Graduate Employability

Employability refers to the ability of qualified graduates to gain their first employment opportunity, maintain it, and even gain a new employment opportunity whenever need arises. Employability depends on specific skill sets, knowledge, and personal attributes which qualify an individual to select the kind of opportunities that will offer them job satisfaction (McQuaid and Lindsay, 2015). Ideally, employability depends on individual knowledge, personal skills, and attributes. Career ownership is one of the features which inform employability because it is only an individual that is responsible for his or her career development satisfaction (McQuaid and Lindsay, 2015).Employability also depends on the issue of continuous learning because clients expect employees to gather new skills in response to changing technology and business operation strategies.

Employability Skills and Personal Attributes

The basic skills which increase an individual’s employability in the 21^st century include creativity and innovation, as well as excellent communication skills. When it comes to communication skills, employers occasionally look for individuals with the capacity to pass their message across clearly and coherently (Archer and Davison, 2018). Communication skills also entail an individual’s ability to listen and give weight to the opinions presented by fellow employees. The ability to seek other people’s feedback actively and consider it in the decision-making process defines what it takes for one to be considered employable (Archer and Davison, 2018). Communication emerges as a dynamic skill which develops over time, calling for aspects such as multicultural competence. It is critical to ascertain whether the people involved will be comfortable with a certain communication approach before settling on the most accommodating facet.

Creativity and innovation stand out as essential skills as well, especially at a time when companies seek new ways of gaining and sustaining competitive advantage. Successful organizations depend on the generation of the best ideas, such that they outdo their competitors. Employers always desire to know whether the talent that they are about to hire will bring new ideas to the table and how they will resolve challenges as they emerge (Verran, 2010).Good ideas appear in all scales, with the inference that an individual must not necessarily generate the best ideas to stand out as an employable person.

The personal attributes which increase employability, on the other hand, include emotional intelligence and teamwork. Emotional intelligence refers to the capability of individuals to understand and manage their emotions in response to changing organizational needs (Dacre and Sewell, 2017). Emotions vary with regard to the environment, but employable individuals must discern the most suitable ways of exploiting such emotions to contribute towards the achievement of organizational objectives. Teamwork, on the other hand, refers to an individual’s ability to work alongside other people. It is not all individuals that are best-wired to work in a team, but employees must develop the kind of tolerance which goes into accomodating the weaknesses of others (Dacre and Sewell, 2017).Organizations may use different languages and besides, individuals sometimes come from different cultural orientations, but one must exhibit tolerance in a bid to prove that he or she is capable of working in diverse teams.

Developing Employability Skills

There are multiple practical steps which go into the development of creativity and innovation. Creativity is more of a muscle which people develop by exercising or stretching their limits and potentials when it comes to problem solving and the generation of new ideas (McQuaid and Lindsay, 2015).In a bid to develop creativity, the first step that I will take is to trust my capability. The human mind is an inimitable and limitless machine whose functionality depends on how well individuals utilize and stretch it (McQuaid and Lindsay, 2015).Self-assurance is the first step towards unlocking creativity because the development of negative perceptions always brings along a psychological barrier which impedes the achievement of personal goals (McQuaid and Lindsay, 2015). In a bid to ensure that I grow my creative potential, therefore, I must exercise the right parts of the brain through self-assurance to ensure that I unlock the greatest cognitive tools.

Associating with the most creative people is another strategy that goes into the unleashing of innovation potentials. Creativity emerges as a contagious feature because human beings are social animals who learn through modeling. Various people have different ideas and thinking patterns, and relying on their positive attributes positively affects an individual’s ability to come up with meaningful ideas and solutions to everyday problems (McQuaid and Lindsay, 2015).People who strive to exercise my imagination potentials, for instance, will challenge my cognitive abilities as opposed to those who seem contented with my thinking abilities. It emerges that there is no single custodian of knowledge, a reason why sharing helps in unlocking the best potential.

Technological Environment and Business

Technological innovation refers to an effective implementation of technical ideas with the goal of achieving the organization’s short-term and long-term goals. When it comes to technological innovation, it is important to delineate between innovation and invention because institutions must not necessarily come up with new ideas before leveraging from the latest technologies (Baden-Fuller and Haefliger, 2013). Technological innovation, therefore, refers to the use social capital and complementary assets to ensure that institutions have the capacity to meet their needs with minimal effort, capital, and time. It is a feature which is designed to enhance competitiveness and customer satisfaction, irrespective of the niche within which a company operates.

Impact of Robotics and Social Media

Some of the best technological innovations which continuously contribute to business disruption in the contemporary corporate environment include the use of social media platforms, the internet of things IoT, and robotics (Baden-Fuller and Haefliger, 2013).Robots, for example, emerge as more efficient and highly effective substitutions to human capital, explaining why the major technological companies such as Google are gradually shifting to the use of robotics (Dirican, 2015). These are machines which are easily programmed and unless there are technical anomalies, the machines reduce the possibility of accidents and mistakes significantly as opposed to human beings (Dirican, 2015). Robotics stand out as smart machines which learn in the process of executing everyday tasks, a reason why they get smarter with time and reduce the kind of errors associated with employees. According to Geiger and colleagues (2013), it is also essential to note that robotics could contribute to long-term structural unemployment, a reason why companies must exercise caution when it comes to replacing employees with robots because it goes against corporate social responsibility initiatives.

Social media technology, on the other hand, presents a new opportunity for businesses to reach to a large number of potential clients at a cheaper advertising prize. As more and more customers resort to referrals and online reviews before making purchases, companies have to establish a strong social media presence in order to survive. Bolton and coleagues (2013) report that the advantage with the establishment of these platforms is that they ease the burden of marketing and the work that sales agents have to handle. Similarly, social media platforms act as data repositories and through big data analytics, companies analyze customer behaviors as a means of determining the precise product and service differentiation strategies that go into building brand loyalty. Google is one of the companies which use social media platforms to gather data and perform analytics (Bolton et al., 2013). In Google’s search engine, for example, people receive content recommendations based on their behavioral attributes, and this gives the illusion of a company’s sensitivity to the needs of the customers.

The internet of thingsstands out as system of interrelated technological devices, implying that companies can interlink all their technological devices for a seamless flow of information. It is one of the most influential technological innovations in the corporate world at the moment connect people, animals, digital objects, and machines. People find it relatively easy to monitor their homes right from the comfort of their offices, and it is one of the applications which contribute towards the achievement of work-life balance (Bolton et al., 2013).People receive unique identifiers, and this is inherent in Google’s case, whereby employees use the identifiers to transfer information across the entire network. Identified as the best employer globally, the company offers its employees unique identifiers which they use to transfer information across different departments and computing devices. It also infers that people could work remotely, provided that they have the identifiers needed to share information with colleagues and superiors in the office (Bolton et al., 2013). Google strives to create an ergonomic working environment whereby employees are capable of achieving work-life balance, but it is the use of such technologies which enables the employees to balance between their work and families because they can work remotely.

Whereas technologies such as the internet of things, robotics, and social media platforms threaten the employability of people, therefore, they also enhance the efficiency of business operations. Companies such as Google sought the best ways of balancing between technology and people, a reason why they brought on board the kind of technologies which enable companies to achieve work-life balance while executing their job with ease and contributing towards the company’s profitability. It emerges as the perfect definition of technological innovation because companies must continuously transform in response to changing technologies as they also strive to accommodate the existing workforce because employee engagement and retention emerges as a critical part of corporate social responsibility initiatives.

References

Archer, W. and Davison, J., 2018. Graduate employability. The council for industry and Higher Education.

Baden-Fuller, C. and Haefliger, S., 2013.Business models and technological innovation. Long range planning, 46(6), pp.419-426.

Bolton, R.N., Parasuraman, A., Hoefnagels, A., Migchels, N., Kabadayi, S., Gruber, T., KomarovaLoureiro, Y. and Solnet, D., 2013.Understanding Generation Y and their use of social media: a review and research agenda. Journal of service management, 24(3), pp.245-267.

Dacre Pool, L. and Sewell, P., 2017. The key to employability: developing a practical model of graduate employability. Education+ Training, 49(4), pp.277-289.

Dirican, C., 2015. The impacts of robotics, artificial intelligence on business and economics. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 195, pp.564-573.

Geiger, A., Lenz, P., Stiller, C. and Urtasun, R., 2013. Vision meets robotics: The KITTI dataset. The International Journal of Robotics Research, 32(11), pp.1231-1237.

McQuaid, R.W. and Lindsay, C., 2015. The concept of employability. Urban studies, 42(2), pp.197-219.

Verran, J., 2010. Encouraging creativity and employability skills in undergraduate microbiologists. Trends in microbiology, 18(2), pp.56-58.