A study on the employability of Lasallian finance fresh graduates for the academic years 2011-2012 and 2012-2013: An empirical paper

The study measures the employability of finance fresh graduates of De La Salle Univeristy for the past two academic years of 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 through the use of a Likert-style survey questionnaire that was administered to the respondents online. The responses gathered from the survey totalled 82 out of the whole sample of 340 graduate, thereby registering a response rate of 24.11%. Employability, as the dependent variable, is supported by six main independent variables namely: academic background, relevant work experience, leadership qualities, awards and achievements, hard skills and soft skills. The study uses explanatory factor analysis as the tool for creating new factors that were derived from the survey responses. In the end, the results create five new underlying factors that represent employability from the answers of the respondents. The results were filtered by using 0.5000 as the cut-off of factor loading values. The new five factors were named so: dynamism, ambition and emotional awareness, interpersonal ability, analytical and technical ability, and accounting background. Of the six a-priori expectations that were proposed, the only variable that was unfulfilled is academic background. The said variable was unable to pose significant results during the evaluation of the underlying factors