BHO2285 MARKETING RESEARCH

PHASE 1: BACKGROUND AND

LITERATURE REVIEW

WRITTEN BY:
VENTZICO 4538199
KEE LIN YEE 4538991
CHAN YAW YEO 4538985
LOKE HOOI LENG 4538952

TUTORIAL: 2 & 4

LECTURER:
MS. MOY TOW YOON

DUE DATE:
11th AUGUST 2016

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Executive Summary
The objective of this report is to conduct a research project based on students’
perception and preparedness for employment. This report includes a brief background of
employability skills and career development activities of students. The purpose of this project
is to examine students’ self-perceived employability which consist of students’ perception
and preparedness for employment, academic experience, employment opportunity, career
development activities and employability skills. Besides, research objectives and questions
are presented in this report. The research objectives of this report is to identify students’
academic experience and their perceived employment opportunities. Furthermore, to
determine their level of engagement in job development activities and their confidence level
in meeting the expectations of future employers.

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Table of Contents
Background ................................................................................................................................ 4
Research Objectives ................................................................................................................... 5
Research Questions .................................................................................................................... 5
Literature Review....................................................................................................................... 6
Students’ perceptions on employment ................................................................................... 6
Students’ preparedness for employment ................................................................................ 6
Academic experience ............................................................................................................. 7
Employment opportunities ..................................................................................................... 7
Career development activities ................................................................................................ 7
Employability skills ............................................................................................................... 8
List of References ...................................................................................................................... 9

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Background
It is logic to assume that someone who own a bachelor's degree will have higher
opportunities to get a job as compared to someone who does not have a bachelor’s degree.
Unfortunately, the certificate papers obtained from bachelor's degree itself is not enough to
get a proper job. According to Smith (2007), employability skills are important as the
technical skills. Indeed, employability skills can be transferred from one job to another job
with high mobility (Techniques, cited in Smith 2007). This is beneficial for a person as these
skills might improve the probability of him or her to be hired. In addition, employability
skills such as willingness to learn, interpersonal competencies and quality personal skills are
now very desired by employers who have met various type of fresh graduates from the higher
education institutions (Kretovics & McCambridge 1998). Fresh graduates recently do not
fulfill the needs of the employers in which employers think that graduates now are not well-
prepared, lack of critical thinking skills and unable to communicate effectively.

In terms of career development activities, potential employers should learn to

understand and appreciate their employees who are beneficial for the working environment.
(Gerhardt et al. 2006). Although there are lots of graduates do not meet the requirements of
employers today, however, these kind of skills could be trained, learned and even practiced
during their working period (Grandin & Duffy 2010). Apart from that, education institution
should emphasis on the students’ readiness to get into the highly competitive job market.
Moreover, students should know that they need to be trained and educated on the knowledge
and information before they step into the job market. For instance, universities should not
only inform knowledge and information but also to teach students on learning themselves
throughout their life.

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Research Objectives
 To recognize students’ academic experience and their perception on employment
opportunities.
 To identify students’ level of engagement in their job development activities.
 To evaluate students’ confidence level in meeting the expectations of their future
employers.

Research Questions
1. What are the preferred skills that employers required on students upon hiring them?
2. How student should prepared themselves before heading to the work place?
3. What are the features that a fresh graduates should owned in order to promote
themselves to the employers?

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Literature Review
Students’ perceptions on employment
In today’s worlds, there are increasing numbers of highly educated students not being able to
meet the requirements of the job market. Indeed, employers are expecting graduates are well
prepared with employability skills and without any further training from the industry when
entering to the job market (Husain et al. 2010). Therefore, it is vital for educational
institutions to recognize students’ perception on employment in order to strategize their
educational programs. According to study conducted by Denice (2012), students thinks that
they can work effectively with others, developing professionalism, and good at social
responsibility and accountability. However, in accordance to Holton (cited in Baytiyeh &
Naja 2012), he had aimed that students were found to be underprepared to fit into a new
environment, misunderstand workplace politics, unable to build effective working
relationships, hard to be accepted as team members, and lastly having problem to earn respect
and reliability from their coworkers. These may cause by students are overconfidence on their
ability and also overestimated self-importance before they entering to the workplace (Denise
2012).

Students’ preparedness for employment

Graduate employability and unemployment are issues that have causes many policy
implications for higher education in many developing countries (Yusof & Jamaluddin 2015).
Thus, higher education institutions should understand students’ readiness for employment in
order to improve the quality of graduates. According to study conducted by Wye and Lim
(2009), they suggested that students’ readiness for employment are highly depends on their
self-belief. Their study suggested that students with fixed mindset about their intelligence are
more likely to be discouraged by failure where they might escape from challenging tasks due
to fear of failure. On the other hand, students with a malleable mindset are more likely to
believe that poor performance can lead to further learning. These optimistic students will
learn from their mistakes and apply this knowledge to future tasks. Therefore, in order to
ensure graduates are able to survive in the market, the higher education institutions should
ensure that students must have employability skills, in specifically, a malleable mindset that
can adapt to changes.

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Academic experience
Education is main criteria of measuring the development of a nation. It is likewise a key
determinant of the prosperity and treasure of a country. One of the objectives for the higher
education is to prepare the students to get into the job market. Nonetheless, institution of
higher learning found that students from the higher education are not satisfying the
employers. Employers found that most of the graduates are not able to secure jobs once they
graduated (Mohamad Razak et al. 2014). One of the reasons is lack of academic experience
among graduates which are below average from the employers’ expectation. Nowadays, most
of the employers are focusing on employees’ academic experience when they came for
interview. Once the employers found that the employees’ academic level has not met their
expectations, they will not waste their time on the employees anymore. According to the
Malaysian Prime Minister, he had stated that there were only 23% of the workforce was
highly educated as in the year 2010. As compared with other well-developed countries, this
percentage is way too low. Hence, the authority and even we, as citizens for this country,
have the responsibilities to develop the structure of students who graduated from higher
education level to become a better one which might hence, improve the country to a
developed one (Ramakrishnan & Mohamad Yasin 2011).

Employment opportunities
One of the reason for high unemployment rate in a country is due to lack of employment
opportunities. According to World Bank (cited in Binyam 2014), 43.7% of the total
unemployed people around the world are made up by youngsters. This negative phenomenon
should be rectify as youngsters are the future pillars of our nation. The researcher found that
only 25% of them are working. Most of them are actively seeking for jobs but failed to get
one which then, lead to giving up on job searching after a period of time. In Malaysia, the
employment opportunities were average from the year 1997 to 2016. However, the situation
started to be worse in the first quarter of 2016 (Central Bank of Malaysia 2016). This result
directly proved that the job opportunities for fresh graduates in Malaysia is becoming lesser
in this year.

Career development activities

In today’s day and age, employability skills especially skills that are unable to be learnt from
papers and books are valued by employers in every industry. However, many students

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nowadays do not acquire these skills - believing that these skills are not important and need
not to be learnt. From the research of Husain et al. (2010), personal quality and interpersonal
skills are both the important skills needed by the employers. The researchers had proven that
no matter how big the company is, employability skills are likely important affecting a
company’s productivity. Husain et al. (2010) showed that students recently do not have
direction towards their future. This causes them unable to focus on improving their
employability skills as they are unsure on their own future. Another study by Wilton (2011)
concluded that from the employers’ perspectives, they seek for employees who are able to
communicate well among themselves with as they clearly understand that bad
communications might cause problems in the workplace. So, communication skill is highly
expected by the employers during the recruiting process.

Employability skills
Through the study from Bayar (2014), career development activities are highly dependable
on the higher education teachers because their perception on their roles will impact their
responsibilities on the students - practising them on the career development activities.
According to Walsh and Tucker (2011), the researcher found that 67.5% participants from the
local degree students are interested in joining the career development activities. This is
because they realize the importance of the activities and willing to improve themselves,
readying them to enter the workplace in their future. Likewise, they concluded that the most
popular topic that able to attract students to involve in the activities are learning on how to
effectively promote themselves to the employers as getting a proper job is the main objective
for a student to worry for after their graduation.

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List of References
Alemayehu, BZ 2014, ‘Factors hindering unemployed youths from starting their own
business: The case of Mekelle City educated unemployed youths’, African Journal of
Business Management, vol. 8, no. 23, pp. 1082-1093.

Bayar, A 2014, 'The Components of Effective Professional Development Activities in terms

of Teachers' Perspective', International Online Journal of Educational Sciences, vol. 6, no. 2,
pp. 319-327.

Baytiyeha, H & Najab, M 2012, ‘Identifying the challenging factors in the transition from
colleges of engineering to employment’, European Journal of Engineering Education, vol.
37, no. 1, pp. 3–14.

Denise, J 2012, ‘Business undergraduates' perceptions of their capabilities in employability

skills: Implications for industry and higher education’, Industry and Higher Education, vol.
26, no.5, pp. 945-356.

Gerhardt, P, Holtz, K, Owings, N, & Resnik, D 2006, ‘Life journey through Autism: A guide
for transition to adulthood’, Organization for Autism Research and Southwest Autism
Research & Resource Center, Arlington, VA.
Grandin, T, & Duffy, K 2010, ‘Developing talents: Careers for individuals with Asperger
Syndrome and high-functioning Autism’. Journal of Autism and Development Disorders, vol.
40, no.2, pp.266-267.
Husain, MY, Mokhtar, SB, Ahmad, AA & Mustapha, R 2010, 'Importance of Employability
Skills from Employers’ Perspective', Procedia Social and Behavioural Sciences, vol. 7, pp.
430-438.

Kretovics, MA & McCambridge, JA 1998, ‘Determining what employers really want:

Conducting regional stakeholder focus groups’. Journal of Career Planning & Employment,
vol. 58, no. 2, pp. 25-27.

Mohamad Razak, MI, Asliza MY, Syazana, WN, Jaafar, WE & Talib, AH 2014, ‘Factors
Influencing Unemployment among Graduates in Malaysia – An Overview’, Journal of
Economics and Sustainable Development, vol. 5, no. 11, pp. 168-173.

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Ramakrishnan, K & Mohd Yasin, N 2011, ‘Employment issues among Malaysian
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) graduates: A case study’, African
Journal of Business Management, vol. 5, no. 26, pp. 10855-10861.

Smith, BP 2007, ‘Employability Standards: Inclusion in Family and Consumer Science

Middle School Curriculum’, Journal of Career and Technical Education, vol.23, no.1, pp 18-
34.

Walsh, SP & Tucker, K 2011, 'The Perspectives of Students Undertaking Masters' Degrees
by Coursework on Career Development Learning', Australian Journal od Career
Development, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 42-48.

Wilton, N 2011, 'Do employability skills really matter in the UK graduate labour market?
The case of business and management graduates', Work, employment and society, vol. 25, no.
1, pp. 85-100.

Wye, CK & Lim, YM 2009, ‘Perception differential between employers and undergraduates
on the importance of employability skills’, International Educational Studies, vol.2, no.1.

Yusof, N & Jamaluddin, Z 2012, ‘Graduate employability and preparedness: A case study of
University of Malaysia Perlis (UNIMAP), Malaysia’, Malaysia Journal of Society and Space,
Issue 11, pp. 129-143.

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