Career identity, social capital, psychological capital and employability of leadership development program graduates.

Abstract

The researcher set out to find the relationship between social capital, career identity, psychological capital and employability of Leadership Development Programme (LDP) graduates. To achieve this cross sectional research design was adopted to collect data from 204 Leadership Development Programme graduates. The collected data was analysed; descriptive, correlational and regressonal statistics acquired about the variables of study. Career identity was found to have a weak positive relationship with psychological capital (r =.09** and p <0.01). Social capital was found to have a moderate positive relationship with psychological capital (r =.43**and p <0.01). Psychological capital positively related with employability (r =.46**and p <0.01) of graduates since graduates needed to and p <0.01) of graduates since graduates needed to first acquire work context skills which enable them to meet the performance expectations. The effect of career identity, social capital and psychological capital on the employability was complimented by age and level of education of the respondents. The older and more educated the graduates were the more appealing to the employers. From the findings managers of LDP were argued to equip graduates with a mixture of career and work context experiences to make them attractive to employers and leverage on the existing networks to cause or promote hiring of competent Leadership Development Programme graduates. The LDP ought to put in place avenues that enable students acquire the required skills through structured holiday placements, professional internships and special interventions like work centered skills, adaptability, pro-activity and sponsoring students for post graduate studies to offset the age constraint.