Abstract:

University-to-work transition can represent a challenging task, particularly in a time of high uncertainty about labour market trends and requirements (Savickas et al., 2009). If in the past, it could be stated that career integration was more or less straightforward, and vertical progression, through successive promotions within one single organization, was a common practice, such scenario does not correspond to the most current typical scenario (Coutinho, Dam, & Blustein, 2008). Temporary and precarious jobs, making individuals to move across several organizations over time are now a common situation (Briscoe & Hall, 2003). Beyond that, the decrease of job opportunities among higher education graduates became the immediate access to a job after graduation is, in general, not so easy for most newcomers (Alves, Morais, & Chaves, 2018).

Although it can be expected that the lack of predictability about what comes next and how graduates can better prepare their future career might have repercussions about their perceived employability, empirical research demonstrating such relation is still scarce. Likewise, graduates’ perceptions of facilitators and barriers of work transition in this challenging context, represents an issue still little explored in empirical studies. Taking this scenario, this qualitative study aimed to explore work transitions processes, taking newcomers to the labour market. For such, an interview was conducted with eleven graduates from a Portuguese university with the aim of exploring how new graduates perceived the factors that facilitated and constrained their transition to the labour market and how they perceive their employability about 18 months after transition. After that, data collected was analyzed though the NVivo software.

The obtained results evidenced a multidimensional and dynamic perspective about work transition and employability, with the identification of individual, institutional and labour market factors. Practical implications of this study refer to the relevance of developing practices experiences during Higher Education studies, in order to enhance career exploration processes and to foster career agency since early as a way to mitigate some of the difficulties that commonly characterize the university-to-work transition.

Keywords:

Employability, work transition, higher education, graduates.