Predicting Employability And Job Insecurity Through Social Network Theory

With the emergence of critical educational reforms and agentic career perspective,unemployment and job insecurity are considered a major threat to government school teachers in Pakistan.Teachers in school are feeling critical pressure to secure their job and searching for social solutions to remain employable.In doing so,the social network may assist them to enhance their perception of employability and decrease their feelings of job insecurity.Social network enhances social interactions among individuals and is a good platform to capture employment opportunities.Prior studies on social ties in the domain of education are descriptive in nature and did not cover the important mechanism of social ties and job insecurity through perceived employability.Drawing on the social network theory,my research attempts to inspect the effects of social network ties on perceived employability and job insecurity and how perceived employability mediates the association between social ties and job insecurity.Moreover,the current study also pursues to scrutinize the moderation influence of information sharing in the association between social network ties and perceived employability.The objectives of current research were a)to investigate the influence of social ties on perceived employability and job insecurity among government school teachers,b)to inspect the moderating role of information sharing in the association between social ties and perceived employability to predict the specific framework for expediting the policymakers' decision making process at government level,c)how perceived employability mediates the association between social ties and job insecurity,and d)whether social ties improve school teachers perceived employability and minimize the job insecurity or not.I utilized the survey design to investigate the proposed model and structural associations.My study recruited school teachers from the government sector.Covariance-based structural equation modeling(SEM)and hierarchical linear regression were utilized to test the model and associations.The data was collected through a structured questionnaire using a convenience sampling technique.The findings revealed that strong tie is significantly associated to perceived employability and job insecurity.Similarly,the weak tie is significantly associated to perceived employability except for job insecurity.Perceived employability,moreover,significantly intervenes the association between both ties and job insecurity,and information sharing positively regulates the association between social network ties and perceived employability.The current study successfully extends the social network theory by empirically establishing the influence of network characteristics(strong and weak ties)on perceived employability and job insecurity.This study helps the school management and government policymakers to enhance teacher's perceived employability and job security by providing networking and training opportunities.Moreover,this research guides the government policymakers to formulate the education policies in accordance with the ground realities and take school management into confidence before implementing any educational reforms,so that teachers feel comfortable with such policies.The present research successfully covers the gap by empirically and theoretically establishing the association between social network ties and perceived employability,and social network ties and job insecurity which was largely overlooked in the literature of social employment management.Moreover,this is the first study which investigated information sharing as a moderating construct in the association between social ties and perceived employability.