ABSTRACT
In this chapter we consider the extent to which the experiences of work in changing employment conditions are congruent with students’ earlier expectations. As yet the changing graduate labour market and student experiences in adaptive organizations have been subject to little empirical investigation, although there have been a number of studies of school leavers and university graduates which have examined the changing nature of the youth labour market (Ashton et al. 1990) and the transition to work in the 1980s (Brennan and McGeevor 1988; Banks 1992). Moreover, most of the existing data tends to be quantitative, derived from large-scale surveys of occupational choice, or alternatively, of the job destinations of those who have recently graduated from institutions of higher education. In our study, we conducted in-depth interviews with those who were currently in employment and who had graduated from our three institutions, in order to ascertain the extent to which earlier expectations about the world of work had been realized. More specifically, we were interested in exploring how the transition to work in the employment conditions of the 1990s leads to either a positive or a negative orientation to the employment relationship. The small number of students re-interviewed (20) clearly makes it impossible to generalize confidently our findings to all those in this study, let alone to the graduate population as a whole. Further research will also need to be conducted in order to establish the extent to which our findings reflect changing corporate realities, given that graduates have previously been found to experience problems in making the transition to economic life (Herriot, 1984). Moreover, the graduates we re-interviewed were among those fortunate enough to find employment, while others are unemployed or in temporary, low-skilled jobs, waiting for labour market conditions to improve. What our empirical evidence does suggest, however, is a widespread disillusionment with the realities of working life.
