Abstract

Firms that try to take on to the politics for employability forced by organizations like the EU and the OECD (Jacobsson 2004) have to transfer the concept of employability to their own contexts. In our paper to the ECER-Conference 2006 in Geneva we described according to Kraus (2006), that the common way to make a reference to employability is to focus on the individuals as the bearer of employability. This point of view leads to a specific concept of adult education. Programs are established to enhance those skills and competencies of the individuals that help them to gain, maintain or regain employment (for example Knauth 2006). We underlined that this programmatic approach is not justified in regard to employability. Employability is a complex concept which is subjected to a constant change (Bollérot 2001). Therefore we suggested to choose an operative approach instead of the programmatic one. The main purpose of the operative approach is to transform the concept of employability into specific learning problems that fit to the employees and their environments in firms. We proclaimed our intention to do empirical studies on employability by moderating workshops to help the firms to learn about their own learning needs.

In this paper we will present the results of our empirical studies. By now we are interpreting our data source in form of painted landscapes and recorded groupdiscussions. We do this in order to reconstruct collective patterns of orientation of occupational groups towards the concept of employability.

Methods

By our workshop concept we try to link our research to learning processes in the firms. We observe the workshop-participants in their 'sensemaking' (Weick 1995) on employability. For this purpose the participants obtain an introduction in a method to paint pictures in form of landscapes to the topic of employability and take part in a groupdiscussion that we moderate according to the principles of the documentary method (Bohnsack 2003). The aim is to reconstruct collective patterns of orientation towards learning demands that are seen as to be part of the concept of employability. On that account we work with the methods of the descriptive and reconstructive social research (Bohnsack 2003; Kelle/ Kluge 1999; König 1995). Finally, we will identify agendas for the respective firms.

Results

We will show that the category employability requests organizations and individuals to start learning processes that focus on the demands they have to face in the light of policies of employabiltity. We will present different features and details of the demands, which will be found in the metaphorical embodiments of the landscapes and the group discussion. We suggest that organizations that want to meet the challenges of employability policies perform workshops on employabiltiy and set up employability policies that are costum tailored to the meangings of employabiltity which were identified in the workshops.

Bibliography

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