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Introduction
Contemporary society faces challenges that are more testing than ever due to the fast pace of development and the interconnectedness of different facets of life. The landscape of vocations and professions is also changing due to the increasing and significant role that technology plays. Furthermore, the key role for economic stability and progress is the utilization of the human resource, and whereas in the past job security was the desired state, in today’s turbulent employment system, the key for sustainability is employability. Employability is the ability to acquire employment when needed, or as Rothwell and Arnold (2007) suggested, it is the ability to keep the job one has or to get the job one wants. For individuals, perceived employability is one’s perceptions of the “possibilities of obtaining and maintaining employment” (Vanhercke et al., 2014, p. 593). The increased relevance of employability for a sustained society is the result of the changes in both career systems and the psychological contract between individuals and organizations (Baruch and Rousseau, 2018). Employability is shaped by many factors, but education is a major determinant of employability, in particular for graduates.
As new graduates need to continuously manage their employability and secure careers in an ever challenging and global labor market, understanding and exploring the student perspective of how higher education (HE) can enhance or limit their opportunities of employment is crucial, as their views are neither well known, nor well researched (Donald et al., 2017a; Jackson, 2015; Tymon, 2013). The relationship between education and employability has become a more dichotomous and tenuous concept as many graduates leaving university today are often underemployed (Okay-Somerville and Scholarios, 2014). Moving from education into the labor market is a major career transition, which requires scholarly attention (Onyishi et al., 2015; Pinto and Ramalheira, 2017), and to date has received limited empirical evidence relating to students’ perceptions and the impact it has on their future careers. The terms “employability” and “perceived employability” are used interchangeably throughout the paper to maintain flow for the reader. A key contribution of our paper is the representation of students from a variety of degree disciplines. This is in contrast to existing literature which tends to focus on students from a singular degree discipline (e.g. Hsieh...