Graduates

This thesis focuses on graduates’ perceptions of knowledge and skill utilisation and early career development for the following main reasons. First, as has been argued and

extensively demonstrated in Chapter 2, graduates now face a difficult labour market. They face increased competition for graduate jobs because of the increase in HE participation (see Section 2.2) and limited expansion of ‘traditional’ graduate-level jobs. They are also bearing an increasing proportion of the costs of HE, albeit via state-subsidised student loans. Graduates are also navigating a post-recessionary, segmented labour market (see Section 2.3), which provides them with questionable opportunities to use their skills. Second, research about graduate employment in small firms has tended to look at employer experiences more than at graduate employee experience (see Section 2.5.3). Given the government’s renewed focus on graduate employment in SMEs (e.g. Sear et al., 2012), it is worth asking how graduates themselves experience employment in small firms and how they think it contributes to their career development (see section 1.3). However,

69 the exclusion of employer perspectives in this thesis is a limitation of the research, and is further addressed in Chapter 10, Section 10.5).

3.3.5.1 Quantitative phase

For the quantitative phase of the study, graduates were selected from the Futuretrack Stage 4 survey, which had 17,075 usable responses in total. Compared to the 121,368 usable responses collected at Stage 1 of the survey, conducted between May and

December 2006 when respondents were applying to HE, this roughly corresponds to a 14% retention rate. Most of the attrition took place between Stage 1 and Stage 2 – one year into HE study or equivalent for those who did not go on to HE – when 49,555 responses were collected, followed by 26,554 responses in Stage 3 conducted in the last year of a three- or four-year undergraduate degree course or equivalent. However, at every stage, new respondents from the same cohort (2005/06 HE applicants) were recruited to the study to boost numbers. In stage 4, new entrants constituted 2,163 of the 17,075 responses. Please see the Futuretrack Stage 4 Technical Appendix for more information (Purcell et al., 2013, pp. 195-203).

First-degree graduates were selected to avoid including employment effects from postgraduate education in the data. The majority of research studies of graduate

employment tend to amalgamate first-degree and subsequent degree graduates (master’s or PhD-level, ‘postgraduates’ hereafter). However, including postgraduates can distort some of the implications of the relationship between education and employment outcomes, for the reasons set out below.

From a human capital perspective, increasing the investment in education and training will lead to higher returns to the individual, which implies that postgraduates can expect to get a higher return on their education compared to first-degree graduates, for example in the form of salary and/or job type. Signalling theory suggests that individuals take on additional levels of education to ‘signal’ their levels of ability to prospective employers, which implies that high-ability individuals able to invest in their education to a greater extent will do so (low-ability graduates will be unable to study high-level qualifications). This, however, may be made more complicated in the presence of fees for postgraduate education, an absence of a student-loan type system, and the finding that some graduates thought that their postgraduate study options were limited by loans (Purcell et al., 2013). In particular, the decision to go on to postgraduate study was found to be associated with socioeconomic

70 background, more ‘prestigious’ HEI type, and studying subjects leading to higher-paying jobs (what Purcell et al. (2013, p. 192) referred to as the “cumulative pattern of

advantage”).62 _{For these reasons, graduates who had gone on to do a postgraduate} qualification were excluded from this study.

Thus, the thesis sample comprised first-degree, UK-domiciled, UK-educated graduates, who were employed in the private sector at the time of fourth wave of the Futuretrack survey, which resulted in 4,572 usable responses. See Section 3.5.3.2 for descriptive statistics of the graduate sample used in the quantitative phase.

3.3.5.2 Qualitative phase

This section gives a definition of the sample of graduates used in the qualitative phase of the thesis, and so only a summary is presented. For more detailed information about the composition of the sample, please see Section 3.5.4.2. The available group of Futuretrack respondents who agreed to be contacted for further research was 1,631 out of 4,572 (36%).63 _{I wanted to select participants for interview who were working in similar jobs in} small businesses and large businesses to isolate the effect of business size as much as possible. I targeted graduates employed at the same SOC 2010 three digit (minor group) level in the Sales, Marketing and Related Associate Professionals (minor group 354) and the Public Services and Other Associate Professionals (minor group 356) because these were the occupational groups with a large enough number of respondents employed in both small and large businesses (see Appendix B Table B.1, Table B.2, and Table B.3).64 Respondents employed in small businesses were deliberately over-sampled.

Graduates employed in small businesses in the selected minor occupational groups were contacted first (N=49) in order to let their occupations set the selection criteria for graduates employed in large businesses. The sampling frame and the resulting responses are shown in Table 3.1. Thirteen graduates employed in small businesses agreed to take part in the interviews, over half of whom were marketing associate professionals (SOC

62 _{In the case of jobs, some graduates may decide to go on to postgraduate study because certain} occupations, particularly in the traditional graduate jobs, require a postgraduate qualification as an entry route (Purcell et al., 2005). The same report (Class of ’99) also found an association between postgraduate study and lower earnings; although this is likely because of a delay in the

postgraduates joining the labour market compared to first degree graduates.

63 _{Futuretrack respondents opted in to if they wanted to be contacted for further research.}

64 _{Using SOC 2010 and IER’s Cascot® software. After my experience in the pilot study, I anticipated a} low response rate for interviews from the Futuretrack graduates.

71 2010 unit group 3543). Then, graduates employed in the same occupations in large

businesses were contacted (N=36, a random subsample selected from a possible 131 respondents).65 _{Seven out of the 36 graduates contacted agreed to take part in the} interviews. The subsample was necessary because otherwise the number of graduates in large businesses contacted would have been almost three times greater than that in small businesses, which would have led to a loss of focus on the small business sector.

Table 3.1: Sampling frame and resulting responses for graduates’ interviews sample selection

SOC 2010

Generic occupation

title Small employer Large employer

Sampling frame Responses Sampling frame (subsample) Responses 3542 Business sales executive 7 1 21 (0) 0 3543 Marketing associate professional 21 7 50 (21) 4

3544 Estate agent and

auctioneer 2 1 0 0

3545

Sales accounts and business development manager

9 1 26 (8) 2

3562

Human resources and industrial relations officer

7 1 27 (6) 1

3563

Vocational and industrial trainer and instructor

3 2 7 (1) 0

Total 49 13 131 (36) 7

In all, 20 graduates agreed to participate in the interviews out of the 85 graduates

contacted, an overall response rate of 24% (27% for those in small firms and 19% for those in large firms). Such a response rate is low but acceptable, and has been used in similar research (for example, comparable to Yorke, 2006, 22%; Arnold et al., 2002, 25%). One reason for this low response rate may be the gap of almost one and a half years between graduates’ survey participation and the interview invitation.

The 24% response rate and the deliberate targeted sampling method adopted led to limitations in the types of graduates recruited for interview. The resulting sample of 20

65 _{Note that no graduates employed in large businesses in occupation 3542 were contacted – the} graduate employed in a small business in this occupation responded after the invitations to graduates employed in large businesses were sent out.

72 graduates were predominantly ‘elite’: those who attended highest- or high-tariff point universities (see Purcell et al., 2009)66 _{and had achieved first class or upper second class} degrees. The predominance of such graduates in the sample prevented a comparison of whether the educational and socioeconomic background of the graduates affected their experiences of skill utilisation and career development. The composition of the sample, the extent to which it met the sampling criteria, and its implications for research are discussed in Section 3.5.4.2.