Designing A Model of Employability Skills for Higher Education Graduates(Case Study: SMEs In Tehran Province)

In today’s market, the lack of necessary skills to operate efficiently could be mentioned as one of the significant issues. In the past, it was reported that higher levels of education correlates with lower unemployment rates leading to higher incomes for people with higher educations. However, this has changed over time, and recent statistics reaveled that the unemployment rate of university graduates is higher than the general unemployment rate in the society. This highlighted the significance of skills essential for operating in the market. Hence, this study seeks to present a model for skills that could raise the chance of employment referring to the literature review. This model was defined based on three groups of hard, soft and cognitive skills. The data were collected through interviews with some of recruiting officials and entrepreneurs. The findings indicated that after 15 interviews, the information and views obtained from the elites had reached saturation levels. Subsequently, the Delphi method questionnaire was extracted, and by referring to these companies, the views of the elites were obtained for the second time. This process was carried out four times, until a consensus was obtained about the skills necessary for the university graduates to enter the labor market. Finally, 17 main skills were mentioned by market participants as the essential skills for graduates to enter and work in the job market. The analysis in this study was conducted through fuzzy technique.