., 2016). So, boundaryless careers are only to a limit materialized within the four occupations. Organizations do not tend to be thought of as responsible for career development, yet continue to provide stable career opportunities for some. This paradox is clearest within software engineering where contract engineers draw validation from outside the present employer, and have very personalized career trajectories based on their own vision and preferences, although the boundaries are still very clear for those specialized engineers. Yet these dual career paths for software engineers were also observed by Baldry et al. (2007) who distinguish between ‘organizational careerists’ and ‘horizontal boundaryless careerists’. The former category are seen as less employable in the external market. The authors stress that it is important to reflect upon whether the choice to become a boundaryless careerist is an active choice or due to external forces such as workplace conditions or restructuring and reorganization. Due to the volatile nature of the IT sector, the opportunities for organizational careers may be in decline and trending in line with business models that are based on flexibility. Scientists in pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies have also seen job security decline over the years and thus flexible, non-linear trajectories only weakly linked to specific organizations may become more frequent. In this chapter I emphasize that for the four graduate occupations there is nothing intrinsic that warrants set career paths linked to their graduate status, skills, or qualifications. We do know that careers of non-graduates are becoming more difficult (D’Arcy and Finch, 2016) but this does not mean that university education can be associated with particular career forms or changes. Graduates’ investment in HE could be seen as a driver of career change. For those having received advanced (occupation-specific) training, they would be likely to move within their occupation, but not likely to move out of their occupation.2 Yet we observe that education in fact is of little consequence in a direct sense except in cases where educational qualifications form credentialist obstacles (as in the case of scientists). So there seems to be limited use of associating the boundaryless career concept with graduate work. Far from all 164

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so-called knowledge workers can use their human capital to create meaningful careers (Sweet and Meiksins, 2012; Brown et al., 2011).3 With the growth of the graduate labour force, the careers of the majority of graduates have become more diffuse and harder to characterize. Educationalist Peter Scott (1995) wrote more than twenty years ago that: The development of mass higher education, therefore will be accompanied by the decline of distinctive careers. Instead the bulk of graduate careers will be difficult to distinguish from other jobs, an inevitable outcome of the creation of a wideraccess system. (p.113)

Elite occupations such as the established professions, not under investigation in the case studies, may continue to produce distinct careers. In some cases, these are also under attack. For instance, significant numbers of junior NHS doctors as well as school teachers leave their fields each year to pursue alternative careers (Campbell, 2015; Syal and Weale, 2016). This shows that strong educational occupational foundations do not prevent career fragmentation.

Notes 1. This is similar in the case of professional careers. Strongly defined by the professional’s crafts or skills, their occupational status determines how well they can monopolize socially valued knowledge (Kanter, 1989, pp.510–11). 2. As explained by Feldman and Ng (2007, p.356), ‘The amount of human capital investment in an occupation, then, is likely to be positively associated with mobility within an occupation but negatively related to mobility to different occupations. It is for this reason, for example, that we see greater occupational out-migration from public-school teachers than from university professors, but greater organizational mobility among professors than among public-school teachers.’ 3. Although Segers et al. (2008) did find some evidence that education was more often associated with a ‘boundaryless attitude’.

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9 The Ideal of the Graduate Worker

Introduction What is at stake in the struggles about the meaning of the social world is power over the classificatory schemes and systems which are the basis of the representations of the groups and therefore of their mobilization and demobilization. (Bourdieu, 1984, p.479)

This chapter brings together all the previous chapters and draws a theoretical framework of the relationships between education, skills, jobs, and careers in the graduate labour market. In the previous five chapters I have described and analysed our four occupations—software engineers, lab-based scientists, financial analysts, and press officers—to draw attention to some salient features of the current labour market for graduate workers. This portrait, albeit incomplete, has produced some useful insights.

Recruitment and Selection (Chapter 4) Although qualifications matter for most employers, in particular for early career recruitment, they recruit on a wide range of skills, qualities, and dispositions to meet suitability and acceptability standards and desires. The process of selection and the demand of skills within recruitment and selection are not driven by qualifications and hard and formal education-based skills. Ambiguous and variable criteria of suitability as well as occupational-specific dimensions of acceptability eschew clear links with higher education.

The Role of Education (Chapter 5) Qualifications do not form a key aspect of suitability for graduate jobs. They signal initial readiness to learn and readiness to work at an expected level. They are not necessarily interpreted as signals of merit or innate ability.

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Educational markers such as degrees, grades, and HE institutions can all serve as indicators depending on the valuation and experience of the employer. They do not tend to constitute generally accepted labour market standards but serve as cognitive aids in the recruitment and selection process. Employers as well as workers adopt rather ambiguous and mixed understandings of educational requirements. There is little evidence to suggest an increase in formal education is deemed necessary to keep up with the skill demands of jobs.

The Skills Used at Work (Chapter 6) The skills of graduate workers used at work are not dominated by, and can certainly not be equated with, ‘advanced’ thinking skills. Instead, the workers in the four graduate occupations use a wide range of skills, combining both hard and soft skills (working in tandem) and various degrees of types of knowledge. The variation within and between occupations makes any graduate typology extremely difficult. High degrees of autonomy, control, complexity of tasks, and advanced knowledge are, at the most, general descriptors rather than reflecting unifying characteristics.

Occupations and Professionalization (Chapter 7) Various analytical approaches link graduate occupation to skills use or requirements, high autonomy, or the prevalence of degree holders. These classifications cannot deal very well with the fact that what counts as graduate labour in a graduatizing competitive labour market is symbolically negotiated (and therefore socially constructed). On top of this, substantive differences in skill requirements and job tasks make existing classifications for distinguishing the graduate and non-graduate occupations challenging. Many graduate occupations may not have the right organizational power, occupational identity, or knowledge base for professionalization to develop.

Careers (Chapter 8) University education is not a direct driving force within the career of graduates. There is nothing intrinsic about the graduate labour force that warrants set career paths. Even a characterization such as the ‘boundaryless career’ can be associated with some graduate workers but it would be hard to associate the concept to graduate work or graduate occupations. Boundaries still shape graduate careers. The dominant discourse outlined in chapter 2 declares that graduates have a special status in the post-industrial high-skilled service economy (or knowledge economy). The economy is thought to be increasingly based on (abstract) 167

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knowledge. Labour markets increasingly rely on highly educated workers as they have the necessary human capital to keep up with the technological demands. Knowledge work relies on advanced or high skills. HE is the developer of skills used for and needed by the (knowledge) economy. Possession of a degree is evidence of the acquisition of these skills. It has also been argued that modern (semi)-professional and managerial workers have become more skilled, autonomous, and constitute a distinct class due to the power and status their skills and expertise yield within the labour market. Graduate premiums are understood as a direct sign of graduate labour market demand. There is a direct relationship between HE and productivity, innovation, and economic competiveness. Although few would regard the graduate labour market as a heterogeneous entity, graduate work tends to be seen as: • • • • • • •

high-status professional/managerial high-skilled knowledge-intense complex autonomous high-waged.

Recruitment and selection practices, work environment, management, and careers are distinctively designed to facilitate this work and the organizational and economic reliance on graduate labour. This normative stance is at odds with the work that graduates in our four occupations perform. Building on the existing critiques of the dominant discourse, the findings of our study suggest graduate workers do not deserve unequivocally the special status that is awarded to them. Within the world of work, their educational status needs to be understood within the occupational and organizational context. The findings of the case studies indicate a discrepancy between the conventional discourse on the nature of graduate work and the wide range of characteristics that belong to only four graduate occupations. Although not the prime focus of the study, the status of graduate workers cannot unequivocally be called high. Organizational factors (such as company prestige) and professionalization opportunities may matter more here. Graduates engage in various roles (professional, semi-professional, or non-professional) that hold various forms and amounts of societal esteem. The study also shows that the work graduates perform can have semi-skilled components, is knowledgeable but not knowledge-intensive, and has various complexities. They can perform tasks that are rather low-skilled, monotonous, and repetitious. Wages also have not been the focus of investigation due to the relatively small size of the sample. Yet others have found great variation in the earnings of graduates. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (2016b) 168

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reports that in 2015, on average, university graduates earned £9500 more than non-graduates (£31,500, excluding postgraduates). Male graduates earned £8000 more than female graduates. White graduates earned, respectively, £7000 and £3000 more than Black and Asian graduates.1 Others have also observed a growing wage disparity within the graduate working population (Tholen, 2014; Lindley and Machin, 2011). The ideal of the graduate worker may be somewhat confirmed by skill surveys and wage comparisons in which graduates are taken as one group and compared to those with lower qualifications. The comparison with nongraduates is increasingly uneven as a growing share of non-graduates comprise those who have traditionally had very little chance in the labour market. A significant share of non-graduates are also involved in low-quality, lowpaid, and insecure work (Kalleberg, 2009; Schmitt and Jones, 2012) that is heavily shaped by managerial and cost-saving decisions around work and skill use (which are more explicit in particular sectors). Another question is what is it about university education that it should lead to autonomous, high-skilled, well-paid roles? Universities do not create or design jobs. Employers do (and some workers can alter these roles over time). Labour markets and occupational structures have changed since the time of elite HE in which there was a stronger and more apparent link between HE qualifications and labour market destinations. Despite the observed growth in skilled service work and the influence of technological change on skill demand, graduate work is not protected from external forces that can diminish its value or esteem. Brown et al. (2011) have argued that Western economies may develop highskilled, low-wage economies as corporations will utilize the skills and knowledge of graduates from all corners of the world, reducing the returns to education for many graduates relying on the work that can be offshored. Reports on automation and technological change also give an insight into how high-skilled work is being transformed by IT technology, affecting the status, pay, and work of even the established professions (Susskind and Susskind, 2015). Although graduate premiums on average are holding up, there has been considerable concern about the state of the graduate labour market (Tholen, 2014). Despite this, the idealized version of the graduate group as workers (as being a distinct labour market grouping aligned with high-skilled, high-waged employment) has not really wavered. The next section will turn to the question of why the graduate ‘brand’ remains strong.

Symbolic Closure and Classification Games The special status of graduate work is likely driven by a variety of actors. It is sustained by a range of academics, experts, and policymakers who continue to 169

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argue that graduates have the necessary human capital to keep up with the technological demands of the knowledge economy (see chapter 2). Graduates can also be seen as an interest group that can perpetuate their advantage through symbolic means. Within the sociological literature there has been great attention to the question of how various groups create advantage within economic fields. Following Max Weber, many have described how groups monopolize opportunities. Weber (1978) describes how groups close off opportunities to outsiders not just by economic classes but also by other groups such as status groups. Wherever groups can successfully label characteristics such as race, language, social origin, religion, or lack of credentials as being inferior, closure can be achieved. Virtually any group attribute can be used to make those outside the group into outsiders and close off social and economic opportunities (1978 [1922], p.342). Conflictual theorists such as Collins (1979), Parkin (1974, 1979), and Murphy (1984, 1988) further developed these ideas. One area that received considerable attention was how education could be used for social closure. For instance, controlling education qualifications limits the supply of contestants, and thus creates economic advantage for professions. Also, the rise of the demand for credentials may not be as the result of any increased demand for skills within jobs, but rather as a means employers use for their selection process according to their cultural or professional preferences, or a tool for labour market entrants to gain advantage over others. Collins (1979) observed that schooling does little to increase the skills actually used in managerial and professional roles and is thus largely irrelevant to productivity. Work skills are mainly learned on the job. However, academic knowledge and educational credentials form the foundations of certain groups’ cultural domination, (re)producing sinecures. The educated can set up their job requirements and exclude anyone without the right vocabulary, knowledge, ideals, and, perhaps most importantly, educational credentials. Universities, therefore, have remained important gatekeepers to the upper segment of the labour market. In more recent years, Brown (2000, 2003) highlighted the positional nature of credentials in an age of mass HE. Individuals with university credentials understand that the exclusionary effect of their diploma does not guarantee them high-skilled or high-paid employment. Instead, individuals will try to distinguish themselves in alternative ways as the differentiating power of educational credentials has weakened. What follows is an increasingly competitive graduate labour market in which those with superior social, cultural, and economic capital will have the most resources to set themselves apart from the rest as well as change the rules of the game (competition rigging), rather than using discriminatory exclusion, through for example education (private education) or the labour market (networks and elite cultural capital). 170

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In recent work, I have observed a neglect of symbolic and discursive means for exclusion within the credentialist literature (Tholen, 2016).2 The ideas of this credentials tradition can be integrated with the work of Bourdieu who emphasizes the symbolic dimension of group domination. Bourdieu (1984, 2000; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977) described how unconscious cultural and social domination occurs over subjects through forcing categories of thought and perception on the dominated. Systems of classifications that are engrained in human actors’ practical knowledge of the social world are internalized, ‘embodied’ social structures (Bourdieu, 1984, p.470). According to Bourdieu (1984), inscriptions of social order in people’s minds are constructed through schemes of perception and appreciation. Classifications codify and thus transform boundaries on how to think and what can be held possible. The orchestration of categories of perception of the social world is adjusted to the divisions of the established order (and thereby to the interests of those who dominate it), common to all minds structured in accordance with those structures, and presents every appearance of objective necessity. Once the world view expressed in particular categorizations is accepted, domination is achieved and relatively easily maintained. Classificatory systems are actively (though not necessarily consciously) maintained and, at least to some extent, purposively delivered by their members. These mental constructs not only provide a guidebook for action but can be manipulated and altered through symbolic work to draw up categories and distinctions. Symbolic divisions become real as they are inscribed into materiality. The idea that people use socially constructed classifications and boundaries between types of people goes back a long way within sociology and social psychology (Durkheim and Mauss, 1963). Shepherd (2010, p.134) observes within the empirical academic literature that: • classifications increase the perception of homogeneity within and heterogeneity between categories; • classifications create shared beliefs, instead of merely representing or reflecting beliefs; • clear and unique categorization classifications carry stronger effects on attention and evaluation than ambiguous and hybrid categorization. There is also a strong theoretical field that associates categorization with power resources. Tilly (1998) highlights the role that categorization processes play in the production of inequality. Categorical pairs such as black/white, male/ female, married/unmarried, and citizen and non-citizen become institutionalized. This leads to both exploitation and opportunity hoarding as people both intentionally and unintentionally incorporate the categorically distinct (through emulation and adaptation), leading to durable inequality. Massey 171

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(2007) further explores the cognitive and neurological mechanism behind unequal categorization, highlighting the importance of framing processes that reify categorical distinctions into cultural content. Boundary work groups and defines in- and out-groups. Here, Massey claims that powerful groups are more successful at boundary work. The esteemed in-group hoards (or extracts) important social, cultural, and economic resources whereas the low-status out-group are excluded or discriminated against. This brings us to how educational categories are used in the labour market and in the workplace. Lamont and Molnár (2002, pp.168–9) usefully distinguish between symbolic and social boundaries. Symbolic boundaries are conceptual distinctions made by social actors to categorize phenomena and used by individuals and groups to create and maintain definitions of reality and acquire status and monopolize resources. Social boundaries are objectified forms of social differences manifested in unequal access to and unequal distribution of resources (material and non-material) and social opportunities. They are conditional upon whether the symbolic boundaries are widely agreed upon. Symbolic boundaries are often used to enforce, maintain, normalize, or rationalize social boundaries (p.186).

Graduates Classification battles to increase resources and close off opportunities to others can be applied to the graduate labour market. Just as dividing people into two distinct sexes shapes the way in which we engage in social situations and reify expectations of gender distinctions (which reinforces and reproduces existing inequalities) (Ridgeway, 2011), ‘graduate’ and ‘non-graduate’ distinctions affect how we understand the nature of work. The categories of graduates and non-graduates are ‘paired, recognised and organised unequal categories’ (Tilly, 1998, p.8). Particular notions on what graduate work is have emerged and have been sustained through continuous persuasion and redefinition by many different actors. Graduates continue to form a status group which can shape reality by shaping shared representations of the world. In the era of mass HE in which a large and growing share of the workforce have pursued HE, categorical work has strengthened rewards and status and competence perceptions and legitimized many opportunities being closed-off to non-graduates. The narrative of the knowledge economy and the idea that highly educated knowledge workers are to answer consistent productivity and prosperity problems aids this characterization. As Sum and Jessop (2013b, p.172) explain, ‘the economy is too complex to be fully grasped in real time by economic actors or external observers. This forces them to engage in simplification as a condition of “going on” in the economic world.’ 172

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Traditionally, graduates were systematically classified as being more able, knowledgeable, and deserving than non-graduates, within society. The symbolic power of the university-educated was upheld because of their superior economic, social, and cultural capital, leading to them having a dominant position within the labour market. Although this dominance has persisted for some graduates, the massification of HE has produced graduates who have an increasing variety of cultural, social, and economic capital and subsequent labour market outcomes. As a status group, graduates have collectively been less effective in holding privileged positions. The appeal to social esteem and social honour has been less effective. Yet the classification of graduates as a salient and meaningful group has not weakened. It still has an important role within media and policy discourses (see Tholen, 2014). For instance, within political debates on social mobility, HE has been given a central place. The university diploma is a key means of rising to the professional and managerial classes regardless of social background. Education remains a great source of social and economic distinction. Originating from the traditional and elite societal position of universities (hence the use of titles such as bachelor, master, or doctor), the continuation of this social fiction of linking positive and valuable characteristics to universityeducated workers, jobs, and skills remains powerful for clear reasons. Bourdieu wrote about the institutionalized value of the qualification that solidifies the relationship between professional work and its perceived labour market value: ‘The qualification is in itself an institution (like language) that is more durable than the intrinsic characteristics of the work, and so the rewards associated with the qualification can be maintained despite changes in the work and its relative value’ (1991, p.241). Because graduates no longer form a status group in the traditional sense, symbolic classification of what degrees signify becomes prominent. Graduate workers do not solely have to sell themselves but have to also (collectively) convince others that their educational status and credentials confer a particular meaning. The associations with knowledge work, advanced skills, and good jobs are reified through categorizations. Through continuous symbolic boundary work (discursive practices to demarcate graduates from nongraduates), graduates as a meaningful (and not just an analytical) social category is maintained and reproduced. The symbolic possession of certified knowledge embodied in university degrees is needed to demarcate groups of workers and enable unequal labour market relations to continue to exist. The current categorization of the labour market shapes how those inside and outside the graduate labour market interpret themselves and the work they perform or do not perform. The hard distinction between graduates and nongraduates, graduate work and non-graduate work is a necessity to keep up the inequality in labour market opportunities and pay differentiation. Validated 173

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and recognized by all workers, these associated differences become the basis of their claims. Symbolic dominance justifies particular groups’ or individuals’ rewards, occupational protection, or labour conditions. Strengthened by a dominant discourse that links credentials, skills, productivity, and wages, symbolic dominance aims to justify and expand the sinecure of the university-educated. The discourse that idealizes the graduate occupation and creates unequal categories between graduates and non-graduates is shared by both graduates and non-graduates alike as well as upheld by institutional structures such as universities and government bodies that have an interest in this segmentation. Actors that rely on authority and expertise, in particular, maintain this categorization (Wacquant, 2013). In order to create symbolic boundaries, the legitimization of the idealized version of graduates is supported by a wide range of voices within society, giving the impression of general agreement and acceptance. Johnson et al. (2006, p.62) observe that the ‘appearance of consensus makes the association between the characteristic and cultural markers of status and competence seem like an objective social reality in the encounter that is accepted by others as a valid social fact’. Existing discourses that promote the virtues of the knowledge-based economy and educational meritocracy provide much support to the credibility of the current consensus around the graduate labour market, despite the questionable record of HE promoting social mobility (Goldthorpe, 2013) and the doubt regarding the value of the knowledge economy (Švarc, 2016).3 Since many ideas around graduate labour have been thoroughly validated and reified, they have become very difficult to challenge on any broad-based scale in society. Yet symbolic dominance occurs not only between the graduate in-group and non-graduate out-group. The competition is also inwards between (groups of) graduates. Graduates and groups of graduates need to convince others continuously of their value and (re)negotiate the meaning and value of (particular) qualifications, skills, occupations, and careers. As we have seen in chapter 7, the demarcation between lab technicians and scientists is heavily based on education status differences based on graduate categorizations which devalue the role of lab technicians, irrespective of the content of the role. Inequalities also occur within organizational contexts in which graduates symbolically draw on educational credentials as well as knowledge and expertise claims to close off opportunities to others and secure entitlements such as earnings, status/authority, and promotions (Stainback et al., 2010). Whereas traditional social closure theory emphasizes education as the provider of credentials and cultural and social capital to gain an advantage over others, work on symbolic closure highlights that HE is becoming an uncertain and conditional base of closure as it can provide a barrier as well as opportunities (Tholen, 2016). 174

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Are the Cracks Showing? Despite the symbolic power graduates hold within the labour market, the case studies also show that the meanings of graduate work, skills, and occupations vary, leaving room for interpretation and contention which are very variable and do not generally adhere to these notions. The deployment of symbolic boundaries is a contested process; understandings are tested and met with critical appreciation. Chapter 5 on the role of education shows that employers and workers alike tend to be very cognisant and even sceptical about the extent that HE penetrates so-called graduate occupations. Contradictions within labour market conditions can put pressure on symbolic closure. The economic realities are changing, as chapter 2 has outlined. Within the UK context, there is persistent evidence that more and more graduates move into semi-graduate or non-graduate positions. D’arcy and Finch (2016, p.39) report that for graduates the chances of securing a nongraduate role in the group have trebled since 2008 (increasing from 0.4 per cent to 1.2 per cent). The authors remark that the growth of graduates into non-graduate roles is blocking progression opportunities for non-graduates. A recent Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) report confirms that graduates are colonizing non-graduate employment, in particular in managerial, associate professional, and technical occupations (Holmes and Mayhew, 2016). Then there are signs of credential inflation. Large-scale research based on online job postings finds that US employers are asking for undergraduate credentials for what traditionally have been non-graduate jobs and considered as middle-skilled jobs (Burning Glass, 2014). For instance, vacancies for administrative assistants, executive secretaries, and clerks as well as IT help desk workers now tend to require a Bachelor-level qualification. Again this shows that middle-skill career pathways are becoming closed off to non-graduates, although (a) some occupations may have experienced an increase in skill requirement to perform (representing genuine upskilling) and (b) HE has been instrumental in enabling development of these skills requirements. Yet there is little evidence to suggest that jobs have required more skills to perform them (and mixed evidence on an increase in autonomy, see Holmes and Mayhew, 2015).4 Most graduates in those semi- or non-graduate occupations cannot demand the relatively higher earnings typically associated with graduate work. It is also questionable whether they can match the esteem or status of those in more traditional graduate occupations (Klein, 2016; Lynn and Ellerbach, 2017). Symbolic closure will be more difficult to maintain or to achieve in jobs in which the job content is too far removed from existing notions of graduate skills or where the educational composition of the workforce is too far skewed towards non-graduates. 175

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The Function of HE According to some critics within the credentialist tradition (e.g. Collins, 1979) and more recently Alvesson (2013), Western societies have fallen prey to educational fundamentalism, a strong faith in the positive effects of education. To accommodate economic growth, so-called knowledge-intensive economies are thought to need increasing numbers of university graduates to cope with the increased skill demands, increasing the number of young people who are persuaded to attend university. As a result, the average length of education continues to grow. Yet with limited numbers of professional jobs available, the positional competition is thought merely to intensify and what follows is credential inflation. The evidence from the case studies provides considerable support for the credentialist thesis but at the same time draws a rather less nefarious picture. Mass HE inevitably would transform the narrow relationship between HE and the labour market that preceded this period. In chapter 5, I have argued that HE has a significant but also varied, often limited, and changing role to play within the graduate labour market. Unlike the idea of the graduate economy, the labour market segment under investigation is certainly not ‘defined’ by HE. Marginson (2015) persuasively explains how the role of HE within society is not as great as is often believed and its potency to tackle social problems needs to be seen in context with other larger inequalities and unequal power relations. He concludes: We should set aside the old hubris that higher education is the principal maker of society, whether we live in innovation societies, or knowledge economies, or somewhere else. In aggregate, what happens with incomes, wealth, labour markets, taxation, government spending, social programmes, and urban development, are overwhelmingly more important. (p.20)

Even for those working in occupations in which HE is deemed crucial, its importance tends to be overstated. It is true that HE has a clear purpose for individuals to widen their chances in the labour market. HE affects all three areas which Gorman (2015, p.124) associates with affecting organizational attainment outcomes (such as selection and promotions): technical abilities, cultural proficiency, and social connections. Yet it does so not for everyone and not to the same extent. In addition, as Gorman observes, all three remain largely developed at work. What equally matters is how work itself structures the meaning and value of (higher) education. HE does not have a direct effect on labour market outcomes, it has an effect through the decisions of employers. As Jackson et al. (2005, p.10) observe: Education has an effect [ . . . ] only in so far as it is taken into account by employers [ . . . ] in the decisions they make about hiring, retaining, promoting, etc. In any

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The Ideal of the Graduate Worker attempt at understanding the role, or changes in the role, of education in class mobility, the actions of employers must therefore have a central place.

We have seen that employers within the same occupation and similar jobs may have different valuations of educational credentials. Some do not value them at all and presumably are still able to find the right candidates. If employers set detailed job-specific requirements (aligned with company and sectorial lines) then generic educational credentials are perhaps of less importance than often is assumed. Job ads tend to ask most often for very specific skills, suggesting employers desire job-ready candidates rather than trainable ones (Souto-Otero, 2016). We have also seen for many employers that Master’s degrees, despite the additional schooling, do not form an important mark of distinction. Other research confirms this (Verhaest et al., 2016). The continuous growth of HE and the movement towards universal access is work in progress. Society is still catching up in terms of class consciousness and social divisions within British society. After the abolishment of the binary system, differentiating higher vocational education and academic (university) education has produced less clarity on the role of universities and the status of graduates within the public domain. Today, the growth in access to tertiary education has introduced a certain normalization, in particular for young people from a middle-class background. Scott (1995, p.109) observes: In a mass system, not only has the middle class taken over higher education; higher education has also taken over the middle class. In the process graduate status has become an essential attribute of a middle-class lifestyle, arguably a more important attribute than class origin or occupational category in a post-industrial age.

More controversially, the move to universalization has also been accompanied by lowering the standards for those willing to access. Roberts (2013) witnesses a shift from exceptionality to normality or ‘mainstream’: Higher education became the new default option for Britain’s young people. In the decades immediately following the Second World War it was necessary to perform exceptionally well at successive stages in school education, and to be willing to defer gratifications, in order to reach university. Pupils had to perform exceptionally in passing the 11-plus and being awarded places at a grammar school, where they needed to perform exceptionally in the 16-plus examinations (GCE O-levels) in order to be admitted to the sixth forms where they might gain the A-levels on which admission to higher education depended. Today most university students have attended comprehensive secondary schools, like the majority of the age group. They have gained five or more higher grade (C and above) passes in the GCSE examinations, again, just like the majority of the pupils in their schools. The normal next step for these well-qualified 16 year olds is A-levels, which most entrants pass, and most of them proceed to university. This has become the new mainstream youth career.

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Normalization has come with expectations and aspirations. Wolf (2015, p.56) writes that among Millennium Cohort parents, with children born in 2000, over 98 per cent said they wanted their child to go to university, with no class, regional, or ethnic differences. Whatever one thinks of the current system of HE, its role as developer of skills has altered over time. Preparing individuals for the labour market, in particular by developing skills and imparting knowledge relevant for professional and managerial roles, will remain a key task of universities, yet in different and more indirect ways. Access to and progression within the modern ‘skilled’ workplace are often directed in ancillary and modest ways by university education. As Marginson (2015) suggests, it is time to rethink any hubris that HE is the principal maker of society. And this includes the labour market.

A Way Forward How then can we understand the graduate labour market? A grand theory of the graduate labour market is perhaps no less impossible than one of the nongraduate labour market. The sheer heterogeneity of the work and conditions that graduates work under makes such an endeavour futile. A renewed understanding of the labour market for graduate workers may have to refrain from utilizing the usual essentialist and objectivist approaches. Also, it needs to be sensitive to occupational specificities. What seems like a simple neutral analytical and practical category of labour associated with an equally distinct type of work and skills and distinct occupations is, in reality, a messy aggregate of employment relations in which some of the characteristics outlined earlier overlap. The graduate labour market appears an anachronism (Tholen, 2014), attributing characteristics to it from a bygone era. Or, alternatively, it may never have been a stable, coherent segment of the labour market. What we do know is that the concept continues to frame how we understand and value different forms of work and orientations to employment. It is, therefore, meaningful for those who are in it or those who have a stake in or relate to it. As such, it deserves some further thoughts on its unpacking and redefining.

What Are Graduate Skills? Engrained within the economic understanding of skills is that they can be measured and are distinguishable and stable. The skills graduates use are often tough to measure and an amalgamation of hard skills and soft skills, working together.5 Their stability is undermined by how they are socially constructed and used within a continuous symbolic closure (as well as political 178

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and material processes that use skills to increase occupational control or competitive advantage). The understanding and valuation of particular types of work itself and the skills associated with it influence rewards structures, divisions of labour, and labour market access among other things. The ongoing equation of graduate skills with what we understand to be high, complex, or advanced skills is not politically neutral and has real consequences. Few would pose the question of whether, or indeed why, we expect graduates to work in high-skilled jobs. Perhaps certain notions of social justice and meritocratic ideas dominate concerns about genuine skill underutilization. Concerns of job quality (security, wage, progression) should besides be applied to all sections of the labour force (Kalleberg, 2013). We want interesting, arguably challenging but certainly meaningful jobs that deliver job satisfaction, ideally for as many workers as possible. Whether completion of formal HE ought to be a key condition, therefore, is doubtful if skills are developed on the job. Furthermore, from a sociological perspective, skill is more usefully understood as located in the job as opposed to in the person (Vallas, 1990). In an earlier study on the work of estate agents, we have argued for the need to examine the skills of graduates rather than graduate skills in new graduate occupations (Tholen et al., 2016). The wide range of skills used and demanded makes the link with formal HE no longer useful. The case studies reveal that this principle could also apply to more accepted or traditional graduate occupations. Despite the skills developed within HE, most jobs that graduate workers are engaged in demand a largely alternative job-specific set of skills, routines, and knowledge. Even if skills are directly related to job content, in very few cases is HE the exclusive site of skills development. Treating graduate skills as the skills of graduates rather than predefined notions around complexity, job discretion, or abstract knowledge or merely focusing on the skills associated with HE is simple but not easy. It would provide challenges as it muddles the mainstream conceptual model which assumes a direct link between graduate skills, job opportunities, and labour market rewards. Others have already questioned the presumed labour market value of typical hard skills. As mentioned earlier, Lui and Grusky (2013) found that analytic, managerial, and nurturing skills are significantly rewarded in the labour market, not quantitative, science and engineering, or computer skills. Yet the benefits of having a neutral view of what graduate skills comprise are compelling. No longer would there be a need to make a hard distinction between skills developed at work and those at universities. The omission of an educational lens opens up new ways of thinking about skill development and economic development in which vocational and work-based skills are given more prominent roles. 179

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What Are Graduate Jobs? Most occupations that are deemed graduate (as well as non-graduate) occupations are constituted of both graduate and non-graduate workers. Their status as graduate occupations may in many cases be justifiable but be socially contingent and lack analytical sophistication. Existing proxies of high-skilled work (occupational classification, educational backgrounds, income) do not map very well onto the work that graduates perform. Just as there is within-occupation wage inequality, there exists within-occupation skill use variation (Levenson and Zoghi, 2007). If graduate work and highly skilled work need to be analytically and normatively distinguished, how can we define graduate jobs? One question that emerges is what is ‘suitable’, ‘appropriate’, or ‘matching’ work for university graduates? The idea that there would be a set of occupations to which tasks and responsibilities are adequately matched by the skills of those who have gained university credentials is appealing but somewhat mythical. For instance, the work of software engineers demonstrated that HE is not always able to provide adequate vocational preparation due to the specificity and pace of software engineering. Equally important is a realization that the concept of a graduate occupation is fluid—continuously reimagined, reclassified, and redefined within the labour market between groups and individuals (as demonstrated in the case study of financial analysts). It is not that educational requirements have become irrelevant; it is no longer (or perhaps never has been) the defining mode of occupational boundaries and content.

Recruitment and Selection Access to the graduate labour market and career mobility are administered by recruitment and selection processes that are unlikely to be fundamentally distinguished from those in the non-graduate segment of the labour market. Many employers are not recruiting for the best and brightest but for a reliable and competent worker who can get on with the other workers (and will not leave the company). The case studies show that recruitment and selection are heavily shaped by occupational standards and practices as well as mediated by wide-ranging employer preferences. There is strong evidence that recruiters are now looking for a wide range of skills (Lowden et al., 2011; Humburg et al., 2013), and that the role of HE matters most in early career recruitment, using it as a sorting mechanism or a general standard of competence. It should therefore not be exaggerated. Employers may not demand what universities teach. Several empirical studies investigating employer skill requirements demonstrate that 180

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hiring practices do not reward ‘typical’ graduate skills (Archer and Davison, 2008; Wilton, 2011). Recruitment and selection, whether in the graduate labour market or not, remain a deeply social process. Growing sociological and social-psychological interest in the recruitment and selection process reveals the importance of the framing and prioritizing of employers (Bills et al., 2017). Despite efforts to standardize and improve objectivity in the recruitment and selection process, we also know that self-presentation tactics remain highly influential in selection outcomes (Stewart et al., 2008; Barrick et al., 2009; Swider et al., 2011). On top of this, discrimination on various non-meritocratic characteristics has not disappeared (Jackson, 2007), in particular class-based discrimination (Jacobs, 2003; Ashley and Empson, 2013) and ethnic and racial discrimination (Harrison and Thomas, 2009; Rafferty, 2012; Gorman, 2015).

The Role of HE In chapter 5, I have highlighted the importance of the occupational frameworks in capturing the role of education within our four occupations. Most clearly, credential closure (i.e. closing off opportunities to other (lower-)qualified groups such as non-graduates and the uncertified) and providing relevant skills and knowledge to perform the role, are organized in various ways within each occupation. Closure can be symbolic or non-symbolic (e.g. licensure, certifications, and educational credentials) and we have seen that within and between occupations there are varying levels at which this occurs. Similarly we can think about how well university education prepares workers for the labour market. As observed by Frank and Meyer (2007, p.288), it is often not very effective in doing this (as opposed to workplace learning such as apprenticeships, internships, and on-the-job training), yet there are again important occupational differences. We can visually present how the four occupations relate to these two functions. Figure 9.1 plots on the horizontal, or X-axis, the extent to which HE plays a role in providing occupation-specific skills and knowledge. And on the vertical, or Y-axis, the extent to which HE qualifications can serve as a closure mechanism. We can see that our four graduate occupations are spread over the whole of the area. Added are the examples of academics that are traditionally experiencing high credential closure as well as the development of relevant skills (degree-specific knowledge, writing, argumentation, research skills, etc.). In the right bottom corner the occupation of estate agent is positioned, representing a lot of semi- or non-graduate occupations. In the left bottom corner we find the idealized understanding of HE within the labour market with low credentialization and high use of the skills associated 181

Graduate Work High credential closure Academics Lab scientists

Financial analysts High value of HE skills

Low value of HE skills Software engineers

Press oficers Estate agents Ideal No credential closure

Figure 9.1. The role of education for graduate occupations.

with HE, in which degrees represent genuine human capital differences and thus closure has largely disappeared.

Conclusion The aim of this book has not been to empirically test how HE participation affects labour market outcomes. Instead, it has started to explore how those workers with university degrees are defined by their educational experiences, status, and qualifications. Here, I critically assess existing economic theories, such as the human capital theory (Becker, 1964; Schultz, 1971) and signalling theory (Arrow, 1973; Spence, 1973), that highlight a direct or indirect relationship between educational attainment and superior employment conditions (through superior productivity or as a signal for otherwise unobservable abilities). What we need to understand more clearly is how the meaning and value of HE, its graduates, their status and skills, affect this relationship in particular through symbolic means. This is not to say that education can be considered a myth and bears no relationship to the skill requirements or work process. The graduate labour market is in flux and has changed considerably over time. As explained in chapter 2, the demise of the traditional labour market for graduate workers was set in motion and sustained by the growth of mass 182

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HE. Despite the upskilling effect of technological change and the considerable employment growth in graduate occupations, some have rightfully observed that the demand has not kept up with the supply. Yet as I have argued earlier, the demarcation between graduate and non-graduate status has been eroded in many parts of the labour market. Also, graduates as a grouping of workers has become less and less meaningful (in the same way that non-graduate is a rather meaningless category) due to growing heterogeneity of work, status, and wages. But also, as the study shows, there is a wide range of relationships that graduate workers have with HE, making HE as the unit of distinction problematic. This is not to say that the conceptual demarcation cannot have useful purposes. We know that people with university education cluster together in various ways. For instance, graduates have been found to have commonalities in their political views (Runciman, 2016; Achen and Bartels, 2016). It remains very important to study and monitor what types of jobs graduates are working in to understand the labour market as a whole. Whether there are too many graduates is ultimately a normative question. University education certainly can and perhaps should provide opportunity for higher learning, cultivation of the intellect, and formation of personality (Bildung) or cultural and technological citizenship (Delanty, 2001). Yet, too often this question is treated in a mechanical fashion, finding comfort in stable graduate premiums or relatively low unemployment figures (Ball, 2016). A wider debate about the nature of the labour market for graduate workers is overshadowed by concerns about whether new graduates are able to find ‘graduate jobs’. This debate has continued and will never cease to exist as it involves the life chances and livelihoods of many young people. In the 1930s, in a time of elite HE, there was also a widespread belief that too many graduates were being produced without adequate guarantees of being able to find jobs in industry or the professions (Barnes, 1996, p.279). The idea that the graduate labour market is in essence distinct and fundamentally different from the non-graduate market is myopic. The portrayal of graduate labour representing knowledgeable, high-skilled, professional, highstatus work is juxtaposed against the unskilled, low-status non-graduate labour market. HE represents only one, perhaps minor, force that shapes the labour market and labour processes, alongside others such as industry composition, occupational change, demographics, and technological changes alongside migration, labour market flexibility, etc. HE’s growth has transformed the educational attainment of the workforce and the available supply of skills within the workforce. Yet supply does not create its own demand. More importantly, the case studies have shown that even the so-called highskilled occupations are not defined by education or understood as such. There is no graduate economy, nor does the economy ‘go to college’ (Carnevale and Rose, 2015; Baker, 2014). 183

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HE will nonetheless keep providing individuals with experiences, abilities, skills, and knowledge that to various extents will be recognized, used, and rewarded. HE will also remain a source of labour market power and distinction, both between graduates and towards non-graduates. Through the use of symbolic resources (e.g. conceptual categorization and interpretive strategies), it can create, maintain, contest, or dissolve claims linking educational experiences and qualifications to privileged status and opportunities. These insights can be transferred into the public and policy domains and can help change and inform debates regarding economic and specifically skills policy, social mobility, and HE access.

Skills and Economic Policy The skill policy in England (but also in many other OECD nations, see Campbell, 2012) has in recent decades been centred around improving outcomes and qualification levels in order to increase the skills within the labour force (e.g. Leitch Review of Skills, 2006). It is thought to lead to economic improvement (including productivity, innovation, and wages) as increasing shares of Britain’s economy would focus on higher-quality and high-end goods and services within a global economic context. Firms’ competitive strategies would be built around these high-skilled workforces, upskilling the work process and subsequently jobs. Skills have become a means of securing an impossibly wide range of economic and social policy objectives (Keep and Mayhew, 2010), leading to high expectations on the direct influence of HE through the deliverance of higher skills and the anticipated economic growth and international competitiveness. Yet further growth of the graduate labour force may not lead to or support improved economic performance. Of course, occupational change may continue to favour socalled graduate occupations. But this is not the same as the assertion that a continuous growth in HE participation is a prerequisite for economic prosperity. The idea is that a great concentration of skilled workers (or human capital) on its own is, at most, merely one condition for inward investment within high-skilled economic activities. Within the global labour market the price of graduate labour is equally important, as large pools of graduate workers are to be found in lower-wage economies all over the world (Brown et al., 2011). An effective skills policy is more likely to target a wider productive system which in turn influences business strategy and behaviour leading to more knowledge-intensive forms of production (Keep et al., 2006; Sung and Ashton, 2015; see also Denham, 2016). In other words, simple supplyside policies have not led on their own to greater skill utilization. As Keep (2014) observes: 184

The Ideal of the Graduate Worker At best, higher outputs of economically valuable skills and knowledge are a necessary precursor for improved performance but this will only occur if other enabling factors (such as investment in plant, equipment, infrastructure and private-sector research and development) take place and if firms choose to shift their product market strategies and product or service specifications upwards. In and of themselves, more skilled employees may not be a powerful enough catalyst to bring about such change. (p.263)

Only under favourable conditions can an increasing number of graduates lead to improved economic performance. In order to get the balance right it would help to understand the labour market for graduate workers not as the imaginative gold standard of employment, but as segmented and heterogeneous labour market sections in which university-associated skills are used in very specific and context-dependent (e.g. sector and occupation) conditions.

Social Mobility Universities have received a prominent place within debates around social mobility. For British policymakers, educational attainment is seen as the most important mechanism through which social mobility is achieved and, in particular, university education has long been regarded as the gateway to upward social mobility for individuals from lower socio-economic backgrounds. Universities are often regarded as gatekeepers to the high-status and well-paid professional jobs. The Independent Reviewer on Social Mobility and Child Poverty, Alan Milburn (2012, p.14), writes: ‘Who gets into university, and how they get on once they have left, will have a critical role in determining whether Britain’s sluggish rates of social mobility can be improved.’ It would be hard to deny that the expansion of professional and managerial jobs together with the increasing access to HE has led more people from working-class backgrounds to occupy top-level occupations, aiding social mobility in an absolute sense. Although it is true that workers with degrees tend to attain professional and managerial positions far more often than those without them, the growth in educational attainment has not increased the relative social mobility in the UK (the chance of upward or downward movement of a member of one social class in comparison with a member from another class regardless of how the class or occupational structure changes over time) (Bukodi et al., 2015; Bukodi and Goldthorpe, 2016). Social origins still very much matter for access to HE, in particular parental education and private school (Sullivan et al., 2014). Students from socially disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to gain access to more prestigious HE institutions even after accounting for prior educational performance (Boliver, 2013). Also, the gap between social classes in the chances 185

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of entering top-level occupations has not changed much over time. Pathways of students from poor and working-class backgrounds tend to be more precarious than those from middle-class backgrounds (Bathmaker et al., 2016), and they keep struggling to enter top professional jobs (Friedman et al., 2015). Young people from affluent backgrounds are better positioned to monopolize prestigious routes and opportunities (Lindley and Machin, 2012; Sutton Trust, 2011; see Triventi, 2013, for European evidence). A recent report by Britton et al. (2016) shows that graduate earnings differ for students from low-income families in comparison with students from high-income families completing the same degrees from the same universities. McKnight (2015) argues that children from relatively high income or social class backgrounds benefit from higher social and emotional skills as well as being more able to secure places in grammar or private secondary schools and are also more likely to attain a degree qualification. Although elite credentials are certainly important to enter top professional and managerial jobs, those from affluent families utilize a wide range of cultural, social, and economic resources in the competition for top positions. This is explained in more detail by Brown (2013) who highlights that too often the positional nature of education is forgotten by those who want to increase social mobility through improved access to HE. He points out that within a mass system of HE, the association between educational attainment and occupational destination is weakened. University degrees have less to give employers in screening potential applicants as they no longer necessarily signal innate character and ability. Instead, they become just an entry ticket and a whole raft of other currencies such as sporting achievements, work experience, but also personality, character, and social confidence become more salient. Those of affluent families are in a much better position to achieve or to develop these new demands. The language of meritocracy maintains a direct relationship between educational attainment and labour market position and obscures the ways in which various forms of advantage are transmitted from one generation to the next within the graduate labour market. Traditionally, HE has legitimized the given hierarchical occupational structure and authorizes those who have completed HE to be socially reclassified. The findings from the case studies demonstrate the difficult relationship between educational attainment and labour market power and position.6 The role of HE in the labour market for graduate workers, as described in chapter 5, does not provide support for the assumption that HE attainment on its own will lead to higher status or advanced cultural and economic resources. Status and resources are of course still linked to labour market positions (as well as cultural dispositions), but the association between class positions and HE attainment is becoming weaker. 186

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Final Thought In this book, I have aimed to challenge existing assumptions with the contention that what we think of as graduate jobs, skills, and careers are in fact much more difficult to define and are actually not reflected, or only partially reflected, in the four graduate occupations examined. My intentions have not been to needlessly muddy the water and create unnecessary ambiguity and conceptual and analytical fog in our understanding of the labour market for graduates. It has also not been the intention of the book to argue that there is a need to curb HE’s growth (by limiting its access or otherwise). There are no absolute limits to HE participation, although we must be able to have an honest discussion about the effects of continuous HE growth on the labour market. Nevertheless, it is important to realize that the assumptions aligned with the dominant discourse on the labour market for graduates are real in their consequences as they shape academic, public, and policy debates, as well as influence how individuals (workers, employers, students, etc.) and groups of individuals together create the meanings of work, skills, and labour market value. We must continue to ask critical questions about how HE is shaping the labour market, the work process, and the occupational structure.

Notes 1. There are additional differences between the median annual salaries of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics graduates (£35,000); Law, Economics, and Management (£32,000); and other Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities graduates (£28,000). 2. Credentialist theory does recognize that degrees have a symbolic dimension but it remains underdeveloped. Authors such as Ridgeway (1997), Tilly (1998), and AventHolt and Tomaskovic-Devey (2014) have extensively used distinction and labelling to explain persistent inequality within the labour market, but their foci have not been on education. 3. Vogt (2015) even views the ideas around the post-industrial economy as ideology, making all other possible (potential) views invisible. 4. The study also showed that jobs resisting credential inflation rely on licensing or certification standards, well-developed training programmes, or measurable skill standards to identify skill proficiency rather than educational proxies. 5. Here I also include non-cognitive skills (e.g. conscientiousness, perseverance, sociability, work effort, motivation). Some consider these to be real ‘skills’ (Farkas, 2003; Heckman and Kautz, 2013), others are sceptical (Payne, 2000). 6. From the case studies we may be able to identify issues with some of the model’s assumptions regarding middle-class service employment and human asset specificity (see also Williams, 2016), incremental advancement, and employment security (Erikson and Goldthorpe, 1992).

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Index

Abbott, Andrew 129, 130–1 acceptability 42–62, 166 account managers 151–2 accountants 9, 120, 125–6, 127, 131–2, 134 Adams, T 74, 136, 138 adaptability 58–60, 92, 94, 116, 147 administrative occupations, growth in 35 advanced work see highly-skilled/advanced work advancement, logic of 143–4 advantages in labour market and higher education 78–84, 85, 162 advertisements 50, 52, 54–5 The Age of Discontinuity. Drucker, Peter 17 Alvesson, M 176 Andrews, CK 99 Anteby, M 114 Arnold, J 143 Arthur, MB 143 apprenticeships 53–4, 82–3, 121 Association for Clinical Biochemistry and Laboratory Medicine (ACB) 135 Association of Accounting Technicians (AAT) 82 Association of Applied Biologists (AAB) 135 Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) 81 austerity 4 authors 139 autonomy 25, 89, 98, 102–3, 114, 167–9 Baker, David P 1–2 Baldry, C 164 Barrett, Craig 159 BBC 63 Bechky, BA 149 Becker, HS 22 Belgium, veterinarians in 139 Bell, Daniel 16–17, 18, 20 Berg, Ivar 27 biases 45, 48 Blackler, F 89 Blundell, R 103 boundaries 145–8, 163–5 between organizations, moving 144

boundaryless careers 144–5, 157, 163–4 employability 145 financial analysts 148, 150–1 human resources policies 145–6 in- and out-groups 172 laboratory scientists 145–7 occupational boundaries 144–6, 163 press officers 147 recruitment and selection 145–6 sectorial boundaries 147–8, 163 social boundaries 172 short-term goals of corporations 145–6 software engineers 145–6 symbolism 172–3, 175 technical boundaries 146–7, 163 trajectories 146, 148–52 within organizations, moving 144 Boudon, Raymond 27 Bourdieu, Pierre 3, 171, 173 Brencˇicˇ, V 47 Britton, J 38, 186 Brown, DK 70–1 Brown, Phillip 25, 44, 91, 169, 170 Brown, R 114, 163, 186 Brynin, M 37, 39, 85 campus culture 16 Canada, number of graduate jobs available in 27 capitalism 14, 24 careers, definition of 142–5 Carnevale, Anthony P 1–2, 18–19 Castells, M 20 categorization 3, 15, 121, 171–2 Cedefop 34–5 certification 132, 140, 173 changes to graduate labour market 29–41 see also professionalization 2000–2015, occupational changes between 30, 31 demands for skill 32–5 expansion of higher education 29–30 graduatization 4, 35, 40, 124 highly-skilled jobs, growth of 30, 33–4

Index changes to graduate labour market (cont.) over-qualifications/over-education 34–5, 36 polarization of jobs 31–3 technological change 2, 32, 40, 146–7, 160, 169 wages 37–40 where graduates work 34–7 Chartered Engineers (BEng) 134, 136 Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Institute 10, 67, 81 Chartered Institute for IT 136 Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) 67, 81–2, 136 Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) 10, 136–7 chartered status 82–3, 135–6 Chicago School 143 China, number of graduate jobs available in 27 citizenship 171, 183 class see also middle-class discrimination 181 higher education, expansion in 177 recruitment and selection 48, 181 skills 88 socioeconomic and cultural reproduction 55 upper-class 30 working-class 16, 185–6 classification 3, 171–3 graduate occupations 112–14, 128, 139, 167 International Classification of Occupations (ISCO) 112–13 non-graduates 139, 167, 172–3 Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) 34–5, 112–13, 120, 139 Clifford Chance 63 closure see also symbolic closure certification 140 classifications 172 credentials 84–5, 129–31, 140, 174, 181–2 graduate occupations 110, 140 higher education 174, 181–2 non-graduates 71, 161, 181 professions 5, 129–30 skills 110 social capital 174 social closure 85, 130, 136, 174 software engineers 136 strategies 5, 38 wages 38 Cockburn, C 88 codification 17, 24–5, 88–9, 100–2 cognitive dissonance 162 Cohen, L 157 collegiality 106 Collini, Stefan 15 Collins, D 25 Collins, R 170

216

Coming of the Post-Industrial Society. Bell, Daniel 17 communication skills 103–5 definition 104 financial analysts 104 graduate occupations 113 laboratory scientists 104 press officers 52, 104, 126–7, 151 small companies 117 soft skills 103 software engineers 8, 104–5 technical (hard) skills 104 written English 52 competition credentials 71, 73 discrimination 170 economic competitiveness 18 employability 157–61, 162, 170 global economic integration 4 higher education 71, 73, 168, 170 non-graduates 78, 81–3 positional goods 27 private education 170 recruitment and selection 44 rigging 170 skills 184 software engineers 150 computers, replacement by 32 conflict sociologists 70–1 contested nature of graduate occupation 14–28 capitalism 14 category, graduate workers as a 15 critiques from academia 23–6 dominant view 15–23 economic context 15 expansion in higher education 15–16, 21–2 higher education 20–3, 26–8 historic context 15–16 impasses 27–8 knowledge-based economy 14, 16–18, 20–4, 27–8 knowledge workers 18–25 premiums for graduates 23 social change 23 social context 15 symbolic boundaries 175 theoretical and conceptual roots 14 university education 15–16, 19–21 context 15–16, 43, 109, 134, 145, 185 Corlett, A 35 Cranmer, S 68 creativity 16, 18, 117–18 credentials see also degrees; master’s/ postgraduate degrees advantages in labour market 78, 170 certification 132, 140, 173 closure 84–5, 129–31, 140, 174, 181–2

Index competition 71, 73 conflict sociologists 70–1 credentialism 64, 71, 74, 80, 85, 130 culture 70–1, 85 degrees as means of access 71–3, 75–8 exclusionary, as 70–3 financial analysts 70–4, 76–8, 82–5, 136, 140 half-life of credentials 77–8 higher education 70–8, 85, 131, 176–7, 181–2 highly-skilled work 170 inequality 85 inflation 75–8, 80, 85, 175 laboratory scientists 70–5, 77, 80, 84–5, 140 middle-skilled jobs 175 non-graduates 73, 85, 175 over-qualifications/over-education 34–5, 36, 112 partial credentialism 78 press officers 70–1, 73, 75, 85 productivity 70–1 professionalization 129–30, 132, 138 qualifications 64, 71–3 recruitment and selection 73–7, 170 signalling 73–6, 85 skills 70, 170, 175 social mobility 186 software engineers 70–2, 73–4, 77, 85, 132, 138 statistical discrimination 76–7 suitability 75–6 symbolic closure 170–1 United States 175 university education 15, 70–3, 75, 170 wages 170 culture acceptability 58 campus culture 16 capital 71, 170, 173 citizenship 183 content 172 credentials 70–1, 85 higher education 176 inequality 3 organizational culture 106 recruitment and selection 48–9 reproduction 55 resources 186 social fit 106 social mobility 186 software engineers 133 status 174 university education 183 customer service occupations, growth in 35 CV-blind recruitment process 63 Damarin, AK 128 D’arcy, C 175

Darr, A 128 Darrah, C 109 degrees 52–6 access, as means of 71–3, 75–6 apprenticeships 121 classifications 173 discrimination 73 disregard of degree results 63 financial analysts 54–5, 72–3, 76–8, 81, 140 grades as a barrier to entry 73 graduate occupations 114, 167 half-life 77–8 highly-skilled work 71 human capital 182 knowledge-based economy 168 laboratory scientists 72–3, 140, 161–2 master’s/postgraduate degrees 78–9, 177 middle class 186 national science degrees 55 non-graduates 81–2 PhD qualifications 79, 80, 162 press officers 68, 73, 75, 127, 132 professionalization 129–30 results, disregard of 63 signalling 72–3, 75–6, 85 software engineers 65 suitability 75–6 Demaiter, E 74, 136 demand for higher education 26–7, 31 demand for skills 32–5, 61 demarcation 4, 68, 122–4, 127, 131, 138, 173–4, 183 Denmark, authors, journalists and linguists in 139 deregulation 4 digital Taylorism 25 discrimination see also inequality acceptability 49, 60 categorization 171–2 class 181 competition rigging 170 degrees 73 gender 169, 172 racism 48, 49, 169, 181 recruitment and selection 48, 49, 191 skills 88, 110 statistical discrimination 76–7 suitability 60 doctors 165 Dore, Ronald 27 dress code 58 Drucker, Peter 16–17 Durkheim, Émile 128–9 Early Years Professional Status (EYPS) accreditation 121 econometric modelling 47–8

217

Index economy 167–8 changes 2 competitiveness 18 context 15 creative economy 16 development 17, 26–7 economic capital 170, 173 global economic integration 4 higher education 64 master’s/postgraduate degrees 78 new economy 8, 16 policy 25–6, 184–5 resources 186 skills 178–9, 184–5 social policy 25–6 technology-intensive service-oriented economy 16 understanding 178–9 university education 15 education see higher education Elias, Peter 37, 113 elites cultural capital 170 elite fit 48–9 financial analysts 55 graduates’ occupations 165 higher education 16, 183 highly-skilled work 48 knowledge workers 18 recruitment and selection 48–9 reproduction of elites 48 university education 29, 55, 63, 173 war for talent and elite labour market 4 emerging economies 21 emotional reactions 48–9 employability 145, 157–61, 162, 170 essentialism 178 estate agents 84, 109, 179, 181–2 ethnic minorities 16, 48, 49, 88, 169, 181 European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training 33 Evetts, J 129 expansion in higher education 1–45 campus culture 16 changes in workplace 1–2 class 177 contested nature of graduate occupation 15–16, 21–2 demand for skills 2, 3–4 elitism 16 non-standard programmes 16 participation rate 29–30 private providers 16 universal access 177 university education 29–30 experts closure 140

218

communication 113 financial analysts 102, 104, 163 internal labour market 143 laboratory scientists 104, 163 management 152 non-graduates 174 premiums for graduates 168 press officers 102, 104, 127, 137, 163 professions 128–30 sectoral boundaries 147 software engineers 104, 149, 163 symbolic closure 169–70 technical expertise 102 EY 63 fast-tracking 4 Feldman, DC 164 fieldwork 6 financial analysts 5–6, 9–10, 168 acceptability 58–9, 60 accountants, distinguished from 9, 120, 125–6, 127, 131–2, 134 accreditation 138 boundaries 148, 150–1, 164 buy and sell recommendations 9 chartered and certified accountants 120 communication 104 competition 157 consensus-building 138–9 context 134 credentials 70–1, 72–3, 76–8, 82–3, 85, 136, 140 cultural reproduction 55 degrees 72–3, 76–9, 81, 140 demarcation 127, 138 discrimination 76–7 elites 55, 68 employability 157 fairness 82–3 finance and investment analysts 120 higher education 67–8, 85, 126, 161, 183, 186–7 institutional knowledge 105 interconnectivity 134 investments 9–10, 55 knowledge 110, 130–1 large companies 116, 119 management consultants and business analysts 120 managerial roles 150–1, 152 master’s/postgraduate degrees 79 non-graduates 92–3 numerical analysis 9 numerical skills 67 on-the-job training 67 O*NET database 10 personality 58–9

Index planning careers 156–7 professional associations 10, 81, 136, 138 professional qualifications 67–8, 81, 140 professionalization 132, 134, 136, 137–40 projections 9 public sector 134 qualifications 52–5, 67–8, 70–1, 72–3, 76–8, 81, 85, 140 recruitment and selection 7, 61 research 9 role 9–10 sector-dependent differences 118–19 share ownership, expansion in 10 size of companies 116 skills 51, 52, 88, 103, 105, 118, 167 small companies 116 sociability 59 social construction 125–6, 127–8 social fit 106–7 socioeconomic reproduction 55 sociology 9 statistical analysis 9, 72–3, 76–7 subject knowledge 67 suitability 51, 52, 74 support role 9 technical (hard) skills 51, 52 title of jobs 120–1, 134 training courses 67–8 trajectories 150–1, 152 university education 72–3 wages, gap in 83 work experience 51, 77 work-readiness 81 Finch, D 175 flexicurity 4 Florida, R 18 framing 172 Frank, D 181 freelance/self-employed 138, 149, 157, 159, 161 Freeman, RB 27 Freidson, E 131 Galbraith, JK 18 Gallagher, N 61 Gardiner, L 35 gender career progression for women 11 discrimination 169, 172 expectations 172 higher education, expansion in 16 laboratory scientists 6 participants in labour market 32 press officers 11 recruitment and selection 48 skills 88 software engineers 8 wages 37–8, 169

globalization 4, 19, 25, 144 Gorman, E 176 grades 29, 53, 55–6, 63, 70, 73–6, 85–6, 167 graduate occupations 3, 112–41 autonomy 114, 167 classifications 112–14, 128, 139, 167 closure 110, 140 clustering 120 collection of jobs, occupations as 121 communicators 113 conditions of work 114 construction of graduate status 115 contested nature 14–28 expertise 113, 140 high-level managerial positions 113 higher education 112–13, 139–40, 175 highly-skilled work 114, 180 ILO 113–14 maintenance of graduate status 115 new graduate occupations 113 niche graduate occupations 113 nominal fluidity 120–1 non-graduates 112, 139, 167, 180, 183 occupation, definition of 114–15, 180 Office for National Statistics (ONS) 112–13 orchestrators 113 over-qualification 112 partially graduate occupations 37 policy 112, 139 professions 113, 115, 128–40, 167 skill levels 112–14, 120, 139 social construction 115, 121–8, 139, 167 Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) 112–13, 139 titles of jobs 115, 120–1, 139 traditional graduate occupations 113 trust 140 types of organization 115 under-utilization of skills 112 university education 139–40, 180 within-occupational differences 115–21, 180 graduate skills, definition of 3 graduates’ careers 142–65, 167–9 boundaries 144–8, 157, 163–5, 167–8 careers, definition of 142–5 economy 167–8 employability and competition for jobs 157–61, 162 expectations 163 external opportunities 157 financial analysts 156–7, 168 focus, vision or ambition, lack of 156–7 heterogeneity 163, 168 higher education 161–2, 164, 167 human capital 142, 165, 168

219

Index graduates’ careers (cont.) knowledge about career opportunities 153–4 knowledge-based economy 142, 168 knowledge workers 165 laboratory scientists 164, 168 management of careers 163–4 management route 163, 168 mental barriers 164 non-graduate roles 175 organizational changes 157 occupational embeddedness 164 occupational identity 164 organizational factors 168 orientations to work 163 planning careers 153–7 press officers 168 protean careers 156 qualifications 164 recruitment and selection 168 self-direction 155 semi-skilled components of work 168 small companies 154–5 software engineers 164, 168 status 168 strategy 163 structure of opportunities 163 traditional careers 163 trajectories 142, 143, 148–53, 157, 163 university education 167 wages 168–9 graduatization 4, 35, 40, 124 Green, F 37, 39, 113–14, 139 Grusky, DB 38, 179 Guile, D 24 Hall, P 20, 144 hegemony 24 Henseke, G 113–14, 139 Hesketh, AJ 44 heterogeneity credentials 76 graduate occupations 139 graduates’ careers 163, 168 labour market 178 non-graduates 183 recruitment and selection 43, 47–8 software engineers 138 trajectories 163 higher education 63–86, 166–7, 176–8 see also degrees; expansion in higher education; university education advantages in labour market 78–84, 85 A-level grades, disregard of 63 bias towards Oxbridge or independent sector 63 class 177 closure 85, 170, 174, 181–2

220

competitiveness 71, 73, 168 contingency in value of HD credentials 78–84 credentials 64, 70–8, 85, 131, 176–7, 181–2 culture 70–1, 85, 176 CV-blind recruitment process 63 definition 64–8 elites 183 expectations 178, 184 financial analysts 67–8, 85, 161, 183, 186–7 accountancy 126 credentialism 70–1, 72–4, 76–8, 85, 140 elite global investment banks 68 numerical skills 67 on-the-job training 67 professional qualifications 67–8 qualifications 67–8, 78, 81, 85 subject knowledge 67 training courses 67–8 formal knowledge 131 function 176–8 fundamentalism 176 graduate occupations 112–13, 139–40, 175 graduates’ careers 161–2, 164, 167 heterogeneity 76 highly-skilled work 2–3, 20–1, 71, 110, 169–70 human capital 168 ILO Skill Level 4 87 inequality 85, 176 innovation 168 knowledge-based economy 20–2, 24, 27–8, 176 knowledge workers 18, 20–1, 22, 26, 168 laboratory scientists 66–7, 70, 84, 161–2, 183, 186–7 biotech 66 credentials 70–1, 72, 73, 75, 77, 84–5, 140 degrees 161–2 on-the-job training 84 pharmaceuticals 66 professionalization 131, 137–8 qualifications 85 recruitment 66 skills 66, 84 training 66, 84 management 170 massification of higher education 161, 170, 173, 176, 182–3, 186 middle class, normalization for 30, 177–9 non-graduates 73, 78, 81–3, 85, 161, 175, 183–4 normalization 177–9 over-education 34–5, 36 parental education 185 polytechnics, establishment of 16 press officers 68, 161, 183, 186–7

Index credentials 70–1, 73, 75, 85 degrees 68 online entities 68 qualifications 85 social media 68 private education 170, 185 productivity 43–4, 70–1, 168, 170 professions 64, 128–9, 131–2, 137, 140, 170 qualifications 64, 71–3, 85, 131 recruitment and selection 43–4, 63–4, 73–7, 166–7, 176, 180–1 signalling 73–6, 85 skills 20–3, 70, 87, 109–10, 167, 175, 178–84 social connections 176 social construction 139 social mobility 63, 173, 185–6 social problems 176 software engineers 64–6, 84, 161, 180, 183, 186–7 coding 64–5 credentials 70–2, 73–4, 77, 85 degrees 65 dynamic process, as 64–5 life-long learning 69 on-the-job training 69 professionalization 136 qualifications 85 suitability 64, 75–6, 85, 166 symbolic resources 184 technical abilities 176 traditional graduates 179 trajectories of careers 161 UCAS scores 63 university education 63–4, 68–73, 75, 170, 181 wages 170 where work-based skills are learnt 68–70 work experience 162, 181 highly-skilled/advanced work 109, 167–70, 179–80 BIS study 34 boundaryless careers 163 credentials 170 decline 34 definition 34 degrees 71 demands for skill 32–5 economic policy 184 elite privilege, reproduction of 48 expansion 30, 32–4 graduate occupations 114, 180 graduate work, definition of 114 growth of high-skilled work 31 higher education 2–3, 20–1, 71, 110, 169–70 hour-glass shaped 32 job creation 21

knowledge-based economy 23 knowledge workers 19–23, 25, 88 non-graduates 34, 183 predictions 33–4 professionalization 129 proxies 180 recruitment and selection 61 social justice 179 social mobility 185 underutilization of skills 27 university education 169–70, 185 wages 5, 38 young workers, decline in 34 Hirsch, Fred 27 Holmes, C 32, 39–40 homogeneity 8, 26, 120, 171 human capital see also skills degrees 78, 182 employability 158 graduates’ careers 142, 165, 168 higher education 21–2, 168 knowledge-based economy 21, 170 knowledge workers 18 master’s/postgraduate degrees 78 recruitment and selection 47 software engineers 74 supply-side 22 human resources 19, 145–6 Humburg, M 47 Hurrell, SA 88 ideal of the graduate worker 166–87 graduates’ careers 167–9 higher education 166–7, 176–8 occupations and professionalization 167 recruitment and selection 42, 166 skills 167, 169 software engineers 124 symbolic closure 169–72, 175 wages 169 identity careers, definition of 143 graduates’ careers 164 laboratory scientists 133 occupational identity 132–3, 167 press officers 134 professionalization 132–3, 167 social construction 127 social identity 133 university education 133 immigration 32 in- and out-groups 172 Independent Reviewer on Social Mobility and Child Poverty 185 India, number of graduate jobs available in 27 individualization 144 industrialization 16

221

Index inequality see also discrimination credentials 85 culture 3 higher education 176 non-graduates 173–4 organizations, importance of 5 resources 3 university education 174 informal learning 52, 125 innovation 4, 16, 116, 147, 168 Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) 38 institutions 38, 53–4, 105, 173 interest groups 129, 170 internal labour market 143, 163 International Classification of Occupations (ISCO) 112–13 International Labour Organization (ILO) 87, 113–14 international trade 32 interpersonal skills 18, 46–8, 87, 97, 119, 160, 186 interviews 46, 48–9, 63 IT help desk workers 175 Jackson, M 52, 59–60 Jenkins, R 49 Jessop, B 24, 172 job control 37, 98, 103, 111, 167 job opportunities 161 job titles 115, 120–1, 123, 134, 139 journalists 10, 139 Keep, E 22, 26, 184–5 keyboard operators in Poland 139 knowledge see also knowledge-based economy; knowledge workers abstract knowledge 130–1, 137–8, 179 career opportunities 153–4 certification 173 complexity 109 financial analysts 110, 130–1 formal knowledge 131 identification of knowledge 44 institutions 105 intensity 109, 122 laboratory scientists 110 management paradigm 44–5 press officers 110, 130–1 professionalization 128–31, 167 recruitment and selection 44 scientific knowledge 17–18 skills 88, 108–10 social construction 122 social knowledge 110 software engineers 138 subject knowledge 67 tacit knowledge 24, 89, 97, 110 updating 19

222

knowledge-based economy 14, 16–18 characterization 172 criticism 14, 23–4 degrees 168 economic development 17 graduates’ careers 142, 168 hegenomic imaginary or dominant frame 24 higher education 20–2, 24, 27–8, 176 highly-skilled work 23 human capital 21, 170 non-graduates 172 post-industrial modes of production 17, 167–8 recruitment and selection 44 rejection of concept 14 science-based industries 17 scientific knowledge 17–18, 24 social change 24 technology-intensive service-oriented economy 16 theoretical and tacit knowledge, difference between 24 United States 16–17 university education 20, 176 white-collar service work 17 knowledge workers 3, 18–25 autonomy 25, 89, 98, 102–3 codification 25, 88–9 cognitive skills 102 communication 108, 109 complexity of work 18–19, 88 creation of knowledge 88–9 creativity 18, 98–101, 103 criticism 24–5 definition 18 digital Taylorism 25 economic and social policies 25–6 economic competitiveness 18 embedded knowledge 89, 102, 110 embrained knowledge 89, 102 encoded knowledge 89, 102 financial analysts 88, 94–6, 109–10 globalization 19, 25 graduates’ careers 165 high-value service industries 19–20 higher education 18, 20–1, 22, 26, 168 highly-skilled/advanced work 19–23, 25, 88 intensity of knowledge 25 job control 98–101, 103 laboratory scientists 88, 89–92, 109–10 low-skilled work 101 management of knowledge 25 press officers 88, 96–7, 102, 109, 109–10 production of knowledge 88–9 professionalization 128 project management 25

Index routine work 102 simplistic skills policy 26 skilled workers 3, 18–19 social construction 24–5 soft skills 102 software engineers 8, 88, 92–4, 109 strategies of companies 19 symbolic analysts, as 19–20 technical (hard) skills 88–103 theoretical knowledge 89 thinking activities 102 transmission and application of knowledge 18 types of knowledge 89 United States 19 university education 88–9 updating knowledge and competencies 19 Kunda, G 92 laboratory-based scientists 5–6, 8–9 abstract knowledge 131, 137–8 acceptability 56–8, 60 biotechnological industry 8–9, 164 abstract knowledge 131 acceptability 56–7 boundaries 145–6 higher education 66 PhD qualifications 80 professionalization 135, 138 size of companies 115 social construction 123 trajectories 148–9 boundaries 145–7, 164 chartered status 135–6 commercial sector 8–9 communication 104 competition 157, 159 consensus-building 138–9 creativity 117 credentials 70–1, 72, 73–5, 77, 80, 84–5, 123, 140 degrees 54, 72–3, 79–80, 140, 161–2 employability 157, 159 freelance/self-employed 149 gender 6 graduates’ careers 164, 168 graduatization 124 higher education 66–7, 70, 84, 131, 137–8, 161–2, 183, 186–7 identity 133 innovation 116 institutions, role of 54 interviews 46 knowledge 110 large multinationals 115–17 life sciences, background in 9 managerial roles 152

marketing 148 master’s/postgraduate degrees 79–80 motivational traits 58 on-the-job training 50, 84 pharmaceutical industry 8–9, 164 abstract knowledge 131 acceptability 56–7 boundaries 147 higher education 66 professionalization 135, 138 qualifications 54, 80 size of companies 115–17 social construction 122–3 trajectories 148–9 PhD qualifications 79, 80, 162 professional associations 135 professional qualifications 140 professionalization 133, 135, 137–40 qualifications 52–5, 72, 75, 79, 80, 85, 162 quality assurance 54 recruitment and selection 46, 61, 66, 77, 135 researchers, demarcation with 122–4 size of companies 115–17 skills 50, 52, 66, 84, 88, 103, 105, 159, 167 small companies 116 social construction 122–4, 127 social fit 56–7, 106 Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) 115 suitability 50, 74, 80 technical (hard) skills 50, 52 titles of jobs 123 work experience 77, 80, 162 labour market value 63, 173, 179, 187 Lam, A 89 Lamont, M 3, 172 Landmarks of Tomorrow. Drucker, Peter 16–17 large companies 115–17, 119, 131 Larson, GS 131 Leadbeater, C 20 learned societies 135 legislators and senior officials in Norway 139 Leith Review of Skills 21, 25 liberalization 4 licensing 136, 140, 181, 187 linguists 139 Liu, Y 38 Livingstone, DW 22, 24 low-skilled jobs 32–3, 35, 44 Lui, Y 179 Macdonald, K 129, 140 McKnight, A 186 Mahmood, Shabana 21 mainstreaming 177 major occupational groups in 2002, 2009 and 2015 36

223

Index Mallon, M 157 management autonomy 168 consultants 138 financial analysts 150–1, 152 graduates’ careers 163–4, 168 high-level managerial positions 113 higher education 170 human resources 19 knowledge 44–5 laboratory scientists 152 non-graduates 175 press officers 152 professionalization 138 project management 25, 138 qualifications 64 software engineers 150, 152–3 talent management 44 trajectories 151–2 Marginson, S 38, 176, 178 marketing laboratory scientists 148 new graduate occupations 19, 37 press officers 10, 99, 106, 119–20, 126–7 software engineers 65 Marks, A 92, 158 Mason, G 203 Massey, DS 171–2 master’s/postgraduate degrees 78–9, 177 mature students 16 Mayhew, K 22, 26, 32, 39–40 meritocracy 27, 42, 63, 157–8, 162, 179, 181 Meyer, JW 181 middle-class degrees 186 elite universities 29 higher education, normalization of 30, 177–9 reproduction of advantage 85 social and emotional skills 186 social confidence 186 social mobility 185–6 mid-skilled jobs, decline in 32–3, 175 Milburn, Alan 185 Miller, SR 48 mobility 143, 145, 149, 180 see also social mobility Modestino, AS 47 Molnár, V 172 Moss, PI 103 motivation 58, 60, 103, 157 Murphy, R 170 national differences 139 National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) 122 neoliberalism 22

224

networks discrimination 170 economy 16 financial analysts 105–6 recruitment and selection 45–6, 48 social networks 38, 48, 57, 156, 160–1 software engineers 45–6 trajectories 12 new economy 8, 16–17, 19, 26 new graduate occupations 4, 19, 37, 113 new types of work organization and technological change 4 Ng, TWH 164 niche graduate occupations 37, 113 non-graduates advantages in labour market 78, 81–3 associate professional work 175 blocking progression 175 classification 139, 167, 172–3 closure 71, 161, 175, 181 competition 78, 81–3 credentials 73, 85, 175 degrees 81–2 distinguishing graduate market 112, 123–4, 167, 172–5, 180–4 changes in market 40 classification 139, 167 competition 81–2 partially graduate occupations 37 recruitment and selection 61 wages 38–9 financial analysts 82–3 graduate occupations 112, 139, 167, 180, 183 graduates’ careers 175 graduates in non-graduate work 33, 35, 76, 175 heterogeneity 183 higher education 78, 81–3, 161, 183–4 highly-skilled jobs 32, 183 inequality 173–4 knowledge-based economy 172 managerial positions 175 partially graduate occupations 37 press officers 83 professionalization 128, 137, 167 over-qualifications/over-education 35 recruitment and selection 43, 61, 180 skills 109 social construction of distinctions between graduates and non-graduates 83 software engineers 82, 124–5, 127–8 status group, graduates as a 172 symbolic closure 175 technical occupations 175 university education 173, 183 wages 8, 38–9, 83, 169, 173, 175, 183 Norway, legislators and senior officials in 139

Index number of graduate jobs available 27 numeracy tests 51 nursery workers 121 nurses 121 objectivism 178 objectivity 44, 88, 144, 181 occupation, definition of 114–15, 180 OECD 20 Office for National Statistics (ONS) 112–13 offshoring 4, 32, 169 Okay-Somerville, B 37 O’Leary, D 61 O’Mahony, S 149 orchestrators 113 organizational change 5, 38, 157 outsiders 170, 172 outsourcing 10, 25, 144 over-qualifications/over-education 34–5, 36, 112 Oxbridge 29, 55, 63 parental education 185 Parkin, F 170 partially graduate occupations 4, 37 Paton, S 138 Penguin Random House UK 63 personal service occupations, growth in 35 personality acceptability 49, 58–9 attitude and manner 49, 58 financial analysts 58–9 interpersonal skills 18, 46–8, 87, 97, 119, 160, 186 middle class 186 press officers 59 sociability 59, 107 social confidence 186 software engineers 58–9 university education 183 pharmacists 164 PhD qualifications for lab scientists, role of 79, 80, 162 planning careers 153–7 Poland, keyboard operators in 139 polarization of jobs 31–3 police 122 policy economic policy 25–6, 184–5 graduate occupations 112, 139 higher education 112, 184 human resources 145–6 skills 184–5 social policy 25–6, 184 supply-side 184–5 polytechnics, establishment of 16

postgraduate degrees see master’s/postgraduate degrees press officers 5–6, 10–11, 168 acceptability 59, 60 account managers 151–2 agency work 151–2 apprenticeships 82 boundaries 147, 164 building relationships 106 commercial sector 119 communication 52, 104, 126–7, 151 competition 157, 159–60 consensus-building 138–9 credentials 70–1, 73, 85 degrees 55–6, 68, 73, 75, 79, 127, 132 employability 157, 159–60 freelance/self-employed 151 fund-raising 119 gender 11 higher education 68, 161, 183, 186–7 identity 134 journalists, relations with 10 knowledge 110, 130–1 managerial roles 152 marketing 10, 99, 106, 119–20, 126–7 master’s/postgraduate degrees 79 media releases, design of 10 non-graduates 82 online entities 68 outsourcing 10 personality 59, 107 professional associations 136–8 professionalization 132, 134–40 public relations 10 public sector 119 qualifications 52–3, 55–6, 85 recruitment and selection 61 reputation 10 role 10–11 sector-dependent differences 119–20 signalling 75 skills 52, 88, 103, 106, 119, 159–60, 167 sociability 107 social fit 107 social construction 126–8 social media 10, 68, 121 status 134 suitability 52 technical (hard) skills 52 title of jobs 121 university education 132 work ethics and networks 160 written English 52 PricewaterhouseCoopers 63 prison service 121–2 private education 170, 185 proactive nature 60

225

Index productivity credentials 70–1 growth 22, 27 higher education 2, 22, 27, 43–4, 168, 170 recruitment and selection 43–4 signalling and screening 43–4 unemployment, periods of 44 professional associations 10, 81, 129, 135–8 professionalization 115, 128–40, 167–8 barriers to entry 129 closure 129–30 consensus-building 138–9 credentials 129–30, 132 degrees 129–30 expertise 130 financial analysts 132, 134, 136, 137–9, 140 functionalist interpretation 128–9 graduate occupations 115, 128–40, 167 higher education 128–9, 131–2, 137, 140 highly-skilled work 129 identity 132–3, 167 interest groups 129 knowledge 128–31, 167 knowledge workers 128 laboratory scientists 133, 135, 137–9, 140 management consultants 138 non-graduates 128, 137, 167 possibility of professionalization 137–9 press officers 132, 134–9, 140 professional associations 135–7 professional qualifications 129–30 project managers 138 social status 129, 134 software engineers 132–4, 136, 137–8, 140 traditional professions 128 professions see also professionalization associate professional work 175 changes to graduate labour market 40 graduate occupations 113, 115 higher education 16, 64, 74, 170 non-graduates 175 professional associations 10, 81, 129, 135–8 qualifications 52, 64, 81, 129–32, 136, 140 semi-professionals 168 skills-based education 22 Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) 35 university education 63 project management 25, 138 protean careers 144–5, 153, 156–8 psychological aptitude tests 51 public relations 10, 136–7 public sector 119, 134 Purcell, Kate 37, 113 qualifications 52–6 advantages in labour market 78

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credentials 64, 71–3 financial analysts 52–5, 67–8, 70–3, 76–8, 81, 85, 140 institutions, role of 53–4, 173 laboratory scientists 52–5, 72, 75, 85, 140, 162 management 64 newspaper advertisements 52 over-qualifications/over-education 34–5, 36, 112 press officers 52–3, 55–6, 85 professions 52, 64, 81, 129–32, 136, 140 recruitment and selection 61, 62, 166 skills 61, 169, 184 small companies 52–3 software engineers 52–4, 55, 85 suitability 49, 52–6, 61, 64, 85, 166–7 supply-driven, as 162 symbolic closure 170 uncertainty 52–3 university education 52–6, 61 wages 169 weight of qualifications 52, 162 work experience 55, 170 quality 4, 8, 179 racism 48, 49, 169, 181 rationality 42, 44–5 recession and its effects 4 recruitment and selection of graduate workers 42–62, 166, 168 acceptability 49, 56–60, 61, 166 advertisements 50, 52, 54–5 biases 45, 48 boundaries 145–6 characteristics 43–4, 47–8, 62 class 48, 181 competitive advantage 44 context 43 credentials 73–7, 170 culture 48–9 CV-blind recruitment process 63 demand for skills 61 discrimination 48, 49, 181 econometric modelling 47–8 elite fit 48–9 emotional reactions 48–9 ethnic minorities, discrimination against 48, 49, 181 financial analysts 7, 61 formalization 42 gender 48 heterogeneity 43, 47–8 higher education 43–4, 63–4, 166–7, 176, 180–1 highly-skilled work 61 human capital 43–4, 47

Index idealized version 42 identification of skills, knowledge and capabilities 44 institutional characteristics 62 interactional process, selection as a 47–9 interpersonal skills 46–8 interviews 46, 48–9, 63 knowledge economy 44 knowledge management paradigm 44–5 laboratory scientists 46, 61, 66, 77, 135 meritocracy 42, 181 multiple factors 42–3 non-graduates 43, 61, 180 number of candidates 47 objectivity 44, 181 occupation-dependent process 43 organizational characteristics 62 personal feelings 45 press officers 61 procedure 42–7 productivity 43–4 qualifications 61, 62, 166 racism 48, 49 rationality 42, 44–5 scientific approach 42, 44–5 self-presentation 181 short-term goals of corporations 145–6 signalling 43–4, 47–8, 73 situational process 43 skills 47–9, 60–2, 166, 180–1 social characteristics 62 social fit 106 social processes 48, 181 software engineers 45–6, 61 stability of selection choice 47 standardized whole-day processes 45–6 stereotypes 48 suitability 49–56, 59–60, 61, 166 talent management 44 uncertainty 43, 45, 61–2 Reich, Robert 19 remuneration see wages repetitive work 118, 168 reputation 10, 78–9, 161 research 4–7 resources 2–3, 5, 172, 184, 186 respectability 140 Rivera, Lauren 48–9 Robbins Report 15–16 Roberts, K 28–9, 177 Rodrigues, R 146 Rose, Stephen J 1–2, 19 Rosenbaum, JE 48 Rotman, A 84 routine-biased technological change (RBTC) hypothesis 32

sale and customer service occupations, growth in 35 Salvatori, A 32–3 Scholarios, D 37, 92 Science Council 135 scientists see laboratory scientists Scolarios, D 158 Scott, Peter 16, 23–4, 165 Scottish IT workers 158 screening 43–4, 47–8 secretarial occupations, growth in 35 sector-dependent differences 117–20 selection of graduate workers see recruitment and selection of graduate workers self-direction 155 self-presentation 181 semi-graduate professions 175 semi-skilled work 168 semi-structured interviews 5–6 share ownership, expansion in 10 Shepherd, H 171 signalling 73–6, 182 credentials 73–6, 85 degrees 72–3, 75–6 press officers 75 productivity 43–4 recruitment and selection 43–4, 47–8, 73 software engineers 134 size of companies 115–17 financial analysts 116 laboratory scientists 115–17 large companies 115–17, 119, 131 small companies 52–3, 116–17, 154–5 software engineers 117 skills 87–111 see also communication skills; highly-skilled/advanced work; soft skills abstract knowledge 179 advanced skills 109, 167, 179 autonomy 167 class 88 closure 110 competition 150, 157–60, 184 complexity of tasks 167, 179 context 109 credentials 70, 170, 175 definition of graduate skills 3, 87, 178–9 demand for skills 2, 3–4, 32–5 discrimination 88, 110 economic policy 184–5 economic understanding 178–9 eligibility for senior positions 158 employability 157–60 ethnicity 88 financial analysts 88, 118, 167 gender 88 graduate occupations 112–14, 120, 139

227

Index skills (cont.) higher education 20–3, 70, 87, 109–10, 167, 175, 178–84 highly-skilled work 32–4 interpersonal skills 160 job control 167 job discretion 179 knowledge 3, 18–19, 88, 109–10 laboratory scientists 66, 84, 88, 159, 167 labour market value 179 located in the job, as 179 managerial roles 150, 152–3 meritocracy 157–8, 179 mixed skills 108 more skills, requirement for 22 non-graduates 109, 169 objectivity 88 planning, employee’s involvement in 22 polarization of jobs 31 policy 184–5 premiums 38 press officers 88, 119, 159–60, 167 proxies 33 qualifications 61, 169, 184 quality of jobs 179 recruitment and selection 47–9, 60–2, 166, 180–1 simplistic skills policy 26 skills of graduates 179 social construction 88, 110, 178–9 social justice 179 social skills 103, 105–6 socialization 109–10 sociology 179 software engineers 74, 88, 167 specialization 112 subjectivity 88 suitability 49–52 supply-side policies 184–5 symbolic closure 178–9 technical (hard) skills 87, 167, 178–9, 179 technological change 169 traditional graduates 179 underutilization 27 university education 169, 179, 185 upskilling 24, 32 use of skills 37, 113–14, 167 work experience 109, 179 work process 88 small companies 52–3, 116–17, 154–5 Smith, N 18 snowball sampling 6 sociability 59, 107 social capital 161, 170, 173–4 social change 2, 23–4 social closure 85, 130, 136, 170, 174 social construction, labour market as a 2–3

228

social construction of graduate occupations 115, 121–8, 139, 167 categorization 121 classification systems 171 complexity 122 demarcation 122–4 financial analysts 125–6, 127–8 higher education 139 identity 127 knowledge intensity 122 knowledge workers 24–5 laboratory scientists 122–4, 127 non-graduates 83 press officers 126–8 recognition 122 skills 88, 110, 178–9 social status 122, 127 software engineers 124–5, 127–8 social esteem 173 social fit 49, 56–8, 106–8 social identity 133 social justice 179 social media 10, 68, 121 social mobility 185–7 advantage, generational transmission of 186 credentials 186 cultural resources 186 CV-blind recruitment process 63 economic resources 186 high-status jobs 185 higher education 27, 63, 173, 185–6 middle class 185–6 parental education 185 private schools 185 social resources 186 status 185–6 university education 15, 185 wages 185–6 working class 185–6 social order 129, 171 social policy 25–6, 184 social psychology 76, 181 social reproduction 5 social skills 103, 105–6 socialization 57, 109–10 sociology 9, 52, 70–1, 76, 179, 181 soft skills 103–9, 167, 178–9 see also communication skills acceptability 60 definition 103 financial analysts 103 interactional skills 103 knowledge 108 laboratory scientists 103 motivational skills 103 non-graduates 109 press officers 52, 103

Index relational, as 103 social fit 103, 106–8 social skills 103, 105–6 software engineers 103, 108 suitability 59–60 technical (hard) skills 103, 107–8 software engineers 5–6, 7–8, 168 abstract knowledge 138 apprenticeships 53–4, 82 boundaries 145–6, 164 acceptability 58–9, 60 Chartered Engineers (BEng) 134, 136 Chartered Institute for IT 136 closure 136 coding 71–2, 74 higher education 8, 64–5 hobby, as a 124 soft skills 108 suitability 50–1 communication skills 8, 104–5 company-specific experience and knowledge, transfer of 159 competition 157–9, 161 consensus-building 138–9 contractors 45, 60, 117–18 creativity 117–18 credentials 70–2, 73–4, 77, 85, 132, 138 culture 106, 133 degrees 65, 71–2, 73–4, 77, 79 design of software 8 development of software 8 dual career paths 164 dynamic process 64–5 employability 157–9, 161 evaluation of software 8 freelance/self-employed 138, 159, 161 gender 6 half-life of engineers 159 heterogeneity 138 higher education 64–6, 84, 136, 161, 180, 183, 186–7 human capital 74 informal learning 125 institutions, role of 53 interviews 46 knowledge 110 knowledge workers 8 large companies 131 licensing 136 life-long learning 69 marketing 65 master’s/postgraduate degrees 79 networks 46, 161 New Economy 8 non-graduates 82, 124–5, 127–8 on-the-job training 69 outdated skills 159

personality 58–9 professional associations 136, 138 professionalization 132–4, 136, 137–40 psychometric tests 46 qualifications 52–4, 55, 61, 85 quality standards 8 recruitment and selection 45–6, 61 repetitive work 118 reputation 161 roles, type of 8 sector-dependent differences 117–18 signalling 73–4 size of companies 117 skills 50–1, 52, 74, 88, 103, 108, 159, 167 small companies 117 social capital and job opportunities, relationship between 161 social construction 124–5, 127–8 social fit 58, 106 Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) 117 standardization 118 standardized whole-day recruitment processes 45–6 status 134 strong identification with job 124 suitability 50–1, 52 technical (hard) skills 50–1, 52 testing of software 8 work experience 45–6, 50 standards acceptability 166 credentials 131 International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) 33 laboratory scientists 90–2, 110 nursery education 121 qualifications 33, 167 Qualifications and Credit Framework (QCF) 33 quality 8 recruitment and selection 45–6, 61, 166–7, 180–1 software engineers 101, 118 Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) 34–5, 112–13, 115, 117, 120, 139 standardization 25, 45–6, 61, 91, 101, 118 universalization 177 statistics data 6, 29 discrimination 76–7 financial analysts 9, 72–3 group estimates 76 status careers, definition of 143 chartered status 82–3, 135–6 classifications 173

229

Index status (cont.) culture 174 graduates’ careers 168 groups 170, 172 master’s/postgraduate degrees 78–9 press officers 83, 134 professionalization 129, 134 social construction 122, 127 social mobility 185–6 software engineers 134 university education 132 Stehr, N 18 student debt 39 subjectivity 151 suitability 49–56, 59–60 acceptability 59–60 characteristics and abilities 49, 52 credentials 75–6 degrees 75–6 discrimination 60 experience 49 financial analysts 51, 52, 74 higher education 64, 85 interviews 49 laboratory scientists 50, 74 numeracy tests 51 press officers 52 psychological aptitude tests 51 qualifications 49, 52–6, 61, 64, 85, 166–7 skills 49–52, 59–60 social suitability 75 soft skills 59–60 software engineers 50–1, 52 technical (hard) skills 49–52 uncertainty 80 Sum, N-L 172 supply and demand 2, 34 supply-side 21–2, 32, 184–5 symbolic closure 169–72, 175 categorization 171–2 characteristics as inferior, labelling 170 classification systems 171 credentials 170–1, 181 forms of meaning 12 group domination 171 higher education 170 interest group, graduates as an 170 labour market conditions 175 non-graduates 175 outsiders 170 persuasion 12 qualifications 170 skills 178–9 social closure 170 status groups 170 university education 170

230

symbolism see also symbolic closure boundaries 172–3, 175 classifications 173 knowledge workers 19–20 power 173 resources 184 university education and symbolic power 173 tacit knowledge 24, 110 talent fast-tracking 4 management 44 war for talent and elite labour market 4 teachers 165 team spirit 106 technical (hard) skills 87–103, 167, 178–9 autonomy 89, 98, 102–3 codification of knowledge 88–9 cognitive skills 102 communication skills 104, 108, 109 complexity of work 88 context 51, 89 creation of knowledge 88–9 embedded knowledge 89, 102 embodied knowledge 89, 102, 110 embrained knowledge 89, 102 encoded knowledge 89, 102 financial analysts 51, 52, 88, 94–6, 99–102, 109–10 higher education 50 innovation 89, 98 interactive skills 102 job control and creativity 98–101, 103 job or task-specific skills 49–50 knowledge workers 87–103 laboratory scientists 50, 52, 88, 89–92, 98, 100, 109–10 low-skilled, technical skills as being 101 press officers 88, 96–100, 102, 108, 109–10 production of knowledge 88–9 professions 103 routine 102 soft skills 102, 103, 107–8 software engineers 50–2, 88, 92–4, 98–101, 108–9 suitability 49–52 testing 51 theoretical knowledge 89 thinking activities 102 types of knowledge 89 university education 88–9 work experience 50 technological changes 2, 32, 40, 146–7, 160, 169 Terkel, Studs 5 theoretical and tacit knowledge, difference between 24

Index Thompson, P 24, 89, 91 Tilly, C 103, 171–2 titles of jobs 115, 120–1, 123, 134, 139 Tobin, N 137 Toffler, Alvin 16 Touraine, A 18 traditional graduate occupations 113, 128, 163, 179 trajectories for careers 142, 143, 148–53, 163 boundaries 146, 148–52 careers, definition of 143 financial analysts 150–1, 152 heterogeneity 163 higher education 161 laboratory scientists 148–9, 150, 152 management, becoming 151–2 press officers 151–2 protean careers 153 software engineers 149–50, 152–3 trends affecting graduate labour market 3–5 Trow, M 15 Truss, Liz 21, 121–2 trust 140 UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES) 33–4 unemployment graduate careers 183 long-term unemployment 4 over-qualification and over-skilling 35 periods of unemployment 44 upgrading skills 24 United States 10, 15–16, 19, 27, 33, 39–40, 175 university education 16, 19–21, 63–4, 68–9 19th century concept, modern universities as a 15 advantages in labour market 78 autonomy 169 certified knowledge 173 context-dependent conditions 185 credentials 15, 70–3, 75, 170 cultural and technological citizenship 183 economy, links with 15 economic, social and cultural capital 173 elites 29, 55, 63, 173 expansion 29–30 expertise 140 financial analysts 72–3 graduate occupations 139–40, 180 graduates’ careers 167 highly-skilled work 169–70, 185 identity 133 inequality 174 innovation 19 knowledge-based economy 20 meritocracy 63 middle class 29–30

new universities, building 16 non-graduates 173, 183 Oxbridge 29, 55, 63 participation rate 29 personality, formation of 183 press officers 132 professions 63 qualifications 61 respectability 140 skills 169 social mobility 15, 185 specific conditions 185 status 132 symbolic closure 170 symbolic power 173 technological development 19 upper class 30 wages 169, 185 work experience 68–9 upper-class 30 upskilling 32 van de Velden, R 34, 47 Verhaest, D 34 veterinarians in Belgium 139 virtual society 16 vocational subjects 16 wages advanced skills 38 BIS survey 168–9 changes to graduate labour market 37–40 closure strategies of professions 38 credentials 170 decline in wages 39–40 demands for skills 32 differentiation 5 earnings differentials 38 ethnic minorities 169 financial analysts 83 gender 37–8, 169 graduates’ careers 168–9 hour-glass shaped 32 ideal 169 institutions, role of 38 median earnings 39 non-graduates 8, 38–9, 83, 169, 173, 183 organizational change 38 polarization 31 postgraduates 39 premium for graduates 23, 37–8 proxy for skills level, as 33 qualifications 169 semi- or non-graduate professions, graduates in 175 skills premiums 38 social mobility 185–6

231

Index wages (cont.) student debt 39 United States 39–40 university education 169, 185 Walker, I 37–8 Wansleben, L 10 war for talent and elite labour market 4 Warhurst, C 20–1, 89, 91, 110, 128 Weber, Max 70–1, 170 weightless economy 16 welfare reform 32 where graduates work 35–7 2002, 2009 and 2015, major occupational groups in 36 administrative occupations, growth in 35 new graduate occupations 4, 19, 37, 113 niche graduate occupations 37 non-graduates 35, 37 standard occupational classification 35 technical occupations 35 Wilensky, Harold 143 Windolf, P 61–2

232

Wolf, A 26, 178 women see gender work ethic 160–1 work experience financial analysts 51, 77 higher education 162, 181 laboratory scientists 77, 80, 162 master’s/postgraduate degrees 79–80 qualifications 55, 170 skills 109, 179 software engineers 50 technical (hard) skills 50 university education 181 work-readiness 60, 81, 166 working-class 16, 185–6 World Bank 20 World Economy Forum (WEF) 20 York, Giles 122 young workers, decline in 34 Zhu, Y 37, 39