A growing number of scholars have investigated how extracurricular activities (ECA) are intimately tied to graduates' positional competition and enhancement of employability. Prior studies have shown that the strategic tendency towards ECA especially applies to privileged, high-achieving students from a high-status university. Yet studies…

The COVID-19 pandemic challenged the daily continuity of young people by causing financial insecurity, remote work/studies, loss of work, loneliness, stress, and unpredictability of the future. This study explores the experiences of pandemic-time graduates from Finland and Sweden in the transition from higher education to work. Finland and Sweden…

The transition from university to working life is a challenging phase for graduates. The focus in the present longitudinal study is on employability factors and their association with this transition and with early career success. The participants were 43 graduates who were interviewed at the time of their graduation and filled in a follow-up…

An unprecedented number of autistic people are completing university and they frequently face unemployment after graduation. However, research focusing on the forms of graduate capital and their employability is scarce. The focus of existing research has been on non-autistic, or neurotypical, graduates. The human, social, cultural, identity and…

Graduate employability research typically focuses on young graduates' entry to the labour market. Little is known about the careers of adults who attain higher education degrees in mid-life. This article explores Finnish University of Applied Sciences (UAS) Master's degree graduates' mid-career trajectories using retrospectively collected…

In this article, we will explore Finnish adult graduates' social positioning in relation to age and ageing, and the new discursive framing of employability that is firmly expressed in national as well as in European policy agendas. Age is here understood as a social construction and ageing as a lifelong process. We will analyse our joint interview…

This article examines the employment and placement in the working life of Finnish higher education graduates (i.e. graduates from universities and polytechnics), focusing on gender equality. It reports a study on gender segregation in higher education and working life, considered in relation to Nordic gender equality policies. The data were…