Demographic changes, such as the ageing of society and the decline of the birth rate, are gradually leading to the loss of valuable knowledge and experience in the Dutch Labour market. This necessitates an explicit focus on workers' sustainable employment so that they can add value to the organisation throughout their career. This study looks into the way in which the workers' motivation might affect their investments into their own sustainable employment. It was conducted in a major industrial service provider, Sitech Services. The conclusion is that intrinsic motivation plays an important role in both younger and older employees, and that the younger workers undertake more action in order to give physical form to their sustainable employment than their older colleagues.
This longitudinal, quantitative study contributes to the debate on technology-based professional development by examining the extent to which a learning (LinkedIn) intervention in a university setting affects an individual’s social media use for professional development, and the extent to which this relates to self-reported employability. In addition, we investigated how this relationship is moderated by an individual’s motivation to communicate through social media (LinkedIn). Based on social capital theory and the conservation of resources theory, we developed a set of hypotheses that were tested based on longitudinal data collected from university employees (N = 101) in middle- and high-level jobs. First, in line with our expectations, social media use for professional development was significantly higher after the learning intervention than before. Second, partially in line with our expectations, social media use for professional development was positively related with the employability dimension anticipation and optimization. Third, contrary to our expectations, motivation to communicate through social media (LinkedIn) did not have a moderating role in this relationship. We concluded that the learning intervention has the potential to foster social media use for professional development, and in turn, can contribute to individuals’ human capital in terms of their employability. Hence, the intervention that forms the core of this empirical research can be a sustainable and promising human resource management (HRM) practice that fits the human capital agenda.
This chapter aims to place the employability related outcomes of this study in the context of other current employability studies. For this purpose, seven recently published employability studies were selected from a range of contexts and with different methodological approaches. Within the literature there is a distinction made between employment skills and employability skills. The former are limited to a specific profession or discipline (sector skills) while the latter are ‘transversal’ and apply to all professions. These skills go by other names such as ‘soft’, ‘generic’ or ‘transferable’ (Jones, forthcoming). The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) defines employability skills as follows: “The transferable core skills that represent functional and enabling knowledge, skills, and attitudes required in today’s workplace. They are necessary for career success at all levels of employment and for all levels of education”. (http://www.hefce.ac.uk/glossary/).
