Description:

The demographic change is a known fact in politics and economy. In the near future, less young people will be available to fill vacant positions in the labour market. At the same time employees will leave jobs at a higher age then now. These tendencies will place employability and learning throughout the life-span in the centre of attention. Employability is about to get a central concept in a "knowledge based society". However, the concept is complex and for this reason used in different and sometimes unclear ways. There is a demand for analyses in this concept. We will therefore try to understand what kind of expectations employability brings to individuals and organisations.Our first view on the actual state of research gives us the impression that communication about knowledge has to be put in a new structure. Traditionally, the notion of work is used in education, human recourses development, and labour and organizations psychology to analyse the competencies, qualifications, and the knowledge that is expected from the individuals. The common understanding is that we know what employees have to learn, and that we get this knowledge by analysing the work places in which the knowledge is situated. Human Resource Management, Total Quality Management, and similar approaches are bound to a fundamentally tayloristic model of labour that thinks that knowledge and competencies can be determined in a scientific way. It is our thesis that, with the notion of employability, a very different approach is requested. Employability implies a more person-centred approach to learning for working life in enterprises. It is a broad conception and refers to very general expectations which structure the communication between persons. Therefore it has to be specified.In our paper, we will focus on these conceptual foundations of employability and investigate how economic organizations deal with this problem. We explore the specific forms of employability. Some concepts for practical arrangements exist indeed but their theoretical foundation is problematic. The conception of employability is basically unexplored and for this reason indeterminable. Therefore, one aim of our study is to examine possible ways to deal with this "research-gap".

Methodology or methods/research instruments or sources used:

Functional analysis of theoretical literature and practical concepts. Functional analysis explores the social function of discourses on work and employability.

Conclusions or expected outcomes or findings:

We expect that the category employability requests a special type of quality from individuals and organisations. Thereby we think that it will be possible to show different features and details of the needed quality. The aim is to use these details as data to classify the challenge of employability for the context of life long learning in times of a demographic change. This contributes to the overall project in gaining data about imaginations of learning throughout the whole life-span.