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To discuss employability and skills requirements for graduates from a graduate recruiter's point of view.

To look at key graduate recruitment organisations and explain what skills programmes are available to graduates. Also looks at continued development and what employers may be able to do in the future to improve skills?

There are transferable skills that employers like to see in a graduate and these can vary according to type of role; also, in general, graduates are keen to develop their skills further. There are organisations to help graduates improve these employability skills like Graduate Advantage and higher education institutions.

Of value to employers looking to recruit graduates, who need to be aware of what types of programmes are available to graduates. It is valuable to graduates, who need to look at their own skills and improve their employability.

Examines the differences between graduates and non‐graduates from the viewpoint of managerial potential and in the light of the question, “Can graduate calibre people be equipped with the same skills by a limited period of training, without university experience?” Reviews the case of a professional self‐management programme, common to graduates and non‐graduates, which concentrates on the graduate skills of debating, thinking, analysis, research and resource investigation skills, and confidence. Concludes that each group is a mirror image of the other and each can learn greatly from the other.

Education focused on the creation of a knowledge base but not on how to bring such knowledge into practice had caused graduate architects to encounter reality shock and fail to perform during building contract administration. Although the effect of performance barriers on competence development is empirically supported, less is known about the mechanisms that explain this effect. Overcoming barriers for graduate architects is crucial while supporting building contract administrators and acquiring professional qualifications. To address this issue, we propose the mediating role of CCA skills as a possible explanation of the relationship between performance barriers and competence development of graduate architects.

A survey was conducted among graduate architects in Klang Valley. In total, one hundred and twenty-seven usable questionnaires were returned and analyzed using descriptive analysis and regression analysis.

Mediation results indicate that performance barriers have a significant positive influence on competence development through CCA skills in claims and legal matters management, project management, communication and relationship management, quality assessment and management, and design management.

The present study contributes to the construction contract administration literature by integrating performance barriers and the CCA skills model. This advances our understanding of performance barriers and CCA skills engendering competence development of graduate architects.

Utilizing work task data drawn from the OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills of 2011–2012 and 2014–2015, we derive a new skills-based indicator of graduate jobs, termed ISCO(HE)2008, for 31 countries. The indicator generates a plausible distribution of graduate occupations and explains graduates’ wages and job satisfaction better than hitherto existing indicators. Unlike with the traditional classifier, several jobs in major group 3 “Technicians and Associate Professionals” require higher education in many countries. Altogether, almost a third of labor is deployed in graduate jobs in the 31 countries, but with large cross-national differences. Industry and establishment-size composition can account for some of the variation. In addition, two indicators of the relative quality of the higher education system also contribute to the variation in the prevalence of graduate jobs across countries.

The role of women in the architecture and design industry is aligned with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, which aims to increase the participation of women in the Saudi construction sector. Saudi female graduates from architectural and design schools are currently working in most of the mega projects underway in Riyadh; however, they face certain challenges at the beginning of their working lives due to the gap between the skills acquired during an architectural and design education and those needed for employability.

This study evaluates the employability skills of Saudi female cooperative education (COOP) students and graduates from architectural schools in Riyadh. A quantitative approach is taken, and two questionnaires are administered: one for female COOP students and graduates from the college of architecture and design in one of the private universities in Riyadh and the other for employers from different architectural firms and governmental organizations in Riyadh. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the research data.

The research findings suggest that practical experiences and on-site observation activities should be provided, and sustainability solutions and applications should be incorporated into the curriculum to bring architecture education closer to the architectural profession and highlight the role of universities in supporting graduates' skills development.

It is worth mentioning that the results of this study were based on the survey distributed to architecture and interior female students in a private university in Saudi Arabia. The number of students surveyed in this study is not large enough to generalize the survey results to the entire population of architecture and interior design students in the kingdom and in the world. The study will be extended to include more participants from male and female students in other universities in Saudi Arabia to investigate the gaps in employability skills in the field of architecture and interior design in the Kingdom.

The study has practical and policy implications for further development and upcoming challenges as the labor market seems to improve and innovate every day. The study suggests providing practical experiences and onsite observation activities and incorporating sustainability solutions and applications into the curriculum.

The originality of this study is that it focuses on the importance of some employability skills, such as research and budgeting aspects, Sustainability solutions and applications for students that have not been mentioned in the previous studies.

This paper aims to seek accounting graduates' perspectives on the demand for accounting in their workplaces, on the gaps in accounting education (AE), and on the future of the accounting profession, inspired by the new definition of accounting proposed by Carnegie et al. (2021, 2022, 2023a), to adopt a strong focus on sustainable development goals (SDGs) in AE to inculcate tertiary students with the skills that lead them to approach and apply accounting as a multidimensional technical, social and moral (TSM) practice.

The online qualitative survey was distributed to 100 randomly selected New Zealand accounting graduates in order to gather insights from their workplaces. All responses from the 30 graduates who completed the questionnaire underwent qualitative analysis using Leximancer software, which automatically identifies high-level concepts and insights and offers interactive visualizations without bias.

The graduates’ experiences underscore the ongoing significance of technical skills in the New Zealand workplace. They emphasized the lack of non-technical skills training, stressed the necessity of diverse business knowledge and highlighted the importance of automation and digital skills.

The implications for transforming AE involve adopting an activist approach to integrate a TSM perspective into teaching and learning and being open to an interdisciplinary approach to expose tertiary students to the impact of accounting on sustainable development, including collaboration with professional bodies for real-world experiences.

The importance of engaging with SDG-related narratives is stressed to stimulate further discussion, debate and research aimed at identifying practical solutions for AE as a facilitator for SDGs in realizing accounting as a TSM practice.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and gain recent insights into the extent to which skills expectation gap exists from the perspective of employers in a Pacific Island country, including the competencies perceived essential within the work context of accountants and the support provided by employers to accounting graduates to address the skills expectation gap.

Using the expectation–performance gap framework developed by Bui and Porter (2010), this study collects and analyses data via semi-structured interviews with employers at chartered accounting firms, large- and medium-sized commercial and industrial firms in Fiji.

Majority of the employers indicated that graduates from the Fijian universities are adequately prepared and have acquired the necessary attributes to perform at the workplace. However, employers expect universities to do a little more in terms of developing confidence and improving ability to apply theoretical knowledge to practice. The findings also outline that the institutional-, social- and student-related constraints directly affect the quality of graduates, which are not in control of academics.

It is noted that graduate capabilities are developed over two different learning environments. This study focused on how universities prepared graduates to perform at the workplace from the perspective of employers. This serves as a basis for future research to investigate effectiveness of trainings provided by employers to graduates to enable them into becoming successful accounting professionals.

This study adds clarifications to the debate on academic–practice gap by providing recent insights into the extent to which graduates demonstrate capabilities to perform in the accounting profession, the prevailing issues with graduate capabilities and the employers’ contribution towards strengthening graduate capabilities.

Graduate underemployment continues to be a serious and growing problem in the UK. Yet, there is a scarcity of research that has attempted to identify the nature, extent and specificity of the problem. This study examines the opportunity for skill use (skill requirements of the job, personal skill levels, congruence between these two measures) and intrinsic (job, career, life satisfaction) and extrinsic career success (salary, promotion) amongst underemployed graduates. Appropriately employed graduates (those who were in jobs for which they required their degree) were used as a comparison group. Questionnaire data were collected from 203 business graduates in the UK. The key findings suggested that underemployed graduates reported significantly lower levels of opportunity for skill use and intrinsic (job, career, life satisfaction) and extrinsic career success (salary). The implications of these findings and avenues for further research are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between skills and employability of business graduates. The study also examines the moderating effect of ‘social mobility factors’ in the ‘skills–employability’ relationship.

A quantitative positivist approach was undertaken to test the hypotheses. Business graduates from two universities in a developing country responded to a questionnaire about their perceptions of different sets of employability factors. Partial least squares (PLS)-based structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to examine the relationships between skills and employability of business graduates.

The findings show that both soft skills and technical skills are positively related to employability, which is consistent with prior studies. The findings also indicate that social mobility factors play a significant role in employability.

The study is based on data from two public universities, and its findings need to be interpreted with care as universities differ in their size, area of concentration and ownership structure.

The findings advance the evidence of graduate employability of business students. Based on these results, university authorities, policymakers, teachers and business graduates will benefit from the findings related to students preparedness for the competitive global job market.

The study's findings contribute to business graduates' skill set development in the developing countries that share a similar education system, culture and values.

Supply and demand characteristics, influenced by the pre- and post-oil economy of Oman, have caused unemployment challenges to Omani graduates. The purpose of this paper is to explore the most common graduate attributes as they apply to graduates’ employability in Oman.

The study uses the principles of “hypotheticodeductive logic” and inferential analysis using a combination of focus group and survey approach. Using an online mode of data collection targeting the past three cohorts of graduates from a prominent University in Oman, the study analyses and presents several insights into graduate attributes and employability issues.

The research finds that the domain of educational institutions in Oman is mainly restricted to the basic generic skills in developing the graduate attributes. Students’ perspectives on employers’ selection criteria reveal that computing skills, the ability to work in teams, English language proficiency, prior training, and the graduate’s personality are the five most significant employability skills in Oman. Currently, there is little interaction among higher educational institutions, alumni, and industry in Oman for boosting the employability of graduates.

The study is highly relevant from the policy perspective in Oman. All the stakeholders in Oman need to come together to define employability skills prudently by expanding the domain beyond generic skills.

The study is important in the context of Oman due to a shortage of studies that look at the graduate attributes from the lens of employability besides addressing concerns about unemployment.