Abstract:

Employability skills research is a well-established field of interest for social scientists, gaining more and more momentum as the job market changes from stable to volatile, flexicurity becomes norm, and the average worker is much less probable to spend his/her entire career with just one employer.

These global changes, paired with a high unemployment rate in Croatia in previous years, make employability skills research extremely important for both students, helping them focus their curricular and extracurricular efforts, as well as universities, helping them keep their programs up to date and relevant to the contemporary job market. Considering the increasing amount of attention and emphasising the need for STEM field experts in the modern economies that Croatia is striving to catch up, it is important to track the employability options of those experts.

This paper provides some methodological insights for the employability skills research, primarily in engineering and other STEM fields, although most of its items can be used in employability research for various other professions.

Literature review yielded more than 100 key employability skills, after sifting and grouping them, 36 skills were retained and used to construct a questionnaire administrated to Croatian employers pertaining to the STEM field which lead to 418 usable respondents.
After purifying the initial solution and removing items that either saturated too many dimensions, had low McDonald’s values or simply didn’t make sense considering the solution, 25 items were retained in an 8-factor structure, explaining 66% of the overall variance.

Keywords:

Questionnaire construction, employability skills, dimension reduction, internal consistency.