Employability

Longitudinal Study

The Project Team at Glasgow Caledonian is housed within the Division of Psychology and, from March 2008, has also involved researchers from the Centre for Research in Lifelong Learning (CRLL). The team are responsible for undertaking a longitudinal study which is examining the ‘university to employment transitions’ of graduates from the partner institutions. The study is charting the changes in perceptions of employability of a cohort of students on non-vocational degree courses as they move out into the world of full-time work from their final year at university. The study consists of an initial final year online experience survey, followed by a series of four follow-up questionnaires and interviews over an 18 month period. The non-vocational degree programmes include:

Psychology
Social Sciences
Computing
Bioscience
History
Mathematics
Physics

The purpose of the survey is to gather information which will allow us to better understand the processes involved in making the transitions from university to employment and related factors, and subsequently to feed information arising from this study back into the employability enhancing curriculum. Information will be collected which relates to the educational and social characteristics of participants, their plans after graduation, engagement with career development activity, part-time employment and voluntary activities, and perspectives of work-related learning activity.
It is hoped that this study will provide valuable, and, to date, unique insights into the trajectory of job uptake, the nature of jobs taken, experiences of first jobs, career planning and career changes, insights which can then be fed back to and incorporated within undergraduate employability modules and other initiatives aimed at enhancing student employability.

The findings from this strand of the AUL@W project will therefore make an important contribution to the issues that the overall project is addressing.

Update on Longitudinal Study

All of the fieldwork phases of the study have now been completed. The initial final year online experience survey, completed by 353 students from the three partner institutions - the Universities of Glasgow and St Andrews, and Glasgow Caledonian University - was undertaken in March 2007. Since then four follow-up phases with a sample of volunteers who had taken part in the initial survey have been carried out. Phase One, involving 132 participants was conducted in June 2007; Phase Two, involving 106 participants was conducted in March 2008. These two phases involved the gathering of both quantitative and qualitative data. Between November 2008 and January 2009, Phase Three of data collection was undertaken. This involved the gathering of quantitative data and was collected via a ‘SurveyMonkey’ online questionnaire and 89 participants completed this phase. The fourth and final phase of fieldwork was recently undertaken in April and May 2009. This involved a representative sub-sample of respondents (36 in total) who were selected for in-depth interviews with all but one of the interviews completed.

Throughout the remaining months of the study (until completion of the study in December 2009) the emphasis will be on analysing, interpreting and disseminating the findings of the study. The latter will focus on disseminating to appropriate internal and external audiences, including the academic, practitioner and policy-making communities. Findings from the longitudinal study will be incorporated in the AUL @ W Final Report to the Scottish Funding Council.

For information about the longitudinal study contact Dr Robert Ingram, Research Fellow, CRLL, Email: Robert.Ingram@gcal.ac.uk Tel: 0141 273 1287.

Updated: 27 July, 2009 | Site editor | Legal