How to promote the employability capital of university students? Developing and validating scales

ABSTRACT

One of the challenges that today’s universities face is to ensure that their graduates find employment in line with their attributes. University students’ employability capital depends on many personal factors in individuals such as human capital, social capital, cultural capital and psychological capital. However, there is no consensus on how to measure employability capital, and the scales developed to date have not been properly validated. The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate, at the confirmatory level, a set of instruments for measuring the factors of employability capital of university students. We conduct three studies based on three samples of 816, 1,082, and 1,088 students. These studies show the structure of the scales resulting from checking content validity, dimensionality, and reliability, as well as convergent, discriminant, and nomological validity. Moreover, the results show that psychological capital is the most relevant of employability capital followed by social capital, cultural capital and human capital.

KEYWORDS:

• employability capital
• human capital
• social capital
• cultural capital
• psychological capital
• scales

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by grants from the Committee of Activities and Services of the Social Council of the University of Vigo with the aim of improving the employability of university students.