Analyzing Managerial Skills for Employability in Graduate Students in Economics, Administration and Accounting Sciences

1. Introduction

Assessing management skills facilitates planning strategies and programs to develop employability management competencies, benefiting professionals, universities and companies. This is essential in preparing students for citizenship, the world of work, and their academic and personal success [1]. It is necessary to implement an accurate assessment tool to measure managerial skills in potential leaders, benefiting the academic and business environment, and fostering the development of managerial competencies for sustainable socioeconomic progress [2].

1.1. Employability Skills

Employability skills are key attributes that employers value when hiring and developing managers. These competencies, essential for organizational success, are adaptable, transferable, and can be acquired and enhanced [3]. Learned skills are divided into cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Cognitive skills include specific knowledge and critical thinking skills, while non-cognitive skills encompass the ability to relate, manage emotions, and make autonomous decisions [4]. Both are essential for personal and social development, which can also be developed and improved [5].

Employability skills, known as soft, fundamental or essential skills, help talented individuals to adapt and be resilient in changing environments, especially in managerial roles [3,6]. They are further classified into hard skills, related to acquired knowledge, and soft skills, linked to personality characteristics and more difficult to develop [7].

The Conference Board of Canada's Employability Skills Forum and the Business and Education Forum on Science, Technology and Mathematics created the Profile of Employability Skills (PES) to identify the competencies that organizations seek in new employees and develop in current employees [1]. This profile includes three main categories: foundational, personal management and collaborative skills, each with their respective sub-dimensions [8,9,10]. (See Table 1).

Soft skills include transversal competencies that enhance employability in a dynamic and uncertain market, helping people to adapt and effectively face professional and daily challenges [11,12].

1.2. Current Labor Market

The current work environments, based on knowledge and technology, require a change in hiring processes, prioritizing the evaluation of personal capabilities in addition to technical skills [13,14]. The labor market seeks to integrate hard and soft skills to ensure adaptability, competence and stability, in an increasingly fast-paced and digital environment [15,16].

Labor productivity and business success can be improved through human capital with employability skills [17]. The demand for employees in the labor market will depend on the acquisition of these skills during their training and professional experience [18].

Among the trends in the labor market, the changes brought about by the Fourth Industrial Revolution should be considered, which implies technological changes, trans-formation of occupations and job profiles, changes in the forms of employment [19] and in the organizational culture; therefore, a suitable environment should be created for managers and employees to adhere to these changes at the organizational level [20].

1.3. Employability

Research on employability and its relationship with skills, higher education and professional development has grown exponentially [21,22,23,24]). This theme is directly linked to Sustainable Development Goals 4 and 8, which address quality education and decent work respectively [25,26].

Employability can be understood from two perspectives: as the variables that determine a person's employment situation, and as the set of individual skills that make it possible to obtain and maintain employment [21,27,28]. These skills facilitate the satisfaction of professional and personal needs [29,30]. Employability is also closely related to the economic conditions of the environment [10]. In this context, three main actors are identified: employers, employees (human talent) and trainers, which are fundamental to the concept of employability [31,32].

1.4. Education

According to Idkhan et al. [33], higher education is crucial for developing employability knowledge and skills, balancing soft and hard skills that meet the demands of employers and facilitate the employability of graduates. Thus, changes in the labor market and the fourth industrial revolution, higher education must focus on equipping students with the skills and knowledge necessary to maximize their development and employability [34]. These changes towards a knowledge economy demand new skills among employees to innovate the work environment and work methods [35].

Therefore, universities seek to improve the employability of their graduates by focusing on transferable skills beyond specific disciplines [36]. However, the lack of professional experience and the mismatch between education and job requirements lead many graduates to face unemployment, underemployment or job instability [12,37]. Consequently, to strengthen human capital, continuous learning is necessary; for this reason, education systems must focus on new knowledge and skills beyond current needs and thus be able to prepare for the technologies brought by Industry 4.0, which in the long term will lead to an increase in the level of education and the quality of the human talent required [38].

Although there is a significant discrepancy between existing skills and those needed for Industry 4.0 [39,40], the higher education system must adapt by integrating skills such as analytical thinking, decision making, organizational skills, social intelligence, logical reasoning, and technical expertise, all crucial for advanced industry [41]. According to Sunardi et al. [1], the main global challenge of higher education is to train professionals with a balance of academic, technical, and employability skills.

Consequently, correlational hypotheses to theoretically and statistically evaluate aspects of this problem are proposed [42,43,44]:

Ho: Latent variables (factors, F_i) are independent, or there is no association with demographic variables (dv_i).

Ha: Latent variables (factors, F_i) are not independent, or there is an association with demographic variables (dv_i).

2. Materials and Methods

This study identified a population of 245 graduate students in Economics, Administrative and Accounting Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH), located in the city of Tegucigalpa, Capital of Honduras; the data were collected through a self-administered survey with 92% response rate from the population exceeding the expected acceptable rate of 60% to 80%, which determined a sample of 225 students [45,46,47].

The Conference Board of Canada's Employability Skills 2000+ structured questionnaire was used as a consultation instrument, which identifies skills with 56 items divided into Fundamental skills (skills needed as a base for further development), Personal management skills (personal skills, attitudes and behaviors that drive one's potential for growth), and Teamwork skills (skills and attributes needed to contribute productively), measured on a 5-level Likert scale [8,33,36,48]. In addition to questions on demographic variables (dvi), which in this case were: gender, work experience and employment status. The prior validity of the questionnaire was considered on the basis of the study conducted by Idkhan et al, [33], whose confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) managed to support the three types of skills (fundamental skills, personal management skills, and teamwork skills), reporting the following statistical indices: Chi-square/relation of degrees of freedom (χ2/df), root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA), comparative fit index (CFI), non-normed fit index (NNFI) and an acceptable goodness of fit index (GFI) fit (See Table 2).

Adjustments were made to the questionnaire with a translation from English to Spanish, semantically validating the content through expert judgment, with the participation of four judges, specialists in the subject of study who evaluated the content according to categories that measure sufficiency or representativeness, clarity, coherence and relevance [52]; it was considered a criterion that 100% of the judges approved the categories for each of the indicators. To analyze the validity of the extracted data, all items whose internal correlations were greater than 0.8 were eliminated to achieve an adequate result of the Measure of Sampling Adequacy (MSA). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed with FACTOR software [53]. And to measure confidence levels, the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy (KMO) [54,55] was applied. In addition, Bartlett's test of sphericity was used to identify items belonging to the three (3) factors (Fi) within the scale, and Hull's method was used to determine the number of common factors [56], considering a dispersion matrix with polychoric correlations [57], a factor extraction by the robust unweighted least squares (RULS) method and a rotation to achieve the normalized direct Oblimin simplicity factor [58,59].

The results were weighted in the Total Factor (F_T) by the set of eigenvalues, considering the skills of the group of students analyzed [60] (p. 44), making a comparison of each factor and the total factor according to the established demographic variables (dv_i): gender, work experience and employment status.

The research produced a data set through the survey (see Table 3), and was then analyzed with cross-tabulations, given the high presence of ordinal or categorical variables. A descriptive and non-parametric statis-tical analysis using SPSS software, the non-parametric Chi-Square correlation coefficient (χ2), whose correlation is significant for a p-value at the 0.05 level (ideally 0.01), statistically demonstrating an effect, was used for the analysis [61,62].

3. Results

The elimination of highly correlated variables (items) limited the study to 21 variables out of 56 (V5, V7, V10, V13, V16, V21, V23, V25, V26, V29, V30, V32, V33, V34, V37, V38, V41, V44, V45, V46, V49), from which the FACTOR software did not identify items to be removed by MSA.

FACTOR was used to obtain a KMO of 0.949 (very good) and Bartlett’s statistic 2488.7 with 210 degrees of freedom and a significance level of 0.00001 for the three-factor Employability Skills 2000+ instrument. The authors achieved a total proportion of variance explained of 71.151%. The results of robust goodness of fit statistics after LOSEFER correction [63] are presented in Table 4.

The Employability Skills 2000+ questionnaire [64] was adjusted according to its latent variables in three factors. Those factors weighed by the set of eigenvalues account for the employability skills of the group of students analyzed (see Table 5), with a Root Mean Square of Residuals (RMSR) = 0.0509.

The factor names were assigned according to the highest concentration of items compared to the original instrument. Each of these three factors (F₁: Personal management skills, F₂: Fundamental Skills, F₃: Teamwork Skills) and the resulting weighted factor (F_T: Employability Skills) were then compared by gender, work experience, and employment status (see Table 6).

As can be seen, the Personal management skills factor (F₁) is not correlated with the demographic variables, and at the same time its high weighting on the resulting factor (F_T) of 81.53% means that Employability skills is not correlated with the demographic variables either. At the level of the Fundamental skills factor (F₂), a high correlation is identified with work experience, and moderate correlations with employment status and gender. There is also a high correlation between Teamwork skills (F₃), work experience and employment status (see Figure 1).

Figure 1(a) shows the gender differences, to the detriment of the female gender, in the perception of achievement of the fundamental skills. Figure 1(b) shows that the greater the work experience, the greater the perception of achievement of the fundamental skills; likewise, Figure 1(c) shows how the perception of achievement of teamwork skills is greater as work experience increases. In relation to the achievement of employability, this increases the perception of achievement of the fundamental skills (Figure 1(d)) and of teamwork (Figure 1(e)).

4. Discussion

Our study determines that there is a correlation in gender and (fundamental) skills, which accentuates the findings of Ogbonna et al. [65], in terms of teaching through synchronous and asynchronous e-learning, where the results indicate that the gender of students has a slight influence on the acquisition of their (practical) skills. And the findings of Xu et al. [66], who studied gender differences and their influence on skills, did not find a significant impact. In addition, the analyses conducted by Parra-González et al. [67], who determined that the gender variable does not predict association with fundamental skills (critical thinking), are confronted. And the findings of Irwan et al. [68], who show that there is no significant difference in employability skills between men and women. Thus, our results show a discordant counterpoint to this previous knowledge by presenting evidence that Employability skills are correlated with the demographic variable of gender.

Regarding work experience and fundamental skills, our results determine that they have a high correlation, which coincides with the findings of Idkhan et al [33] and Qostal et al [69]. In this order of ideas, the results of Parra-González et al. [66] determine that work experience influences the development of these fundamental critical thinking skills; as well as the research of Shiraly et al., [70] and Dyki et al., [71] which indicate that work experience influences communication skills; both studies also point out the importance of these fundamental skills having to be developed through academic training. Regarding fundamental skills related to decision making and creative thinking, López-Arias and Rodríguez-Esteban [72] find a positive correlation with work experience, unlike our study that does not find a correlation with personal management skills (F1); their results reach statistical significance with social skills that demonstrate positive attitudes and behaviors, as well as with adaptability skills, as does the study by Soares and Mosquera [73].

In reference to work experience and teamwork skills, on the contrary, the findings of Macanović et al. [74], which have shown that professionals in caring professions with less work experience have higher levels of psychosocial work competence (communication skills, mediation skills, teamwork skills and empathy). Our work indicates that the more work experience, the higher the teamwork skills in graduate students. Supporting the findings of Basir et al. [75] regarding the work experience of internships and entrepreneurship courses of students to improve employability at graduation.

Also, this research has determined a moderate correlation between employment status and fundamental skills, as well as a high correlation with teamwork skills, the same occurs with the analysis conducted by Idkhan et al. [33] and Qostal et al. [69] where they show that having skills such as fundamental and teamwork skills have a positive and significant effect on the employability index. But, unlike our study, they show that there is significance in the relationship between employability and personal management skills.

Another coincidence, regarding the high correlation between employability status and teamwork skills evidenced by our results, coincides with the study by Abdullah et al. [76] whose findings indicate that the development of teamwork skills is among the most desired by employers and help to achieve better employment conditions. Similarly, the results of Soares and Mosquera [73], who consider the international exchange experience as a strategy for the development of interpersonal and teamwork skills that can generate better employability prospects, agree. Our results are also supported by Dyki et al. [71] who indicate that the development of teamwork skills complements disciplinary knowledge and skills to improve their chances of achieving employability conditions. The same occurs with González-Cespón et al. [77] whose study evidences the development of transferable skills, which are directly related to employability; therefore, both investigations are consistent with the results of our study regarding the relationship between fundamental and teamwork skills and employability.

Finally, there are coincidences in the studies of Basir et al. [75], Abrantes et al. [78] and Mainga et al. [3] that show the incidence of the development of fundamental skills, personal management and teamwork, as well as their importance in preparing graduates for the labor market, which increases their employability or ability to be self-employed. In addition, it should be noted that research by Mainga et al. [3] reveals that employability is partially affected by labor market demand and external factors that are not related to the knowledge, skills, abilities and attributes of professionals.

5. Conclusions

This article provides a proposal of the construct of managerial skills suitable for employability that corresponds to a practical interest for human talents who assume a managerial role, in a properly validated scale that has measured the perception of managerial skills through a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), considering the Employability Skills 2000+ research model, which provides a broad focus on management skills, leadership, decision making, problem solving, adaptability, communication and teamwork.

The CFA eliminated 35 items from the original scale, which did not capture enough variability, which generated changes by rearranging the other 21 items into three factors, with good internal consistency and having as a central axis the management skills for employability among them: Personal Management Skills, Fundamental Skills and Teamwork Skills.

Regarding the hypothesis proposed, the findings show the existence of a high correlation between the fundamental skills and the work experience variable, as well as a moderate correlation with the employment status and gender variables. On the other hand, there is a high correlation between teamwork skills and work experience and employability conditions. However, no significant relationship was found between personal management skills and demographic variables.

Finally, this research has important implications for organizations and educational institutions, and raises new lines of research for other researchers, since the general scale of this study can be applied in new studies with different social and organizational contexts as a tool for the selection and evaluation of human talent in the public and private sector, as well as for the identification of training needs or training processes at the managerial level, including the analysis of the most appropriate educational methods for the development of employability skills.