Graduate’s labour insertion through personal contacts. A proposal from the knowledge management

Abstract

The transformation of the economy after the financial crisis, together with the appearance of new products and services, have been a challenge, both in educationally and professionally key, in the labour insertion of university graduates, requiring higher education to make decisions in synchronicity with these changes. In this context, the present paper aims to offer an analytic vision about the labour insertion phenomenon through the personal contacts’ resource. Adopting as hypothesis the derived devaluation of the graduate’s training in benefit of what we have called interpersonal capital, namely, the volume of graduate’s networks and contacts that allow them to have access to a job, we propose a series of strategic lines to develop in the higher education field that revolve around knowledge management. To this, we situated ourselves in a qualitative methodology based on the systematic review of the principal studies and reports written in Spain by universities, employment observatories, public and private organizations, quality assessment agencies in the university system and experts in this scope. Specifically, we have analyzed 56 studies and reports carried out between the years 2000 and 2018. The results allow us to identify two fundamental trajectories in the labour insertion of graduates, finding a remarkable growth in the use of social capital as a resource of labour intermediation in the last period analyzed (2011-2018). Therefore, there is an important change in the view of recent graduates, employers and university have about their own training, justifying the propose we made in relation to knowledge management and its contribution to the employability of university students.