Are employers active players in the process of nurturing and driving skill supply by younger university graduates? And how do they interact with Universities in shaping graduates' skills? Firms rely upon timely availability of skills to compete and grow, while workers depend on their skills to access jobs and, more importantly, high quality jobs. The purpose of this research programme (RP) is to examine employers' strategies to access the skills they need by either recruiting skilled employees from the labour market (LM) or by training their internal labour force. This choice reflects the make-or-buy alternative typical of all production factors, yet the centrality of human resources and the uncertainty surrounding the outcomes of programmes targeted at their development turn this choice into a critical driver of firm survival. Due to the crucial roles played by graduates from higher education (HE) institutions in shaping growth and innovation processes, this RP focuses on HE under- and post-graduates. When do employers prefer ready-to-work over ready-to learn graduates? What individual characteristics encourage internal training? Which solutions may support university-to-work transitions and consequently reduce or avoid skill problems? The underlying assumption is that the match between skill demand and skill supply depends on the ability of HE institutions to provide students with appropriate skills but also on firms' human resource policies and practices. To account for the intertwined roles of HE institutions and employers this RP explores both anticipative and remedial strategies and pursues five specific goals: 1) identify the employability skills for younger HE graduates in national and international LMs; 2) examine firms' strategies to access and develop required skills; 3) explore employers' expectations from HE institutions; 4) explore how employers' skill policies affect job quality of younger graduates; and 5) explore the relationship between HE and firm...

Who benefited most from the re-regulation of labour markets which affected most of EU countries in the 1990s? The guidelines of the European Employment Strategy stress the need to promote flexibility combined with employment security and to ensure employment-friendly labour cost developments and wage-setting mechanisms [Ce05]. Despite higher occupation and employment rates, the outcome of 20 years of labour market flexibility is not clear yet. Flexibility allowed employers to face increasingly competitive markets, yet claims exist that contract flexibility was also used to cut labour and training costs [RaScHa00]. Contract flexibility has also been accused of driving large shares of younger workers and other groups of disadvantages employees to career paths characterised by temporary contracts, lower wages, poor working conditions, and low training. Literature on employment relationships has achieved important results, but several gaps still exist. The core idea of this research project is that wage dynamics and the use of flexible contracts are driven by the wage policy of a firm and by environmental conditions. Thus, the research programme jointly developed by a Portuguese and an Italian research unit, will take advantage of two national administrative linked employer-employee panel databases: Quadros do Pessoal, and Work Histories Italian Panel (WHIP). The research programme is based on a multidisciplinary, comparative, and pluralist approach and it is expected to produce new theoretical models and empirical evidence on the joint use of contract flexibility and targeted wage policies by firms.