Exploring learning and fit in the transition from higher education to the labour market: A systematic review

The transition from higher education to the labour market involves important and extensive changes for graduates, which makes it an interesting and necessary period to focus on as the current society is characterized by rapid technological changes and globalisation. This transition as a context has been used in a wealth of studies, mostly focusing on ‘finding employment’, ‘career success’, and ‘staying in employment’. Employment is a well-studied outcome, while, to the best of our knowledge, a review studying the role of (continued) learning in the transition from higher education to the labour market is lacking. It is notable that the fit between the educational background and the work situation is regularly examined. Although most research agrees that this fit is an important variable in examining the transition, no univocal framework is provided which summarises the effects of the (absence of) fit or the relation between fit and learning. Therefore, a systematic review was conducted, in order to explore the literature on the transition from higher education to the labour market, concerning fit and learning. The literature was systematically searched and following databases were used: ERIC (OvidSP), Social Science Citation Index, Econlit, and FRANCIS. In our literature search, the term ‘transition’ was coupled with all combinations of ‘education’, ‘school’, ‘college’, or ‘university’ and ‘labo(u)r market’, ‘work’, or ‘employment’. In addition, these terms were also combined with the infix ‘to’ instead of ‘transition’, for example ‘college to work’. These search terms led to 47247 hits. After removing doubles, 20454 unique references remained. To reduce this number of references, several steps were taken. First of all, articles that did not focus on the transition were excluded, as well as studies that are not empirical, non peer-reviewed studies, or studies that were not in English. This selection was conducted in several steps. The first step comprised the selection based on the title of the manuscript. Afterwards, a selection based on abstract was made, followed by excluding articles published before 1990. Subsequently, the studies were categorized in accordance with the educational level they focused on. As the focus of this systematic review is on the transition from higher education to the labour market, only studies that included higher education were retained, leaving 376 studies. In a next step the studies focusing on learning and/or fit were retained. In a final step, 54 studies were selected. The results point to the complex and dynamic role of learning in the transition from higher education to the labour market. Furthermore, it is found that fit takes a central role in this transition. We found that a lot of outcomes relevant in the transition (e.g., engagement, goal-setting, self-regulated learning) are related to the fit graduates experience between their educational background and their current job. In addition, results will be presented on the relationship between the experienced fit and learning in the workplace, which mainly points to the necessity of specific or generic competencies.status: publishe