FOSTERING EMPLOYABILITY AT WORK THROUGH JOB CRAFTING

"In the current times of labor market transformations characterized by increasing globalization and digitalization processes, institutions and organizations are aiming at fostering employees’ levels of employability via training interventions at work. Higher levels of employability sustain employees’ competitiveness and job security as well as organizational productivity. Some scholarly authors define employability as a form of proactive adaptability specific to work that allows employees to identify and implement their career plans. It is also defined as the ability to transition effortlessly among the different occupations, allowing the individual to obtain employment. Given this, interventions aimed at fostering proactivity are deemed to be a possible way to foster employability. In recent years, researchers and practitioners have extensively examined employability, identifying different and separate antecedents, i.e., volition, support for career, skill development, job-related skills, willingness to change jobs, self-efficacy, and applicability of training on the job. In this study, we aim to give a contribution to such literature on training interventions to promote employability by proposing critical scrutiny around training interventions by which we will introduce job crafting intervention as a candidate to foster employability by supporting employees’ proactive behaviors. Indeed, job crafting intervention is a specific training aimed at promoting proactive behavior. In particular, it focuses on four main employees’ behavioral strategies, namely, (a) reducing job demands, (b) seeking challenges at work, (c) optimizing and (d) enhancing job resources. By promoting such behavioral strategies, employees can foster the applicability of learning by doing at work which directly affect the overall sense of employees’ employability. For instance, seeking challenges strategies can indirectly lead to learn novel practices at work affecting their sense of competence and organizational belonging. Likewise, reducing job demands and enhancing job resources can be seen as behavioral strategies which can directly foster practical knowledge (i.e., know-how) and its applicability which in turn may lead to higher levels of perceived employability among employees. Hence, in this study, we will firstly outline the benefit of training interventions at the workplace within which job crafting can be seen as a possible training pathway to foster employability. Secondly, we will present the specific training strategies setting a research agenda for further developments. Ultimately, we aim at lecturing about the pragmatic and moral concern of the notion of employability by proposing a theoretical discussion for practical implications."