Integrating a dispositional and a competence-based approach to study graduates’ perceived employability: Preliminary evidence from the University of Florence

The recent changes in the characteristics of labour market and workplace demand have been renewed the interest on graduate employability. The emerging world of work calls for flexibility, versatility, and creativity, traits (features) not traditionally required of an employee. As a consequence, over the last decades, the idea of career as an evolutionary sequence of professional activities and positions held by a person that leads over time to a progressive improvement of attitudes, information and individual skills has drastically turned. Becoming the agent of his own career (Sullivan & Baruch, 2009), graduates are expected to develop individual-level factors that are likely to make the difference for their employability. For young graduates experiencing the transition to work, this switch from employment to employability are urgently asked them to be equipped with a ready to use sets of “transferable” competences, in order to make the transition from university to work as easy and quick as possible. Extant research considers individual dispositions and competences to be the main blocks affecting perceived employability. The former are proposed by scholars of the dispositional approach (Fugate et al., 2004; Fugate & Kinicki 2008; Rothwell et al., 2008), while the latter have been brought to light from researchers of the competence-based approach (Van der Heijde & Van der Heijden, 2006; Clarke, 2017). Answering to the call for more research that integrates the two perspectives (see Vanhercke et al., 2014), this study offers an empirical investigation looking at graduates’ dispositions (their work identity) and competences (their self-awareness) whose interaction is likely to shape graduates’ perceived employability.