The project

This project looks at graduate transitions and work placements from an inclusive perspective in alignment with the focus of the Oxford Brookes Centre for Diversity Policy Research and Practice.
We are focusing on understanding how work placements reproduce and how they can disrupt inequalities due to gender and social class, using a mixed-methods research approach.

We’re currently interviewing recent graduates and current Master’s students in the UK and in Italy about their experiences of work during study.
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Project aims

We aim to build on our interdisciplinary strengths to examine access to and participation in work placements and the labour market and broader outcomes of participating in such placements, using a quantitative and qualitative research approach. We compare the situation in the UK and Italy from economic, political and sociological perspectives, with the innovation of integrating the theoretical insights of how work placements affect graduates’ labour market and other outcomes and reproduce the inequalities inherent in the national systems, contextualised in the national regimes of human capital formation (Iversen & Stephens, 2008).

Our research question asks who participates in what kind of work placements and why, and how does this contribute to reproducing or disrupting gender and social inequalities in higher education and the labour market in an institutional context, using the UK and Italy as examples. Importantly, we conduct a mixed-methods investigation by piloting qualitative interviews of students’ and graduates’ experiences in both countries to deepen and extend our quantitative insights. We will build on this pilot study into a grant application to a funding body sympathetic to our interdisciplinary and mixed-methods view.

Our critical stance will allow us to highlight the deficiencies in an individualistic and universalist approach to graduate employability that narrowly defines terms of ‘success’ and obfuscates the mechanisms and structures shaping graduates’ agency (Tholen, 2015). We aim to link the ways in which graduate transitions to employment are situated within and influenced by national education and labour market systems. Last, we hope to take a fresh perspective on the problem, by looking at the issue in an holistic way from critical, institutional and interdisciplinary perspectives.

We hope to understand the similarities and differences between the reasons why students undertake work experience activities, what they think about their experiences, and to set up follow-up interviews to see what the students do after they graduate, to help address the gaps in and deepen the insights from our quantitative analysis. We will develop the Graduate Transitions research network further, and intend to build on this project further and apply for research grants to fund further research. We will also propose a special issue on graduate transitions to employment in a comparative, interdisciplinary context.

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