Employability and Industrial Mutations. Группа авторов

Géraldine Schmidt and Florent Noël (Chapter 2) approach the issue of employability from a business perspective: developing employability is one of the conditions for the success of the restructuring, mutations and transformations that companies must carry out to remain competitive. Making employees employable ultimately means facilitating professional transitions and making changes more easily acceptable. This means planning workforce movements and skills development efforts, and also empowering employees. It can also mean letting employees decide on the direction of their activity and thus build, in an emergent and bottom-up way, the organization and even the strategy of the company. This brings us to the emancipatory conception of employability put forward by Bénédicte Zimmermann in Chapter 3, who, on the basis of fieldwork, explores the conditions under which employability is confused with the ability of individuals to widen their field of possibilities to enable them to make professional choices of value to them, thus distancing themselves from the constraints of the labor market, on the one hand, and organizational rigidities, on the other hand. These three contributions set out the terms of the debate: the challenge of employability is not only to gain access to employment or to remain in employment, but also to aim for dignified living conditions and ultimately to aspire to freedom.

This broadening of perspectives allows us in the second part to draw a portrait of employable or, in a sense, unemployable workers. It is a question of discussing “what staying on the sidelines” or “being in the running” could be. To this end, Chapter 4, written by Raymonde Ferrandi on the basis of her experience as a psychologist working in social services to help with social and professional integration, draws up a series of portraits of people excluded from employment. These are people who are not allowed to work for administrative or medical reasons, or people who belong to discriminated groups. They are sometimes people who do not manage to master the social codes in force in the world of work or who, for various reasons, keep themselves away from work, which they see as an insurmountable situation. It is the weight of social representations of people or individual representations of work that is highlighted. In contrast to these problems of exclusion, Pauline de Becdelièvre, Cindy Felio and Jean-Yves Ottmann focus in Chapter 5 on qualified Information Technology workers who embark on the adventure of self-employment. The life stories they present are those of workers wishing to emancipate themselves from subordination – sometimes driven by a desire for independence, sometimes as a result of accidents along the way – who then have to work on themselves and for themselves to make themselves attractive. Constant monitoring of new technologies and professional practices, “self-marketing“ and the maintenance of networks become the conditions, not always met, for their professional development. Martina Gianecchini, Paolo Gubitta and Sara Dotto finally address the problem of employability for “stable” employees (Chapter 6). Their questionnaire survey of a large sample of Italian workers shows the importance of the ability to interact broadly with the various trades that make up a company. Particularly for jobs related to innovation or team management, mastering a particular expertise is not enough. The “digital revolution”, in particular, requires an interest in other specialties. This observation leads the authors to plead for the return of the “honest man of the Renaissance”, gifted with a broad and general understanding of problems and capable of imposing himself in project mode.

At the end of these first two parts, the reader will hopefully have a better understanding of what is meant by employability development. The third part describes concrete management systems set up by companies, sometimes in collaboration with labor market actors, to develop employability. These examples show that employability is not an attribute of individuals, but that it is the result of approaches to identifying and enhancing skills that explain the concrete dynamics of careers. Being employable is a question of collective judgment which requires coordination between the actors involved: individuals and employers at least. In Chapter 7, Anne-Laure Gatignon-Turnau and Séverine Ventolini discuss the simulation-based recruitment method developed by Pôle emploi, which makes it possible to dispense with the curriculum vitae that penalize the long-term unemployed and those who are furthest from employment. Putting workers in a situation makes it possible to validate the possession of skills despite the absence of validated training or validated experiences. It can be a way for companies to broaden their sourcing to compensate for possible labor shortages. This way of organizing the meeting of labor supply and demand ultimately makes it possible to establish a dialogue between employers and new employees and has the effect of strengthening commitment to work. Chapter 8 is in the same vein, but for different categories. Thierry Colin, Benoît Grasser and Fabien Meier present the skills enhancement approach developed in an aeronautics company to recruit for production positions with high requirements of reliability and quality. What’s more, these positions involve new products and technologies that do not yet exist. A fortiori, there is no ad hoc training leading to them. They clearly show that employability is co-constructed in the interaction between an individual and an organization through manpower pre-qualification mechanisms based on very general skills, followed by training and tutoring mechanisms. They also stress the fundamental role of work instructions and teaching tools that make learning, work, employment and thus employability possible. Employability is thus decided in the uncertainty during the recruitment process and then in the on-the-job training process. Risk and investment are at the heart of the approach. At the other end of the employee’s “life cycle” in the company, Ève Saint-Germes offers, in Chapter 9, a dive into a world that is too often overlooked: that of outplacement units. Here again, employability appears to be the result of coordination between actors with different constraints: individuals looking for work after being made redundant, the employer who makes them redundant, the redeployment unit, the joint committee monitoring the redundancy plan and so on. We find the idea that employability is equipped with tools and gives rise to intense negotiations on measurement systems, the categorization of individuals leading to orientation towards a particular support measure, budgets and so on. Employability is not given, it is socially constructed. Chapter 10 closes this section. Sara Dotto, Patrick Gilbert, Florent Noël and Nathalie Raulet-Croset attempt to identify typical configurations in which production requirements, ways of defining the qualities of work and management systems for assessing and developing employability, are brought into line. The figure of the multi-skilled, available and opportunistic worker is only one model among others, alongside the worker with certified skills modeled on the stable requirements of standardized production or the worker included in networks within which the shared culture and affinities necessary for collaborative work are developed.

The approaches presented in the third part are based on structured and deliberate management systems: building tests, organizing training, monitoring the development of skills and so on. But employability is also built in the work situation in interactions with management and peers, in the learning of professional gestures, behavioral codes and the discovery of desirable opportunities. It is the whole organization that must be empowering. The contributions in the last part of the book return to the ideas developed upstream by presenting examples of companies undergoing change and tension, in which the work situation has a positive or negative influence on the employees’ career path. The transformation of the SAE group’s factories towards a factory of the future model, presented by Emmanuelle Garbe and Jérémy Vignal in Chapter 11, raises interesting questions about the employability of operators in the current context of digital transformation. Technological changes have led to fears of a polarization of the workforce, with super-operators, on the one hand, who are called upon to increase their skills in order to carry out the tasks of controlling and managing installations, and less qualified operators on the other, who may fear that their work will be de-skilled with them becoming servants of