Employability as Process: Early-Career Transition Among Business Graduates in Morocco

Résumé

The transition from higher education into employment has become a contested juncture in contemporary labour markets, and acutely so in Morocco, where graduate unemployment in some settings runs well above the national average and tends to rise rather than fall with educational level. While the conceptual literature has reframed employability as a relational, context-dependent process built through capital, identity and early experience, most empirical work still measures it as a static stock of skills assessed at or before graduation, and the Moroccan graduate's own account of the transition is barely heard. This study addresses that gap and asks how early-career business graduates in Morocco understand and build their employability as they enter the labour market. The analysis is framed by Holmes's (2013) processual reading of graduate employability. Adopting an interpretivist, abductive design, it draws on in-depth semi-structured interviews with thirty early-career business graduates (one to five years' experience). Thirty-three interviews were conducted and three excluded on eligibility grounds, each lasting between forty-five and seventy-five minutes, analysed through reflexive thematic analysis. Four interrelated domains organise the findings: self-perception and early workplace feedback; skills and professional expectations; barriers and levers in transition; and responsibility and personal agency. Perceived readiness proved unstable by nature, revised through workplace contact and feedback that was interpretive before evaluative. The competencies that most shaped early performance were largely built after entry through situated and self-directed learning, inviting a reframing of the “employability gap” less as a deficiency carried out of university than as the distance any newcomer covers once employed. Graduates held structure and agency together, naming opaque recruitment, prior-experience paradoxes and network-dependent access as real constraints while still treating continuous upskilling as their own responsibility. Employability emerges as something assembled, and continually reassembled, in the early career, an account that centres the graduate's voice and carries practical implications for universities, employers and policymakers. Because the corpus is confined to thirty business graduates from six Moroccan regions, the account is offered as analytically transferable to comparable settings rather than as statistically generalisable.

JEL Classification: I23; J24; J62; M51

Paper type: Empirical Research