Employability and Industrial Mutations

3Capability-based Employability: A Total Organizational Fact

Established as a pillar of the European employment strategy in the early 2000s, employability has since been a key element in the policy of modernizing labor markets and social protection systems. The “activation” measures associated with it aim to develop the responsiveness of the labor market through greater adaptability of workers, and in so doing to develop companies’ performance while combating unemployment. The previously dominant paradigm of “job security” is thereby replaced by that of “securization through employability”. The result is a twofold shift: first, from an assured state (security) to a process in permanent evolution (securization); second, from a legally codified status (employment) to properties attached to a singular person (employability).

Employability gives way to the dynamics of individual pathways and the opening up of possibilities. It refers to a “capacity for professional integration” (Chassard and Bosco 1998) which depends on the individual profile of the employee and its adequacy to the job opportunities available on the labor market. In connection with the concept of adaptability, it also implies that the employee must take responsibility for this match. These are the foundations of the interactive definition of employability as “the capacity of an individual to find a job, given the interactions between his or her individual characteristics and the labor market”, that has been taken ...