Employability Skills Influencing Quantity Surveying Graduates’ Gainful Employment

Abstract

Basic/core competencies alone rarely translate into gainful employment for fresh graduates in today’s highly competitive labour market. Accordingly, assessing employability skills desired in addition to basic/core competencies by employers of fresh graduates, has become the focus of researchers and education authorities of disciplines/majors. This study assessed the most influential employability skills for gainful employment of graduate Quantity Surveyors (QS). A questionnaire was self-administered to a sample of 108 QS consultancy firms. Statistical analysis was conducted using Pearson correlation and multiple regression. Results revealed industry interaction, self-motivation skills and entrepreneurial skills with respective standardized coefficient of 0.406, 0.341 and 0.215 to be employability skills most influential in addition to basic/core competencies, for gainful employment of QS graduates. As previous attempts to improve employability of QS graduates focused largely on basic/core competencies only, this finding present QS education authorities with most important skills to consolidate on other than core competencies in order to ensure QS graduates are gainfully employable. From a practical perspective, the study’s findings can be used by quantity surveying education authorities as a basis to further consolidate their teaching plans and ensure fresh quantity surveying graduates are fully work ready and gainfully employable.