Construction of an employability scale : competencies and personal, academic and organizational abilities / Construção de uma escala de empregabilidade: competências e habilidades pessoais, escolares e organizacionais

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2006

RESUMO

The recent usage of the expression Employability refers to skills, abilities and general attitudes that a person is expected to have in order to gain and keep an occupation or an employment. The growing demands of working qualifications bringing an increase of research in this area, particularly in the study of personal features, beliefs and attitudes that can exert influence on the efficacy for conquering a job. This study had the purpose of constructing and validating an Employability Scale designed to evaluate factors related to a positive result in the search of an employment. The initial sample comprised 628 university students, both male and female, attending administrative, engineering and psychology courses from public and private institutions in the state of São Paulo. The instrument had initially 88 items referring to 11 factors/variables, applied in a collective way in a type of four-point Likert scale, in which the descriptors were "surely yes", "I believe so", "I believe not" and "surely not". Nine months after the first application the respondents were invited by e-mail to inform whether they had jobs or not within their area of study, which resulted in 274 answers. This sample was the basis for the validation of the instrument. The statistical analyses allowed the redefinition of the scale obtaining 57 items arranged in the following four factors/variables: Efficacy of Search; Difficulty of Search; Optimism; Responsibility and Decision. The statistical values were sufficient to confirm the trustworthiness of the scale and to recommend it for future researches. Among the most significant results, it showed that subjects with a greater score of self-efficacy in the search of a job manage to find a position faster, and that positive attitudes such as confidence, extrovert and self-esteem were meaningful differentials to obtain an employment. It was understood that the conquest of a job is more influenced by personality traits than biographic characteristics. Engineering students showed a better performance than the administrative and psychology ones. Also, graduates from private institutions had a better total punctuation. It can be concluded that the proposed Employability Scale managed to adequately discriminate the behaviors related to a positive result in the search of a job. It is worth stressing that the groupings arranged in this study showed an important relationship with professional success. The instrument satisfactory differentiated the successful participants from the ones that did not succeed. The creation of the Employability Scale tried to understand more about the relevant variables for professional success and is intended to contribute to the areas of Psychology of Work and Psychologic Evaluation.

ASSUNTO(S)

empregabilidade escolas industrial psychology employability estudantes universitários schools college students psychological assessment avaliação psicológica psicologia organizacional

ACESSO AO ARTIGO

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