Unpacking agentic capital in employability of international graduates
- Thanh Pham, Monash University, Australia
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Today’s uncertain labour markets have put more pressures on graduates to take responsibilities in managing their career. This has led to the fact that graduates’ agency has become necessary. For international graduates, agency is even more important to their career successes due to visible and invisible discriminations and stereotypes in the host labour market. But there is currently a dearth in knowledge about international graduates’ post-study work experiences including how they use their agency. We know very little about what kind of resources international graduates have and what kind of strategies they use to maximise their resources for career development.
This presentation extends my discussion at CGHE on April 8, 2021 by unpacking the role of agentic capital in employability of international graduates. The presentation draws on the emerging literature that constructs international students as active agents who have their resources and personal attributes and many know how to use these resources and attributes to obtain what they prioritise in their life and either navigate or go against inequalities, challenges and discriminations. The presentation draws upon extensive research with international graduates in Australia to answer these important questions:
• What types of agency do international graduates use to negotiate employability?
• What are the main characteristics of agentic capital featured in strategies that international graduates use to negotiate employability?
• What are signifiers that constraint and facilitate the development and utilisation of their agentic capital?
• And finally, so what does agentic capital really mean?
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Dr Thanh Pham is a Senior Lecturer in Education at Monash University in Australia. Her research interests are in higher education, graduate employability and internationalisation. She is currently researching how international graduates in different contexts including Australia and Asian countries like Japan, Vietnam, China and Singapore utilise resources obtained in the host country and further developed in the home countries to navigate the labour markets. She has developed comparative models/typologies about the usefulness of these resources in different contexts.