Scale Development to Measure Employer Engagement

Employer engagement, in existing literature, mostly refers to the engagement of the educational institutions in the corporate world; to benchmark their curricula and syllabi in-line with the employers' needs. This study has focused on the same construct with different relation; typically in the context of work-based learning providers and organizational practices. Although there has been theoretical discussions and calls to develop comprehensive measures for employer engagement, however, no contemporary measure for employer engagement exist to the context this study was carried out. The scope of this study covers the development of a new scale based on the guidelines to measure employer engagement specifically to the context of work based practices. The scale constitutes of 19 items that address, employer engagement based on 3 sub-dimensions. The scale was developed and validated through six phases beginning with the determination of valid dimensions / construct followed by generation of pool of items, assessing the content adequacy of the items and items refinement through exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. Reliability and validity of the scale are also tested.