www.jsser.org Journal of Social Studies Education Research Sosyal Bilgiler Eğitimi Araştırmaları Dergisi 2022:13(4),188-208 Teamworking and Concern for Standards as Part of Employability Readiness of the UAE Students’ Personality Ganka Ivanova1, Rakan Alhrahsheh2, Amoura Aboutaleb3, Ashraf Alazab4 Abstract In the time of globalization and technological revolution, we often witness that skillset required to go through life demands are changing dramatically; more digital literacy is required and specific soft skills. The last is a growing concern, especially for growing economies and societies, where involving the local workforce is a challenge. In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the government places a huge emphasis on Emiratization and puts conditions on employers to include Emirati nationals in the workforce. Preparation for work starts with attitude, raised in the family, affected by the educational system, and includes specific personality factors in specific correlation. This study aims to provide light on the status of employability readiness of the UAE students, specifically team working and concern for standards as factors correlating with employability and shows its correlations. The last can be considered when updating university programs for preparing the UAE youth to take part in the global workforce. Results showed a strong relationship at the level of significance (α = 0.05) between concern for standards and employability, in addition, there is no effect of the gender variable (male, female) on the student's personality and the degree of his employability. Keywords: Employability, personality factors, team working, concern for standards Introduction The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has successfully demonstrated a well-working model of integrated foreign workforce with local population, having the ratio of foreign workforce much wider present than that of UAE nationals. The population of expats in the UAE represents 88.52% of its total population, and the Emirati population is 11.48% (UAE Population statistics report, 2022). However, the UAE government makes huge effort to include the local workforce in educational programs and highlight the importance to work. It also reserves specific jobs for the UAE nationals and stimulates businesses to employ more local people. In November 2018, the UAE government announced its National Employment Strategy 2031. 1 Dr. Ganka Yordanova Ivanova, Al Ain University,UAE, ganka.ivanova@aau.ac.ae 2 Dr. Rakan Alhrahsheh, Al Ain University, UAE, Rakan.alhrahsheh@ aau.ac.ae 3 Dr. Amoura Hassan Aboutaleb, Al Ain University, UAE,Amoura.aboutaleb@aau.ac.ae 4 Prof. Ashraf Mohamed Alazab, Kafrelsheikh University, Egypt, Prof.alazab@outlook.com Journal of Social Studies Education Research 2022: 13 (4),188-208 The strategy-shared goals were to support government efforts for building knowledge based, sustainable economy through different means, including supporting local production and providing national human workforces with skillset required for the labor market, promoting lifelong development and personal growth programs and training workforce to equip the majority of people with future skills needed. The latter resulted in the need to highlight the current status of employability of the local workforce, given that they have unique circumstances in the UAE, where the current workforce in the market consists of over 286 nationalities. The latter makes things even more challenging for the UAE nationals as they must cope with global competition and work in a multi-cultural environment, with people often very different in regard to skillsets, culture, and preparation to work. Some specific skillsets are required to face the requirements of future as well (Brewer, 2013). Additionally, the UAE labor market is a very changing and dynamic environment, which as any dynamic requirement demands a specific employee profile (Misra & Khurana, 2017). In this regard, this study aims to answer questions related to personality factors as part of employability readiness as well as specific correlations of team working and concern for standards-as factors part of employability readiness as they show predictions for team and organization cohesiveness as well as ability to align to a common standard and goal-very important, when working in a multi- cultural team as the working in the global environment needs specific understanding of cross- cultural competencies (Safta, 2015). The study also shows a correlation between employability characteristics and gender, as it is widely noticed in the UAE community that women are strongly supported and encouraged to be part of the workforce and become entrepreneurs. The pressure on the UAE nationals is high as they are expected to join a globally competitive workforce very soon and perform in high positions, which often include specific technical preparation and readiness and certain soft skills, and behavioral preparation. Thus, this study comes to answer important questions associated with the UAE nationals’ employability readiness and research questions in that context linked to a correlation of team working and concern of standards -as the latter is very important, when the UAE demands to align all employees to international standards and be the leader in setting new standards. Ivanova et al. 190 Research questions RQ1: Is there a significant correlation between the readiness of the Emirati students’ personalities for employment and the following variables: age, teamwork, and attention to standards separately? RQ2: Are age, teamwork, and attention to standards determinants of the Emirati students’ readiness for employment? RQ3: Are there significant differences in the average scores of the Emirati students’ readiness variable for employment due to the gender variable? Hypotheses H01: There is a direct correlation between the Emirati students’ readiness for employment of the dependent variable and the independent variables of age, teamwork, and attention to standards separately. H02: The variables of age, teamwork, and attention to standards make a unique moral contribution to explaining part of the discrepancy in the degrees of the Emirati students’ readiness for employment variable. H03: There are significant differences in the average degrees of the Emirati students’ readiness variable for employment due to the gender variable. Theoretical review The United Arab Emirates is located in the Gulf, consisting of seven emirates, including Abu Dhabi, the capital city of the UAE. It has a unique demographic landscape, having expats as the majority of its workforce is now prioritizing the UAE nationals as part of its future development. The UAE Vision 2021 reported that the UAE should adapt new economic models and promote sustainable, knowledge-based, and diversified economy, while partnering with global entities to ensure a successful future for the future UAE generations (Vision, 2021). The vision strategically puts human capital development at its core, linked to participation of Emiratis in the workforce and providing them initially more opportunities and support to complete their higher education, where they can practice skills that can align them easier to global economic demands and shape future needs. Currently, only 47.6% of the Emiratis are employed (Federal Competitiveness and Journal of Social Studies Education Research 2022: 13 (4),188-208 Statistics Authority, 2018), and the government aims to address this imbalance in various ways. Local businesses and entrepreneurship have been strongly encouraged, and expatriate talents are also supported with various new types of visas with the aim of additionally stimulating the economy and generating additional positions and knowledge transfer. It is very important to highlight the role of educational institutions in preparing future employees to join the workforce. As it is well known, universities are places where we expect students to develop specific competencies such as social, communicative, technological, and cultural competencies (Gapsalamov et al., 2020; Hambali, 2019; Shinysherova et al., 2018; Tarman, 2012). Additionally, the expectations from the UAE nationals are high as they are widely supported and expected to join and lead teams in a diverse environment. The latter itself and the demand to perform, when placed very fast in very high positions, includes ability to work in teams and adhere to specific standards and be ready to fit into a continuously changing and dynamic professional environment. The profile of an employee, to begin with, in 2022, is very different from what it was 10 years ago. The challenge in front of universities and competency development programs nowadays is to prepare students now only for today’s expectations but for future demands that are arriving with double faster speed that mankind is used to, than ever before. Unemployment is often associated with lack of proper education, motivation, and certain personality factors. To ensure students' future success, we can discuss what personality factors are mostly considered in organizations. The latter is one of the main issues in human resources, organizational psychology and organizational behavior (Shaleh et al., 2022). The personality characteristics of employees are associated with employee teamwork skills, ability to adhere to standards Van & Heijden (2016), consciousnesses, problem solving, ambitiousness, assertiveness, creativity, emotional intelligence, and continuous professional development (Dacre, 2017). We used a psychometric assessment tool Carrus assessment, developed by AQR International, UK, and screened for validity, reliability, and consistency by British Psychological Society Chartered Psychologists. The Carrus personality test assesses employability and its components, and we are very pleased to share its findings on some of its aspects. Many scholars have argued the employability factors that undergraduate students must have. Paredes and Rodriguez (2021) examined the employability skills expected of graduates in 14 Ivanova et al. 192 metropolitan areas in Texas, USA, and found that graduates need more communication skills, especially bilingualism. Cabezas-González et al., (2021) also examined the effect of the variables of gender, age, and academic degree on acquiring digital competence by graduates, enabling them to obtain jobs, with a sample of 370 students from the University of Salamanca (Spain). The main conclusion was that the three variables studied could be considered influencing, though not decisive, in the acquisition of digital proficiency for employment. Omar et al. (2020) referred to a Malaysian Employment Agency’s study on the causes of graduate unemployment conducted on 3,300 employees. The results showed that the graduates are well trained but lack soft skills such as communication, problem-solving, interpersonal ability, and flexibility. In their study, Singh & Sing, (2017) investigated the salient factors in e-learning for the development of specific job skills. The result indicated that, from the student's point of view, in addition to other factors, flexibility in e-learning is the most prominent factor in developing job-specific skills. Singh (2017) also explored the antecedents of employability from the employer's perspective of sustainable job creation and the development of a measurement metric. The results emphasized the importance of innovative skills and innovative abilities along with innovative knowledge and abilities, personality factors, career-building traits, emotional intelligence, and effectiveness beliefs. Hashim (2015) investigated the practice of teamwork skills for technical employment among students at technical institutions. Two hundred twenty-six students in the final semester in the Department of Electrical Engineering participated in this research. The results showed that the level of teamwork, adaptation, interpersonal relations, and communication skills is high among the graduate students. In their study, Guilbert et al., (2016) aimed to develop an integrated approach explaining employability through a qualitative approach that examines relevant studies. They reported that the company and its interventions are considered an important source in developing the ability of employees. They also found that companies contribute to this by raising the level of services, informing employees of new vacancies, and improving the work environment. Madar and Buntat (2011) aimed to determine the elements of employability skills that were incorporated by community college trainers into the teaching process and their importance to employers in Malaysia. The study sample consisted of 270 respondents. The results showed a need for awareness of communication skills, workgroup skills, and information and communication technology skills. Journal of Social Studies Education Research 2022: 13 (4),188-208 Dacre and Qualter (2013) examined the association between emotional self-efficacy and employability, through graduates (N = 306, they found emotional self-efficacy to be an important predictor of graduate employability. Additionally, they found that graduate employability mediates the relationship between emotional self-efficacy and career satisfaction. In their study Fugate, & Kinicki (2008), they found that dispositional employability was significantly related to employees' positive emotions and affective commitment related to organizational changes. It was shown that these effects were above and beyond those found for tolerance for ambiguity, work locus of control, self-esteem, and optimism. Methods Research Design This empirical research was conducted to determine employability among students at Al Ain University. The study specifically examined the relationship and effect of teamwork and attention to attitudes (independent variables) and employability (dependent variable). This research used a descriptive approach through a special employability psychometric assessment questionnaire, used for the first time for such a study. To find the correlation and its effect between the variables, this study utilized the analysis of the multiple correlations, Pearson's simple correlation, and ascending stepwise multiple linear regression. The research also used a t- test to analyze the differences between the averages to determine whether the difference in sex affected the readiness of the Emirati students’ personalities for employability. Study Sample This research used a purposive sample of 310 male and female students enrolled at Al Ain University in the final semester in the Department of Applied Sociology, enrolled in the academic year 2021–2022. Table 1 shows the socio-demographic characteristics of the study sample. The participants were females (N = 133, 42. 9%), and males. (N = 177, 57.1%). The ages of the participants ranged between 18 and 42 years, with a mean of 25, a standard deviation of 6.9, and a range of 24 years. Ivanova et al. 194 Table 1 Distribution of the Study Sample by Gender and Age Student Users (N = 310). ـ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Variable N % M SD Range ــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Gender Male 177 57.1 Female 133 42.9 Total 310 100 ــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــ Age (years) 25.6 6.9 24 Less than 20 57 18.4 20 to less than 172b 55.5 31 and above 81 26.1 Total 310 100 Data Collection Tool The data collection tool is a personal psychological assessment questionnaire called Carrus, consisting of 32 questions, designed by AQR International UK and screened by British Psychological Society UK representative, Chartered Psychologist for reliability, credibility and consistency that measures employability and its various aspects. The Carrus employability test, available in different languages, including Arabic, consists of four parts. To ensure questionnaire validity, the questionnaire was reviewed by a group of arbitrators at Al Ain University and other Universities in the UAE, and their comments and review were considered. We also used Cronbach's alpha test to ensure the questionnaire's internal consistency. Its value ranged between 0.721 and 0.888. The high value of this parameter (> .60) indicates a high c. The scale reliability results are shown in Table 2. Table 2 Cronbach's Alpha of the Reliability of the Questionnaire ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Domain No. of Items Cronbach's alpha Face validity ــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Team working 5 0.865 0.930 Concern for standards 7 0.721 0.849 Employment readiness 20 0.888 0.942 Total 32 0.917 0.957 ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Journal of Social Studies Education Research 2022: 13 (4),188-208 The first part of the questionnaire consisted of socio-demographic data. The second part consisted of five questions designed to measure the impact of teamwork on employability that required participants to mark them if relevant, as follows: (1) “Working with others gives me more motivation,” (2) “I enjoy being part of a team,” (3) “ I can be more effective if I work in a team,” (4) “I prefer working with others,” and (5) “I love being in a team.” The items were represented through the five-point Likert scale; (5) Very Agree, (4) Agree, (3) Neutral, (2) Disagree, and (1) Absolutely Disagree. The arithmetic mean value of the sum of the degrees of the five phrases was 19.5 degrees, with a standard deviation of 4.3 degrees. The third part consisted of seven questions, which measured the attention to standards as follows: (1) “Just doing a 'good' job isn't enough for me,” (2) “Do whatever it takes to get the work done,” (3) “I don't like making the same mistake over and over again,” (4) “I want everything to be perfect,” (5) “Working to get the right results is important to me,” (6) “I always work according to clear standards,” and (7) “Because that is important I rarely make the same mistake twice.” The items were represented through the five-point Likert scale; (5) Very Agree, (4) Agree, (3) Neutral, (2) Disagree, and (1) Absolutely Disagree. The arithmetic mean value of the sum of the degrees of the five phrases was 29.0 degrees, with a standard deviation of 3.8 degrees. The fourth section consisted of 20 questions measuring the employability through the following indicators: (1) “I am a good listener” (2) “I find it helpful to ask questions and learn from those around me,” (3) “The “Get up and go” style is what I have toward most things,” (4) “I participate in volunteer work to help others,” (5) “When I work with others, I often notice how they can do the job better,” (6) “I learn from my mistakes,” (7) “I keep all my work organized in files,” (8) “ I like to be in charge of something,” (9) “I often find my way to convince others in the group to do what I want,” (10) “I always try to meet task deadlines,” (11) “I work hard to get good results،,” (12) “I understand how important it is to keep up with developments,” (13) “I prefer to stick to the rules,” (14) “I can always figure out how to deal with a problem,” (15) “I am often described as a person with a lot of ideas,” (16) “I feel satisfied by helping others” (17) “I usually plan what to do,” (18) “People usually trust me for advice and support,” (19) “I can influence the opinion of others when they look at things differently from my own,” and (20) “I can see myself being successful in the future.” The items were represented through the five-point Likert scale; (5) Very Agree, (4) Agree, (3) Neutral, (2) Disagree, and (1) Absolutely Disagree. The arithmetic mean Ivanova et al. 196 value of the sum of the degrees of the five phrases was 81.8 degrees, with a standard deviation of 10.5 degrees. Data Collection Process The data collection was performed by the authors through the distribution of the online test described above or during a period of three weeks in Feb 2022. Initially, the questionnaire was sent through email to 400 randomly selected students. Seventy-eight questionnaires were not returned, and 12 were deleted, because they were incomplete and couldn`t be used. The total sample of the questionnaires used for this study was 310. This ensured that a sufficient number of students and a good presentation of them participated, as the latter is important when we are trying to provide an expanded picture of community attitudes toward the topic assessed. Data Analysis The study used SPSS-24 software to perform the statistical analysis. This included descriptive statistics, frequency distribution, and percentage of data used to describe the variants. An F-test was utilized to determine the significance of the multiple linear regression analysis model. A t-test was performed to analyze the significance of the relationships between the independent variables and the dependent variable in the regression equation. The approved levels of significance ranged from 0.01 to 0.05. Study Results The study relied on the central limit theorem, which states that in the case of relying on samples with a sufficient limit greater than 30 or 40, violating the assumption of normality will not represent a major problem, and therefore parametric tests can be used even if the data are not normally distributed (Pallant, 2007 .( Altman and Bland (1995) mentioned that in the case of using samples of hundreds of observations - as in the case of the current research - the data distribution can be ignored. Descriptive results The relative importance of the indicators expressing the independent variables and the dependent variable in the study appears in Table 3, Table 4, and Table 5, respectively. Journal of Social Studies Education Research 2022: 13 (4),188-208 Table 3 The Responses of the Study Sample Individuals to the Factors Driving the Teamworking Item Mean Standard deviation I enjoy being part of a team 4.0 0.99 Working with others gives me more motivation 4.1 0.96 I prefer working with others 3.7 1.10 I can be more effective if I work in a team 3.8 1.10 I love being in a team 3.8 1.11 Mean 19.5 4.3 Table 4 The Responses of the Study Sample Individuals to the Factor of the Concern for Standards Item Mean Standard deviation Just doing a good job isn't enough for me 3.9 1.0 Do whatever it takes to get the work done 4.5 0.74 I don't like making the same mistake repeatedly 4.3 0.95 I want everything to be perfect 4.1 0.91 Working to get the right results is important to me 4.4 0.76 I always work according to clear standards because that is important 4.2 0.80 I rarely make the same mistake twice 3.6 1.1 Mean 29.0 3.8 Table 4 shows the indicators of interest in the standards. It turns out that the item "Do whatever it takes to get the work done" got the highest approval from the study sample, with an average score of 4.5 out of 5.0. The item "Working to get the right results is important to me" was in the second place in terms of approval from the study sample, with an average score of 4.4, and in the last place in terms of approval from the study sample was the item “I rarely make the same mistake twice” with an average score of 3.6 out of 5.0. Table 5 The Responses of the Study Sample Individuals to the Factor of Employment Readiness Item Mean Standard deviation I'm a good listener 4.31 0.82 I find it helpful to ask questions and learn from those around me 4.38 0.84 The “Get up and go” style is what I have toward most things 3.76 1.00 I participate in volunteer work to help others 3.88 1.00 When I work with others, I often notice how they can do the job better 4.05 0.93 I learn from my mistakes 4.26 0.91 I keep all my work organized in files 3.88 1.06 I like to be in charge of something 4.00 0.97 I often find my way to convince others in the group to do what I want 3.85 0.96 I always try to meet task deadlines 4.17 0.88 I work hard to get good results 4.31 0.78 I understand how important it is to keep up with developments 4.30 0.77 I prefer to stick to the rules 3.95 1.0 I can always figure out how to deal with a problem 3.96 0.96 Ivanova et al. 198 I am often described as a person with a lot of “ideas” 3.79 1.06 I feel satisfied by helping others 4.34 0.87 I usually plan what to do 4.04 1.0 People usually trust me for advice and support 4.14 0.84 I can influence the opinion of others when they look at things differently from my own 4.03 0.85 I can see myself being successful in the future 4.35 0.86 Mean 81.8 10.5 Table 5 shows the indicators of the Emirati students’ readiness for employment. It turns out that the item I find it helpful to ask questions about and learn from those around me obtained the highest approval from the study sample, with an average score of 4.38 out of 5.0. The item ‘‘I can see myself being successful in the future’’ came second in terms of approval from the study sample, with an average score of 4.35, and the “Get up and go” style is what I have toward most things in the last place in terms of approval, with an average score of 3.76. Teamworking Table 6 The Numerical and Relative Distribution of the Participants According to the Teamworking Overall Score Teamworking F % Less than 11 (low) 12 3.9 11 to less than 20 (Medium) 102 32.9 20 and above (High) 196 63.2 Total 310 100 The actual range of degrees of the teamwork variable ranged between 5 and 25 degrees. It is clear from the data in Table 6 that the vast majority of the participants (63.2%) have a positive orientation toward teamwork, which may have a positive impact on increasing the personal readiness of the vast majority of them for employment. The results of correlation and regression analysis may confirm or deny these expectations. Concern of Standards Table 7 The Numerical and Relative Distribution of the Participants According to the Concern of Standards Overall score Concern of Standards F % Less than 21 (low) 6 1.9 21 to less than 35 (medium) 277 89.4 35 and above (high) 27 8.7 Total 310 100 Journal of Social Studies Education Research 2022: 13 (4),188-208 The actual range of degrees of interest in the standards ranged between 7 and 49 degrees. Table 7 shows that the vast majority of participants (89.4%) were of moderate interest in the standards, which may have a positive impact on increasing the personal readiness of the vast majority of them for employment. The correlation and regression analysis results may confirm or deny these expectations. Employment Readiness Table 8 The Numerical and Relative Distribution of the Participants According to the Employment Readiness Overall score Employment Readiness F % Less than 47 (low) 1 0.3 47 to less than 74 (medium) 69 22.2 74 and above (high) 240 77.5 Total 310 100 The actual range of degrees of the students’ readiness for employment variable ranged between 20 and 100 degrees. Table 8 shows that the vast majority of the participants (77.5%) have a high level of readiness for employment. Hypothesis Testing RQ1: Is there a significant correlation between the readiness of the Emirati students’ personalities for employment and the variables of age, teamwork, and attention to standards separately? To answer this question, the study attempts to test the first hypothesis, which postulates that there is a direct correlation between the Emirati students’ personal readiness for employment as a dependent variable, and the independent variables of age, teamwork, and attention to standards separately. Before determining the strength of the relationship between the independent variables and the dependent variable, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test results for moderation of the distribution showed that the variables used in the study don`t follow a normal distribution, where the significant value of the test parameter mentioned for the variables used is less than 0.05. Ivanova et al. 200 Table 9 Matrix of Correlations Between the Three Independent Variables and the Dependent Variable ــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Employment Age Teamworking Concern of Readiness Standard ــ ــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Person correlation Employment Readiness 1.00 .170 .461 .748 Age .170 1.000 .195 .207 Teamworking .461 .195 1.000 .358 Concern of Standard .748 .207 .358 1.00 ــ ــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Sig. (2-tailed) Employment Readiness . .003 .000 .000 Age .003 . .001 .000 Teamworking .000 .001 . .000 Concern of Standard .000 .000 .000 . ــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــ N = 310 ــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Table 9 shows a direct and significant correlation between the independent variables of age, teamwork, and attention to standards separately and the dependent variable of the Emirati students’ personal readiness for employment. It means that any increase in the value of any independent variable is accompanied by an increase in personal readiness of Emirati students and their readiness for employment. This finding fully supports the first hypothesis. RQ2: Are age, teamwork, and attention to standards determinants of the Emirati students’ readiness for employment? To answer the second research question, the study attempts to test the second hypothesis, which hypothesizes that the independent variables of age, teamwork, and attention to standards make a unique moral contribution to explaining part of the variance in the degrees of the Emirati students’ personal readiness for employment variable. Table 10 Shows the Multiple Correlation Coefficient and the Coefficient of Determination Model R R square Adjusted R square Std. error of the estimate 1 .748a .560 .558 6.97032 2 .776b .602 .600 6.63346 a. Predictors: (Constant), Concern for standards b. Predictors: (Constant), Concern_for_standards, Teamworking Table 10 shows that the independent variables of teamwork and attention to standards only are collectively related to the dependent variable with a multiple correlation coefficient of 0.766. The Journal of Social Studies Education Research 2022: 13 (4),188-208 value of “p” calculated to test the morale of the analytical model provided in Table 11, including the multiple correlation coefficient model: 232,604, which is a statistically significant value at the 0.005 probability level. The value of the adjusted R2 coefficient of determination indicates that the independent and significant variables, the two variables of teamwork, and attention to the combined criteria, explain 60% of the variance in the dependent variable, while the remaining 40% is attributed to other variables that were not included in the analytical model. This did not prove the existence of any significant effect of the age variable on the readiness of the Emirati students’ personalities for employment. Table 11 Analysis of Variance Between the Dependent Variable and the Independent Variables ــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Model Sum of squares df Mean square f Sig ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ 1 Regression 20470.4 2 10235.2 232.604 .000c Residual 13508.8 307 44.003 Total 33979.3 309 ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــ Dependent variable: Employability_readinessa Predictors: (Constant), Concern_for_standards, Teamworkingc To identify the unique contribution of the significant variables in explaining part of the variance in the degrees of the Emirati students’ readiness for employment variable, the stepwise multiple regression (forward solution) method was used. Table 12 shows that there are only two independent and significant variables that have priority in explaining the variance in the dependent variable when controlling for the rest of the independent variables, namely: attention to standards and teamwork. The results show that about 55.8% of the explained variance in the degrees of Emirati students’ readiness for employment is attributed to the variable of interest in standards, while the variable of teamwork was responsible for explaining 4.2% of the variance in the dependent variable. These results show that the attention to criteria was solely responsible for explaining about 93% of the total variance explained in the dependent variable by the two significant variables in the analytical model. This result partially supports the second hypothesis. Ivanova et al. 202 Table 12 Shows the Results of the Stepwise Multiple Linear Regression Analysis of the Relationship Between the Independent Variables and the Employment Readiness Independent variables B Β The percentage of the explained variance in the dependent variable %of the explained variance in the dependent variable T Sig. Concern of Standard 1.817 0.669 0.558 55.8 17.349 0.000 Teamworking 0.545 0.222 0.600 4.2 5.751 0.000 RQ3: Are there significant differences in the mean scores of the Emirati students’ personal readiness variable for employment due to the gender variable? To answer the third research question, the study attempts to test the third hypothesis, which is that there are significant differences in the average scores of the Emirati students’ personal readiness variable for employment due to the gender variable. A t-test for the difference between the two averages was utilized to test this hypothesis. Table 13 shows that the difference between the mean scores of male and female participants with respect to the dependent variable (the Emirati students’ readiness for employment) was not significant, as the value of t = 1.135, which is a non-significant value. Significant at any hypothesized probability level of 0.05 < sig = 0.257. Accordingly, it would be safe to say that gender difference does not affect the readiness of the Emirati students’ personalities for employment. This does not support the third hypothesis, and thus it cannot be accepted with a great deal of confidence. Table 13 Results of the T-Test for the Differences Between the Mean Scores of the Dependent Variable According to the Gender Variable Dependent variable Mean T Sig. Male Female Employment readiness 82.4 81.0 1.135 0.257 Discussion This study aims to determine the level of job readiness among UAE graduate students by testing the relationship between the independent variables “teamwork and attention to standards” and “job readiness” as a dependent variable. Journal of Social Studies Education Research 2022: 13 (4),188-208 With regard to correlations in the study sample between teamwork and its indicators, individuals confirm that working within the team provides them with energy and motivation to achieve common goals. This enhances the personal readiness of the vast majority of them for employment readiness, as shown in the study results. The researchers claim that incentive programs can increase the quality and quantity of performance from 20 to 40 percent, and the study community members have a great interest in teamwork, on average A total of 19.5 and an actual range of 63.2% (Clark, 2003). This result is consistent with the study of Hashem (2015), confirming that graduate students have a high level of teamwork skills (Di & Cumbo, 2017). This shows that the Emirati society enjoys a different character from several societies. However, the study itself is unique. Also, it is challenging to compare with other studies conducted in UAE as UAE is a 51 years old country, and therefore, it has its own socio-demographic and employment issues involving UAE government. It has been getting more attention for the last 10-12 years and many other studies in the same filed are actually conducted in UAE and GCC region. Hence, we can identify this study as unique, and the study results can be considered novelty, adding value more to understanding current and near future issues in UAE society and workforce. The UAE society is well-serviced society and its governmental or private institutions are recently presenting a wide range of motivational strategies, striving to support employees and provide them with the best ways to perform their jobs with all activity and vitality and succeed in their careers. UAE government also provides good income, comfortable workplaces, and good services, accessible faster to all, in a positive atmosphere and environment. As for the indicator of interest in standards, this research showed that the study population had a high interest in standards, with an average of 29.0 and that the majority of participants (89.4%) showed a moderate interest in standards. Thus, individuals emphasized the importance of completing the required work, regardless of the time it takes. In addition, they showed a high level of interest in the criteria, with an average of 81.8. They always seek to learn from others, are highly ambitious, and look toward career performance with passion. This result does not agree with the findings of Omar et al. (2020) study, which emphasized that graduates do not have good communication skills, which reduces future employment opportunities. According to Guilbert et al. (2016), the elements we must focus on are attitudes toward personal development. The company and its interventions are a basic source in employee development, it provides development Ivanova et al. 204 programs to develop the knowledge and goodness of employees and how to manage their professional life, keeping them informed of vacancies, and updating services in the work environment. The results of the research clearly showed that a clear majority of the participants (77.5%) had a high level of willingness to be hired. There is a strong direct relationship between the independent variable: age, teamwork, and interest in standards, individually, and the dependent variable: Emirati students' personal readiness for employment. This result can be explained by the fact that the UAE government provides students substantial scholarships to support them to complete their undergraduate and postgraduate studies for free. It also significantly raises their income ratio by encouraging them to advance to a higher professional level after they complete their degrees In addition, the results of the study showed that the age variable does not affect the readiness of Emirati students for employment. It has been observed that gender difference also does not affect the readiness of Emirati students for employment, This result correspond with Cabezas-González et al., (2021), in addition, this can be explained by the fact that the state encourages women to work and contributes to empowering women and raising their social status through the participation of women in all jobs without discrimination (Coetzee, 2008), her wages are equal to that of men, and she has more leave than males because she is a mother. Conclusion As detailed in the previous section, the individuals assessed have a great concern about the standards, and they are keen on teamwork by joining work teams and staying away from individualism, which contributes to raising their degree of employability for them. Moreover, the results showed that both males and females pay attention to the criteria of employability, and this indicates that female participants enjoy a good level of social inclusion in the labor market. The result of the first hypothesis showed that the significant value of the test coefficient for the variables used was less than 0.05. This finding fully supports the first hypothesis, which postulates that teamwork and readiness for standards contribute to an increase in employment readiness of Emirati students. As a result of the second hypothesis, it appears that attention to criteria was solely responsible for explaining approximately 93% of the total variance explained in the dependent variable by the two Journal of Social Studies Education Research 2022: 13 (4),188-208 important variables in the analytical model, and no significant effect of the age variable on the readiness of Emirati students for employment has been observed. The results of the third hypothesis also showed that there were no significant differences between females and males with regard to employability. It means that women and men in the UAE have the same preference for employment and are motivated to get the job equally. This study comes as an answer to the local UAE labor market, and it arises from the demand to understand more employability, its factors and correlations between them, and the status of the UAE nationals, when it comes to certain personality factors, part of employability. The UAE government is doing tremendous work to combine local talent with industry, country, regional and global needs and align its workforce to its strategic directions, vision, and goals, made in a way to serve the country and the world at some point. In the light of that study come unique revelations regarding the UAE students and their personalities, and this is important, as they are an important part of the UAE Emiratization process, and such studies have not been conducted yet in UAE. The study also provides additional insight into the educational setting in the UAE and its connection with the industry’s needs and demands. As the UAE work landscape is unique and combines representatives of more than 200 nationalities-the hard skills that one needs to perform the job (technical skills and job knowledge) become as much as important as the soft skills (personality factors). The current study highlighted the importance of different aspects of employability and specifically the correlations with concern of standards and teamwork -as these are very important when an employee is joining multi-cultural environment as well as meeting global standards. One of the key questions all students and employers have always is how close academia to the workforce is needed and is academia equipping students with the sufficient skillset to add value to their future workforce. The latter, as a question deriving from this study, may result in the new research. Research Limitations In this study, the data were collected by a questionnaire method that could have affected the accuracy of the results. However, the researchers tried to solve this limitation by encouraging the participants to answer the questionnaire during the researchers’ attendance to classes. Another thing to consider is that the research is a current representation of the problems in the scope of our research. More insights and trends can be gathered if the research is performed as a longitudinal Ivanova et al. 206 one in future, and similar data will be collected every year with a similar socio-demographic sample at the university. As the UAE has distinctive features from other societies, it is a society of social welfare, further studies on employment motivation in different societies, especially emerging economies or other GCC countries, is highly recommended to obtain more results. References Altman, D. G., & Bland, J. M. (1995). 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