12 - Employability

Summary

Introduction

Employment for many young people and adults can offer a route out of cycles of poverty and disadvantage, and is an important social determinant of health (see Chapter 9). We know that getting a job promotes well-being and discourages negative thoughts and behaviours, offering an opportunity to make new social connections and to widen networks.

Employability covers the range of work done with young people and adults in communities and other educational settings, to help them move into jobs and other meaningful occupations. It is not just for the unemployed, but can also help people move into better, more sustainable employment. Who gets to decide what is a meaningful occupation is a difficult question and one which we feel each of us, as community workers, must pose. There are many tools and frameworks which exist to help individuals identify their ideal job or what skills they need to develop to access their local labour market. There is a great deal of research about the poor outcomes for disadvantaged individuals and communities, but there is little theory which deals specifically with how we might work with these people in relation to their employability goals. In this chapter we will explore this work and the challenges it presents to the community worker and we will identify theory which might help us as practitioners.

Policy context

Allatt and Tett (2019) suggest that employability work is driven by the assumption ‘that work of any kind is the solution to poverty’ (52). Indeed, policy discourse around getting people into employment is often couched in the language of social justice and is influenced by a human capital perspective. This perspective is focused on measuring a limited number of standardised skills, with a focus on productivity and competition (Allatt and Tett, 2019). The driver behind this type of work is not citizens’ well-being, but economic outcomes. We need to think carefully how this driver impacts on our work in communities and the commodification of individuals for economic rather than social motivations, because ‘this economic discourse then tends to drive a curriculum that prioritises narrow employment skills-focused learning that neither respects learners’ own goals nor values their life experiences’ (Allatt and Tett, 2019, 42).