Employability and Industrial Mutations

2Employability as a Managerial Imperative?

As the contributions by Bernard Gazier and Bénédicte Zimmermann in this book (Chapter 1 and Chapter 3) show, employability is a political issue. It is a question of addressing the issue of long-term unemployment and exclusion from work, or of enabling workers to seize their career path to serve a project “of their own” in an emancipatory perspective.

One of the criticisms leveled at employability consists of denouncing the lack of responsibility on the part of companies with regard to career paths and in passing on to workers the consequences of their management decisions: workforce adjustments or job and skill changes. However, it is much more in a situation of employment and work than in a situation of unemployment that individuals have the resources and opportunities necessary to prepare sustainable career paths. Employers therefore have a role to play, at least as much as public employment services.

However, this role only becomes a management concern insofar as it can be linked to tangible results or “performance” for the organization. Without this, employability remains confined to issues of corporate social responsibility: we “do employability” because we are legally obliged to or because we feel concerned about the fate of the “victims” of economic change. The central argument of this contribution is to show that employability is not an optional concern for companies, but a managerial imperative. In order to do so, it will ...