Constructing Professionals’ Employ-Abilities: Conditions for Accomplishment

Abstract

In the context of an increasing emphasis on 'knowledge' work, as well as the contingent nature of work, the authors consider how best to describe the kinds of attributes that are regarded by employers as being valuable in contemporary workplaces. They argue that rather than merely citing lists of functional type skills, a better way to capture the kinds of attributes that employers value is to regard these kinds of generic attributes as 'employ-abilities'. Using cases of professionals in practice they illustrate that enacting personal agency in the workplace, deciding what to do and how to proceed, is powerfully shaped by communal self-correcting processes, particularly those judgments which are articulated by and amongst peers. They suggest that their approach provides a more sophisticated account of the role of graduate attributes in professional formation. This chapter focuses on 'thick' descriptions and ascriptions of abilities to professionals, in their work practices - in the very doing of their work. The particularities of the immediate workplace context are the signifiers of identities, which are at once both social and embodied. The argument proceeds in two ways. First, a new conceptual account of how somebody comes to 'understand' something is given. Secondly, two case studies of identity formation, through practice, are presented. The intention throughout is to show that close attention to the particularities of work practices generates the attributes or capacities required for employment: that one learns for work by doing work and that, by extrapolation, lifelong learning occurs across the lifespan in diverse settings, with particularistic 'accomplishments', beyond which what could be claimed as 'generic' is vaporous. [Author abstract, ed]