Abstract
D.Phil. (Personal and Professional Leadership)
For most graduates, entry into the working world is the start of everything they have aimed
for through school and university. (Holden & Hamblett, 2007). They arrive with an intense
desire to prove themselves, along with often unrealistic expectations of what the
organisation will deliver. The organisation, driven by deadlines, profits, and promises to
shareholders, has its own aims, and all this is situated “in a time of vast changes – changes
so epochal that they may dwarf those experiences in earlier eras… changes that call for new
educational forms and processes.” (Gardner, 2006, p.11). Add to this South Africa’s specific
issues around quality of education, historical inequalities, and culturally disparate
workforces, and you have multiple reasons for why both business and graduates could “fail
to achieve their real goals” (Schein, 1964, p. 68).
In order to better support graduates, it is necessary to more deeply understand the nature
of the graduate transition from university to the world of work. As identity is critical to the
process of adapting to new professional roles, I focused on the graduate identity journey in
the first year of work (Ibarra, 1999). Using constructivist grounded theory, I tracked a group
of 20 graduates over a one-year period, in a graduate development programme in a financial
insitiution in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Comparing the data I collected to Holmes’s (2001) Claim-affirmation Model of Emergent
Identity, I provide insight into the identity issues that graduates need to overcome during
this first year, how these issues impact their self-esteem, personal agency, and self-efficacy,
and which coping methods they choose to employ during this time. The results suggest that
by providing graduates with a liminal temporary identity, the graduate identity, they are
better able to manage the transition from student identity to professional identity. The
temporary graduate identity allows them to play with their identity rather than work at their
identity while on the graduate programme (Ibarra & Petriglieri, 2011). In order to create the
temporary graduate identity it is suggested that graduate development programmes need to
be reconceptualised as rites of passage, filled with ritualised activities that enable graduates
to experience communitas with other graduates on the programme (Turner, 2008). Various
graduate rituals are suggested to this end. Within the graduate rite of passage, graduates need to be supported in developing their
interpersonal, intrapersonal and technical skills. To help graduates develop deeper insight
into self and others, a graduate self development model is proposed. In order to support the
development of technical skills, rotational technical skills programmes and fixed role
programmes are explored. A framework is suggested for how to develop rotational
programmes that maximise the pros and minimise the cons of rotational programmes.
In order for the graduate programme managers to best support graduates during their time
on the programme I recommend that they need to become more sensitive to the needs of
the graduates, I adapt the graduate self development model and offer this as a tool for
programme managers self development. This model will help graduate programme
managers to begin to uncover some of their own stereotypes and unconcious biases, and
more deeply develop their coaching, mentoring and supporting skills.
Many of the graduate issues that arise while on the graduate programme involve graduates
and managers leaping to conclusions based on faulty assumptions about each other. This
often results in an impasse between graduates and their managers. I suggest that graduate
programme managers take on the added role of mediator in order to point out to graduates,
and their managers, how they might be misconstruing each other, therefore helping to avert
some of the issues graduates experience.
The findings of this study therefore have implications for graduate programme managers,
and provides insight into how to better design and develop future graduate programmes.