work alone, and also introduces some minimal indications of the “quality” of the job (duration and wage). It does not postulate a priori any link between individual skills, collective situations or economic or social policy actions and the outcome on the labor market. In this sense, it is neutral and cannot guide action: it can only be used for the retrospective evaluation of a particular intervention program.
This is not the case for two more recent versions developed mainly in the early 1990s, which can be called E6 “employability-initiative” and E7 “interactive employability”.
The E6 version emphasizes individual responsibility and the ability of a person to mobilize a process of human and social capital accumulation around his or her projects. E6 can therefore be defined by the negotiability of accumulated individual skills, and measured by the extent of accumulated or potentially accumulated human capital (knowledge and productive skills, and also learning capacities) and the size and quality of the network of collaborations and support that a person is likely to mobilize around him or her (social capital). The interest of this version is its dynamic dimension; it has the paradox of favoring individual characteristics that are close to an entrepreneurial model, the most employable person being the one who can extract income from his or her knowledge and networks, that is, the one who ultimately creates jobs, for himself or herself and for others. The policy implications here are the promotion of lifelong learning, better labor market information and greater labor market flexibility.
The latest E7 version explicitly introduces the interactive dimensions. Based on a 1994 Canadian definition, it defines employability as the relative ability of an individual to obtain a job, given the interaction between his or her individual characteristics and the labor market. Measuring employability then consists of establishing a set of statistical profiles that link individual characteristics and trajectories to labor market contexts and trends. The main operational consequences are the “activation” of employment policies with the promotion of multidimensional and negotiated approaches.
1.1.2. From static to dynamic and from unilateral to interactive
The direction of the above evolution is easy to decipher. The first versions of employability, if we exclude E1, which remains dichotomous, have the characteristic of being in some way split between an activist bias centered on the individual (E2 and E3) and a fundamentally collective orientation (E4). It should also be considered that these three definitions of employability have little dynamic component. Even though rehabilitation pathways can be developed from E2 and E3, these definitions start from a number of requirements and performances to be improved and draw up a list of priorities to be achieved, taking the state of the labor market as an exogenous data. Symmetrically, E4 does not question individual initiatives, and highlights macro-economic dependencies to the point of exonerating individuals from any adaptive responsibility beyond duly listed and previously accepted actions. Let us caricature: these three versions are at once one-sided, instantaneous and ultimately static.
Let us leave aside E5, which we have seen to have no causal or political orientation, and focus on E6 and E7. These last two versions precisely seek to articulate what remained unilateral in the previous versions: we can consider that they are interactive from the outset, and bring to the forefront the requirement of situated adaptation. And they introduce a dynamic dimension by mobilizing both the idea of human capital and that of social capital, whether they are situated in a flexible market framework (E6) or in a more complex institutional framework (E7).
Table 1.1. Two generations of employability
| DimensionTemporality | Individual | Interactive | Collective |
| Instant; 1960s | E2. Socio-medical employabilityE3. Employability – “workforce policy” | E4. Employability-Flow | |
| Dynamic; 1990s | E6. Employability-initiativeE7. Interactive employability |
It is thus possible to position five of the seven employability skills in a simple table (see Table 1.1) contrasting two generations, that of the 1960s and that of the 1990s. E6 is more on the individualistic side of interactions insofar as it is based on the primacy of flexible market adjustments, whereas E7 is closer to more collective dimensions, bringing into play more varied institutional adjustments.
1.2. Current tensions and recompositions
E7, interactive employability, has gradually concentrated the bulk of the practices and debates rooted in them. When it was first formulated, E7 was quickly associated with statistical “profiling” practices, whether American or European. However, the interactions taken into account have become better explored and more diversified, and open up new margins for maneuver, combining individual capacities and collective construction.
1.2.1. “Profiling”, from contextual calibration to negotiated interaction
American-style “profiling” practices (Georges 2007) consist of building and calibrating a statistical model that observes over recent past periods the average time to exit from unemployment for different categories of unemployed and associates them with their characteristics (age, professional specialization, qualification and location). We then try to predict the probability of an unemployed person’s exit from unemployment at a given time by running the model with that person’s characteristics. The coefficients of the model must be re-evaluated very frequently, for example every three or six months. The statistically most employable unemployed receive standard and minimal assistance, while those who are further from employment are targeted with enhanced measures. The average gains from the use of such a model were estimated, in the late 1990s, to be a one-week reduction in the duration of unemployment, a not insignificant gain in the North American context of the time when the average duration of unemployment rarely exceeded a few months. It is thus a rationalization of the care of the unemployed. The interaction with the collective dimensions is minimal here, taking into account only the various “local” labor market contexts in the model.
The “profiling” of the unemployed then spread and was implemented in different ways in different countries. The risk of such an approach is that, under the guise of objectivity, it may lead to a naturalization of individual employability, even when contextualized. Some countries have rejected it outright, as in the case of the public employment service in the United Kingdom, on the grounds that the measure freezes what should in fact evolve, in particular the career orientation and claims of the unemployed. Other countries, the most numerous, have limited themselves to segmenting the unemployed population into a few groups distinguished according to their “distance to employment” and have used this as one diagnostic tool among others; this is notably the case in France.
The law of 13 February 2008 creating Pôle emploi gave the new body bringing together compensation and placement services the task of “improving the employability” of job seekers, in particular by setting up a “profiling” system which positions each unemployed person on one of three paths: the “support” pathway intended for people with a “low distance to employment”, people “whose skills, abilities and salaries are in line with a buoyant market”; the “support“ pathway for jobseekers with a “high distance to employment” “whose job or salary is not in line with the market”. A final pathway is for business