"Softs Skills' Competencies and Moroccan Graduate

Employability."

Literature Review

● Asma Ait Elouarat

● Aicha Elaasri

English Department - Ibn Zohr University

A special thanks to our supervisor : Rachid Acim .

Introduction
In Morocco, employability has become an important concept given its relationship with higher
education. Unemployment rate is increasing especially among graduates. It has become essential
to differentiate employability and employment as it is commonly thought that the university from
which graduates obtained their diplomas is the most important factor determining - their
employability.
The integration of soft skills development into university curricula presents the first key of
student’s success career, universities setting calls for the essential pedagogical modifications
to
both the curricular content and professional practice to provide individuals with both the
necessary talents for "being" and the skills for "doing (Guerra-Baez, 2019). Learning these
soft skills facilitatesskillsacilitate graduates’enhancesbility and enhance their future careers
through two types of firsts. FirstThe firstning is the ‘‘inside training activities”, such as
roleplaying activities, team-building workshops, business simulation and, probem-solving
strategies. Second training belongs to the ‘‘outside training activities,"’ includin
volunteering and the entrepreneurial business projects that aim to essentially build strong soft
skills performances.

Avoid Plagiarism (see

https://www.ijafame.org/index.php/ijafame/article/download/734/663/

https://revues.imist.ma/index.php/JPM/article/view/35595

1 . Literature Review

This Literature Review will focus on the changes occurring in Higher Education to
cope with employers demands. It will define the two concepts (employability and identity) and the
view organizations have of
them, demonstrating the changes in the economy and their effects on the labor Market. Then it
will discuss the pressure of it Institutions face to include employability in their curriculum and
how they can do so. Finally it will discuss the consequences of those changes and worries of
some academic professionals. It will try to prove that, in order to best prepare students, HE
Institutions should teach graduates means to continuously update their knowledge and skills
so they can cope with the demands of employers.

https://www.academia.edu/3983291/
Graduate_Employment_A_Literature_Review

2.1 Context and definitions

2.1.1. Understanding Employability

According to the Cork Institute of Technology’s (CIT) Careers Service1 , employability is the ability to
obtain employment and maintain it. Dacre Pool & Sewell (2007) define employability as follows:
“Employability is having a set of skills, knowledge, understanding and personal attributes that make a
person more likely to choose and secure occupations in which they can be satisfied and successful.”
The concept of employability has been at the center of discussion from researchers, public officials
and employers. It has also been given more attention in the last decade worldwide in various
disciplines including career research, education, management, and psychology (Forrier and Sels,
2003). Graduates’ Employability Employability has always been central to employment. Yet, its
definition changes and develops throughout time depending on different aspects such as time,
context, targeted individuals and purposes. According to Versloot et al. (1998), during the past
decades, particular attention has been drawn towards ‘the society’, ‘the company’ and ‘the individual
worker’ when defining the term employability. The authors explain that ‘the societal’ aspect stands
for a country’s low unemployment rate and economic health. Hence, employability is an indicator of
the country’s positive employment status. Then, when talking about ‘the company aspect’,
employability is referred to as ‘matching the supply and demand in a changing organization’. Finally,
as for ‘the worker’s aspect, employability is the opportunity to land and keep a job in the labor
market. All three aspects lead to the same definition which is “the possibility to survive in the labor
market” as implied by the authors.

https://revues.imist.ma/index.php/JPM/article/download/35595/18166

Since late 1980s, the concept of employability received considerable attention around the globe due
to globalization and technological advancement. Many researchers attempted to simplify the
concept, mainly to facilitate communication between employers and governmental institutions, as
well as future employees to serve the common interest of societies as well as their economy. Hillage
and Pollard (1998), Harvey (2001) and Yorke (2006) have largely contributed to the context of higher
education on employability. Hillage and Pollard (1998) argue that employability depends on the
individual’s competencies and skills, and the way they manage to update their resources so they
would sustain their employment. It all relies on how individuals efficiently exploit and put forward
their knowledge to realize their potential, and at the same time, land and maintain their jobs. Harvey
(2001) explains that employability is not only about finding and securing a job, but rather lies in the
‘propensity’ of the graduates to find a job and making a distinction between what he calls ‘the
individual employability and institutional performance’. As for York (2006), his definition goes hand in
hand with that of Hillage and Pollard’s, in the sense that the individual’s employability is mostly
related to his/her ability to secure a job. York further adds that a ‘graduate job’ is ‘chosen’ and
related to “one’s achievements, understandings and personal attributes” and that what makes them
more employable, benefits them, their community and economy. Other researchers including Brown
et al. (2003) indicate that Hillage and Pollard’s definition disregards the labor market conditions and
needs that affect the graduates’ ability to find employment, which have nothing to do with the
graduates’ capabilities. They also add that employability is not an institutional success-related but
rather an individual accomplishment. As aforementioned, definitions of employability differ
depending on the various stakeholders’ perspectives.

3. Soft Skills

Over the last decades, research has largely focused on the hard skills and recognize how they are
required by the labour market (Balcar, 2016);only limited attention has been devoted to the
investigation of soft skills (Ciappei & Cinque, 2014). It has been argued that, in order to achieve a
positional advantage, graduates need to develop and acquire a combination of hard skills and soft
skills (Clarke, 2017). Many organizations recognize the fact that the technical skills of their
employees are not enough to achieve the organization’s goals, this is why employers of many
industries consider soft skills critical for business success (Stewart et al., 2016).
The function of a higher learning institution is not only to train a selected elite group of
school leavers, but to offer a focused educational experience this includes providing students the
required knowledge and skills to pursue their respective careers (Ramalu et al., 2013) however, many
academics and researchers agree that there is an increasing gap between soft skills expected by
employers and the level of soft skills possessed by graduates (Singh & Jaykumar, 2019). Soft skills
are difficult to measure and evaluate comparing to hard skills (Abujbara & Worley, 2018) but
employers usually prefer to recruit an individual who possesses soft skills in addition to hard skills
(Maclachlan, 2019). Later, Majid, Eapen & Aung (2019) pointed that there was evidence that soft
skills compete with hard skills in their ability to predict employability. Alongside, Charlton (2019)
argued that strengthening soft skills is one of the best investments a graduate can make for a future
career. Soft skills necessary at the workplace are communication, problem solving, teamwork,
decision making, leadership, critical thinking, time management & creativity (Lavender, 2019).
Tracing from several institutions, notably the European Union (EU) and the Organization for
Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) had proposed several titles for Soft Skills through
history as shown in Table 1 below. Specific Competences refers to hard skills, whereas Generic
Competences refers to soft skills.

https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/EJMBE-01-2019-
0011/full/html

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09504222221127213?icid=int.sj-
abstract.citing-articles.6

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Different-names-proposed-to-
define-soft-skills_tbl1_363520540

Table 1: Different names proposed to define soft skills.

Source: Cinque (2015)

Soft skills are personal attributes that enhance an individual's interactions, job performance
and hard skills that tend to be specific to a certain type of task or activity. It also refers to social
gracefulness, and fluency in languages, personal habits, friendliness and optimism that mark to
varying degrees. Soft skills complement hard skills, which are the technical requirements of a
profession. It can also be an important part of the organization especially if the organization is dealing
with people face to face (Pachauri & Yadav, 2014).Similarly, soft skills help people to adapt andbehave
positively so that they can deal with the challenges of their everyday life. In this instance, soft
skills relate to a considerable range of interpersonal and social qualities and competences, transferable
across economic sectors and industries (Hurrell, 2016; Deloitte Access Economics, 2017).
Soft skills development among students is essential for finding a job. Employers mostly look
for few specific soft skills during hiring new employees which include creativity, leadership, critical
thinking, communication, time management, teamwork, problem solving, etc. (Patacsil & Tablatin,
2017). The importance of these soft skills relies on considering them an important part of the
employability skills and knowing the definition of each of them will ease the learning process of each
skill as mentioned by many scholars as shown in Table 2 below:
 Table 2: Soft Employability Skills

Source: Amirrudin & Salleh (2016)/ Ornellas et al.(2018)/ Shivoro et al. (2017)/ Kashyap (2019)/
Sanyal & Hisam (2018)/ Li et al. (2019)

4 .The concept of graduate identity

Given the succession of articles and reports concerning graduate employability over
the past 15 years or it might be thought odd
that the question of graduate identity has not been settled by now. There are at least
three reasons why this has not happened. First, the concept of what a graduate is has
undoubtedly been affected by the growth of higher education: a graduate is no longer
drawn from a relatively narrow section of the population. Second, there is bound to
be a difference of perspective in terms of what universities think they are producing and what
employers expect. Finally, it seems reasonable to suppose that the very
concept itself—graduate identity—is subject to interpretation, depending on
employer, sector and size (at least). Our tentative research suggests that we may be
starting to reach a stage where the last of these problems, at least, is being addressed.
The idea of graduate identity has been explored by Len Holmes (2001). Holmes'
starting point is a dissatisfaction with the prevailing concept of graduate employability
in terms of skills acquisition. The skills approach simply cannot do justice to the
complexity of graduateness because of the assumption that skills performance must
be measurable and observable. Performance, Holmes suggests, depends upon
interpretation of a situation but this ability to interpret cannot be measured in any
straightforward sense. Interpretation itself is a complex activity depending on both
understanding a situation in terms of a practice and on understanding agents in terms
of their identity in the context of that practice. Thus, a practice provides the site within
which identity is constructed. This identity itself is not fixed since a practice itself may
legitimise a series of related identities depending upon context. Furthermore, a prac
tice also provides the site in which identities can be modified, revised and developed.
What Holmes's analysis does is to take us beyond the skills agenda to an examina
tion of the conditions of performance. It is not a naïve condemnation of performativity
as such, rather, it provides us with an analysis of the conditions of performativity. In
order to perform in the appropriate manner, a person needs to be able to do at least
two things: first, understand how a particular practice is enacted (the language and
vocabulary, the goals and purposes and the broader environment in which a practice
takes place) and, second, be able to construct for herself a legitimate identity. There
fore, when we examine graduate employability we should not think so much in terms
of skills and performance but more in terms of practice and identity as forming the
basis of that performance. This, however, presents a problem as far as the recruitment
of agents into a particular practice is concerned since, to varying degrees, those agents
will not be sufficiently aware of either the practice or the identity required. What is
required is that those agents have the potential to become cognisant of both practice
and identity, based on their current identity. In addition (and this is the peculiarity of
employment-based practices) agents also require the potential to perform. This
potential cannot always be based on actual performance or current cognisance of a
practice. Holmes' suggestion, then, is that graduate recruitment is an exploration of
current identity, in terms of graduateness, with a view to judging whether a person is
capable of assuming a role in respect of practice, identity and performance.
It therefore follows that graduate identity, of its very nature, is something that is
malleable and plastic. It cannot be something that is merely a series of attributes that
can be enumerated and ticked off. In an elaboration of his ideas, Holmes (2006)
observes that identity is to be taken 'non-essentially, as relational, the emergent
outcome of situated social processes...identity is thus socially constructed and
negotiated, always subject to possible contestation and so fragile' (p. 9). Thus, it may
be that the identity claimed by an individual is also one that is affirmed by others, as
recognisable; in this way convergence occurs. But of course, it may be that the
identity a graduate presents is not recognised, or at least not wholly recognised, by an
employer. Prior to taking on a graduate identity, an agent has a student identity
primarily formed through subject discipline and a range of student experiences. It
may well be that the student experiments with her identity during the course of
study—this being one of the great benefits of being an undergraduate. But once the
student emerges out of university, her identity is no longer under her control.
Emerging at last into the public domain, her identity as a graduate is shaped by social
and economic processes that are not under her control. And the chief agent in shaping
this identity—by virtue of economic power—is the employer.
Nevertheless, graduate identity is something that is inescapably 'owned' by the
graduate. What it is he or she owns and how it is owned is what we propose to exam
ine in later sections. Employers operate with a loose, tacit notion of graduate identity
which varies according to their own requirements, determined by size and sector. But
why do not employers simply select from their own practices a set of criteria against
which the graduate is evaluated? The reason is simple: employers can only assess
potential·, they are not able, in the main, to assess actual performance. Employers have
to figure out, on the basis of what is before them, how the graduate will perform in
the future. They need some kind of basis for conceiving this potential, and this basis
is provided through the idea of graduate identity, suitably refracted and diffused in
the light of their own requirements and experience of graduate recruits.

Conclusion
The problem of young graduates’ professional integration is an open debate that requires the
involvement and interest of all stakeholders, students, the educational system, companies and
administrations, in order to propose practical alternatives that can easily be applied to facilitate the
integration of graduates into the labor market. The employability of young people is a major concern
in our country, and the professional integration remains one of the major challenges to be addressed
at the national level. A mismatch between supply and demand in the Moroccan labor market is
witnessed.

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