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The purpose of this paper is to explore youth graduate unemployment and unemployability as a development problem in South Africa.

This exploratory study applied a qualitative research method to elicit the perspectives of youth graduates regarding their unemployment and unemployability. A total of 30 face-to-face semi-structured interviews were conducted with unemployed youth who recently graduated from five South African universities.

The results indicate that, as youth graduate unemployment increases in South Africa, graduates become hopeless in terms of securing employment. The participants attributed their unemployment to multidimensional factors that include limited demand in the labour market, skills mismatch and lack of work experience.

This research exclusively focused on graduates from five South African universities; hence, the results of this small qualitative study cannot be generalised to the entire South African population. However, this paper offers important insights that may form the foundation for a nationwide study on a related topic.

This paper presents important insights that influence policy makers, government and other relevant stakeholders to develop alternative solutions to youth graduate unemployment. This paper recommends that government should play a critical role in bridging the gap between higher education and industry in order to address youth graduate unemployment. It also calls for a more cooperative effort between government, higher learning institutions and employers in order to create job opportunities for youth graduates in South Africa.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the problems faced by unemployed and underemployed graduate students in a small European country. It focusses on the way young people adjust to unemployment and underemployment and on the specific strategies they use to enhance their employability. Various aspects of these strategies as they relate to student decision making and analysis are discussed. The role of new skills and competencies in managing graduate unemployment is examined.

Qualitative research was conducted with 15 graduate students of the Education Department of the University of Cyprus. In-depth interviews and focus-group interviews were used to collect data.

The results indicate that the main strategy used by respondents in order to enhance their prospects of employment is the acquisition of additional skills and competencies. A secondary strategy is the pursuit of employment opportunities abroad. Student decisions and perspectives appear to be optimistic, partially rational, placed within a short-term horizon and influenced by the belief in the investment value of education.

The findings are qualitative and cannot be considered to be representative of the population. However, they allow an in-depth analysis of the way a group of students experiences and manages unemployment and underemployment.

The way young people deal with unemployment and underemployment has not been investigated in many studies, especially in relation to the degree to which graduates formulate specific strategies in order to manage the transition from the university to the world of work. Students’ and graduates’ perceptions regarding the association between skills and employment can provide the basis for more informed planning and policy making in higher education.

The structural links of non‐formal education to the world of work and graduate unemployment in Nigeria are examined. The role of government′s stop‐gap measures and the inadequacies of the formal educational institution are discussed. These policies resulted in the worsening of graduate unemployment, labour market segmentation and élite class formation, while only marginally increasing employment. Non‐formal education represented a more meaningful approach to solving graduate unemployment, and matching skills with job needs, than the contemporary approach.

The purpose of this paper is to report on a study that investigated the feasibility of a women-only professional accounting firm in the city of Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that could help reduce female graduate unemployment in the city. Practically, the study sought to find out if, and under what conditions, a women-only professional accounting firm in Al Ain might be useful in providing employment for women in professional accountancy and facilitating the entry of female graduates into the job market by providing them with professional training. Theoretically, the study sought to add to the literature on positive discrimination to help women’s job prospects.

The study followed a qualitative research approach. It sought to show some specific connections between various professional, cultural, and economic factors by crystallising them through a hypothetical, innovative solution to the problem of local female unemployment, namely, a women-only professional accounting firm in a location of limited employment opportunities. It did so by investigating the views of male and female accounting graduates and other stakeholders.

The main finding is that the model women-only professional accounting firm could be used to overcome family objections to female graduate employment by removing the requirement that women work a long distance away from their families. The study also showed the deep cultural entrenchment of gendered stereotypes of female professionals.

The study could have had a larger sample size with the survey, but it is important to note that this was not the focus of the study. However, the strength of the paper is in the qualitative aspect of canvassing views from various stakeholders.

The study brought to light key opportunities and challenges for policy makers who are seeking to address female graduate unemployment in economically remote locations.

The paper adds to the literature on positive discrimination for female job seekers in an adverse cultural and economic context.

In 1993, the Responsive College Unit (RCU), an independent educational market research organization based in Blackburn, was commissioned by the East Lancashire Training and Enterprise Council (ELTEC) to evaluate the labour market experiences of graduates from Lancashire. Describes the survey which followed almost 6,500 graduates; 40 per cent of the entire graduate cohorts for the period 1991‐93 returned questionnaires. Suggests that the results shed new light on the plight of graduates seeking employment in the current recession and also identified important factors which determine the extent to which local economies like Lancashire are able to retain the skills of their most qualified young people. Describes the main findings from the research and identifies the picture that emerged of the current realities of the transition from higher education to work.

This article is intended to give a detailed if summary account of recent statistics and research on the graduate labour market. The past five years have seen renewed interest in links between higher education and the economy. Graduate manpower statistics can therefore be seen not just as records of graduate deployment but also as means of assessing claims that have been made about higher education and the labour market. Where possible this account of the statistics includes a brief reference to how they can be used in this type of debate.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether personality traits play a significant role in understanding students’ self-perceived employability and test if the associations are influenced by the student’s job market appraisal. This is important as perceptions about one’s employability hold invaluable importance for students in uncertain job environments as they might need to form strategies to cope with unemployment until they find a job.

Data were collected from 296 using a questionnaire survey approach and analyzed using hierarchical regression to test the hypothesized associations.

The findings showed that agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience are positive and significantly associated with self-perceived employability. Also, job market appraisal played a momentous role in predicting self-perceived employability both directly and via interaction with conscientiousness and openness to experience.

The present study is valuable to different stakeholders such as educators, employers and students as it identifies the personality dispositions that should be encouraged among students while also indicating the need for fostering student’s reappraisal of uncertain job markets.

This study presents new evidence on the application of the appraisal theory by indicating the interaction between personality traits and cognitive appraisal. This advances the current theoretical understanding of the mechanism through which personality traits can best explain individual differences in self-perceived employability.

This paper seeks to highlight the role of entrepreneurship education in encouraging the growth of graduate entrepreneurship in the UK to help overcome the over‐supply of university graduates in a very difficult employment market. This paper aims to discuss the design principle for entrepreneurship education that facilitates graduate entrepreneurship, and the design methodology that allows multi‐faculty collaboration in the provision of entrepreneurship programmes.

This paper begins with the conceptualisation of design principles and frameworks based on current concepts found in the literature, followed by practitioner‐based reflection to shed insights into the process of developing entrepreneurship education in higher education institutions (HEIs).

The authors have developed the “30/70 methodology” to guide the future design of entrepreneurship education, and the “80/20 methodology” to support cross‐faculty entrepreneurship programmes to serve non‐business students. Factors that impede or support academic entrepreneurship and effective integration of entrepreneurship programmes in HEIs are discussed.

This paper shares the authors' experiences, and their unique design principles and methodology to support the development of education for entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how long-run unemployment of former apprentices depends on the size of their training firm and their ability.

The authors use a large administrative data set that follows graduated apprentices during their working life. They show that training in large and medium-sized firms is associated with considerably less unemployment. This, however, may simply be the result of sorting processes, i.e. larger training firms with higher wage levels attract and choose the most able young workers. Therefore, the authors use a proxy for ability to estimate and control for the impact of ability on long-run unemployment. They assume that rank-order tournaments for the most attractive training positions take place and take into account an institutional peculiarity of the German training system, the empirically observable regional immobility of apprentices. Accordingly, they use a region-specific ranking based on training plants’ size or median wages, respectively, to proxy for apprentices’ ability.

The negative association between training plant size and long-run unemployment is muted but still statistically well determined even after controlling for the rank of an individual’s training firm in the local plant size distribution or the local wage distribution, respectively. Thus, the rank itself is a predictor for long-run unemployment of apprentices. The fact that the position in the local size distribution matters conditional on plant size shows that there is a local competition for training places.

Lacking mobility may increases aggregate unemployment, as mobility reduces the risk of unemployment.

The results imply that supporting regional mobility of young workers, e.g., by informing them better about existing mobility subsidies and dormitories for apprentices and by creating additional mobility incentives is warranted.

This is the first study to investigate long-run unemployment of former apprentices. Furthermore, the authors develop new variables to proxy for ability.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse whether there is an adjustment between the Portuguese higher education supply and the needs of the labour market.

An empirical study is performed, using a quantitative approach, relating the job offers for graduates registered at the employment centres and the number of graduates by higher education institutions (HEIs) in Portugal, at an aggregate level and NUT II regions, by areas of education and training, over the 2003–2018 period. To understand how job offers and graduates are correlated, bilateral Spearman's rank correlation coefficients were calculated.

The results show that, in large groups of educational areas, exists a match between the higher education supply and the labour market needs, with an emphasis on the fields of “social sciences, business and law”, “engineering, manufacturing and construction” and “health and welfare”. However, at a more disaggregated level, a mismatch in the sub-areas of “teacher training and education science” and “computing” was found since labour market needs are much greater than graduates by HEIs and the two variables are moving in opposite directions.

The study has revealed important aspects that the educational policy should take into account in order to create the conditions for a gradual adjustment to the labour market needs. Also, the results demonstrate that some measures should be taken in short/medium term to avoid problems in the medium/long term.

One implication of this empirical study was the elaboration of a correspondence table to standardise the data analysis units from two different sources. As this correspondence did not exist prior to this study, this output is a relevant contribution to the research field. Another important contribution is the demonstration of a mismatch in some educational sub-areas that deserves special attention from educational policymakers.