Enhancing graduate students’ employability:an enacted-resilience framework

In an increasingly dynamic and digitally mediated professional landscape, the demands on graduate students extend far beyond technical proficiency. To successfully navigate the ambiguities of the modern job market—including its unpredictable expectations, digital challenges, and frequent rejections—they must possess not just specialized skills but also a profound capacity for resilience. While resilience is widely recognized as a critical life skill, this paper argues that our current understanding of it remains incomplete, particularly at the individual level. We contend that a more robust theoretical framework is needed to capture the active cognitive processes through which resilience is forged in relation to employability – defined as an individual's proactive capacity to adapt to career-related changes (Fugate, Kinicki, and Ashforth, 2004).