Credentials, skills, job readiness
Labour markets differ in the importance attributed various characteristics: credentials, transversal skills, technical skills, job readiness, experience.
In recent years analysis of millions of online job vacancies yields new insights into how employers describe the characteristics they prioritise in selecting and recruiting candidates. How can these insights be used in career information and guidance for the people and for skills and qualifications policies? This debate can be illustrated from different sources.
Brown and Souto-Otero (2018) drew on Burning Glass’s Labour Insight for the United Kingdom UK), using over 21 millions jobs adverts posted online between January 2012 and December 2014.
- The results are surprising as only 18 per cent of job adverts specific a qualification requirement (pg 12). The data showed that 18 per cent of job adverts associated with managers, directors and senior officials, 22 per cent of those linked with professional occupations, 18 per cent of the job vacancies related to associate professionals and 17 per cent of adverts for skilled trades occupations specify a qualification requirement.
- This finding corroborates evidence that in the UK labour market there is a loose link between qualifications and the occupations linked with those occupations.
Where can the discussion lead us?
- Beyond formal academic credentials – what is the nature and specificity of employer requirements?
- To what extent are credentials / qualifications being “devalued” by employers in recruitment processes and decisions? Is this question sufficiently illustrated by the data from job vacancies in a context of growing educational attainment and mass certification?
Brown and Souto-Otero (2018, pg 19) argue:
“If credentials are not the crucial differentiating criterion on which candidates are judged in the UK labour market, this questions the future role of credentials in the labour market and wider society in the UK. This is not because credentials are no longer important, but because they cannot determine how recruitment operates: they can no longer be seen as the differentiating factor in employer hiring decisions, in the way the theories analysed imply. Our analysis reaffirms that it is a mistake to place such a single-sided focus on formal academic credentials to understand how the labour market operates: when it comes to the examination of the role of education in occupational achievement there has been too much emphasis on credentials, and too little on the ‘other stuff’.
However, even when credentials are not required in job specifications they may still be ‘essential’ to enter the competition as employer’s screen for qualifications as a way of eliminating applicants when they confront large numbers of applications.”
Further reading:
- Brown P. and Souto-Otero M. (2018), The end of credential society? An analysis of the relationship between education and the labour market using big data. Available here.
Please log in or sign up to comment.