Position of Higher Education System Graduates in the Labor Market: Search For New Opportunities

The ongoing socio-economic and socio-cultural changes bring about significant alterations in the social structure of society and the institution of education. This calls for in-depth research to predict the further development of social processes and determine effective methods of managing them at the society and regional levels. The employment of university graduates has essentially acquired the characteristics of a new social process after the abolition of obligatory employment by distribution. The emergence of new statuses (for example, mixed statuses), in which university graduates often find themselves being unemployed or working outside their professions, has become an acknowledged social fact. The interest of many sociologists in this problem is also due to changes in the functions of social institutions, including the institution of education, an important part of which is higher education. The study focuses on the importance of such obstacles as contradictions between the qualification programs, teaching methods, graduates’ competencies, employers’ requirements for the same competencies and qualifications, the mismatch between the studied theory and practice, and the identification and justification of the main employment strategies for university graduates. The study objectives are pursued through descriptive data analysis and the qualitative approach with a questionnaire as the main data collection method. The study is conducted on a sample of 130 organization leaders. The aforementioned problems and shortcomings of Kazakh university graduates’ training are detected and analyzed using comparative analysis. In accordance with the specifics of the labor market, the authors identify the market, paternalistic, and traditional strategies of university graduates’ employment.