Acquiring personal competencies for graduate competitive advantage

By applying Barney’s Resource Based View (RBV) and Bourdieu’s Capitals Concept, the authors seek to examine how university students perceive they will compete in the graduate jobs market and to what extent they have pursued the acquisition of competencies to give them a competitive advantage over other graduates. Semi-structured interviews are used to obtain data from a sample of eighteen business degree students at a UK university. The findings were analysed thematically. It was found that the participants had not considered their strengths using the RBV framework. Instead, they understood how ‘fields of work’ worked using Bourdieu’s habitus. Additionally, the participants knew that skills that embodied cultural capital mattered but were not sure which ones. Participants valued work experience, in particular, for the skills they learned. This paper provides a novel application to education of a strategic management concept to yield original insight into graduate employability. The approach discussed in this paper, offers a practical tool for graduates to consider their own development, in relation to the increasingly competitive jobs market.