University Graduates Employability Skills Connotation And Development Research

Employability is individual's ability and attributes to acquire,maintain and reacquire a job,with good performance on the job as well.Studies on employability are meaningful to students,enterprises and society.This study is supported by the Careers Advisory Service of Shanghai.We selected 9 colleges in Shanghai and delivered questionnaires in random to the students who have had offers and would be graduate soon under the help of career centers of colleges.A total of 875 usable responses were received out of an eligible sample of 1145, representing a 76.45%response rate.Then,through the usage of statistical software, like SPSS 15.0 and LISREL8.70,we analyzed the data to explore the structure of employability skills from graduates' perspective and try to prove the relationship between employability development activities and its performance,with employability mediating the relationship from the individual level.The study is divided into two parts:1.To build the structure of graduates' employability skills.Based on the review of employability skills,we selected possible specific employability skill to build the scale of employability skills.Through Exploratory Factor Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis,we found 5 factors of employability skills,which included leadership and management skills,problem solving skills,self-development skills,people skills and basic skills.2.To prove the theory that students who attended employability activities could enhance their employability and then achieve better employment performance.In this study,we took employability development activities and internship as independent variables,salaries and satisfactions of the job offer as independent variables and self-reported employability skills as the mediator variable.Outcomes show that employability activities had no significant relationship with employment performance, while cumulative time of internship had significant relationship with employment performance(salaries and satisfactions),employability skills of graduates as part of mediator. Unlike other studies which were from employers' perspective or on-campus undergraduates' perspective,we build the employability structure from graduates who have had offers,which could complement the studies of employability skills. Additionally,this study tried to prove the relationship between employability development and employment performance from individual perspective and pointed out that employability could be the mediator,which could give the strong empirical evidence of employability development.