Employer Decision Logic and Institutional Shaping of Skilled Migrant Employability in Construction

Abstract

Skilled migration is widely promoted as a strategic response to persistent skill shortages in the construction industry. Yet skilled migrants continue to experience nonemployment, underemployment, and delayed career progression despite possessing strong technical capabilities and formal qualification equivalence. Existing research has largely attributed these outcomes to individual deficits, skills mismatches, or incomplete integration, offering limited insight into how employability is actively produced within construction organizations. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of capital, this study examines skilled migrant’s employability in the construction industry through an employer-centered lens, focusing on how employability is shaped under conditions of project risk, regulatory accountability, and reputational exposure. Twenty semistructured interviews were conducted with hiring managers and senior professionals across public and private organizations. Abductive thematic analysis revealed that employability in construction is governed by a risk-mitigating process in which professional legitimacy is provisionally granted, selectively enacted, and often delayed rather than fully realized. Nonhiring, cautious hiring, restricted role allocation, and delayed career progression emerge as organizational responses through which employers manage project risk, regulatory accountability, and reputational exposure. Building on these insights, the study develops a risk-mitigating employer decision framework for skilled migrant employability that reconceptualizes skilled migrant employability as a temporal and conditional process, rather than a one-off outcome of skill matching. The study contributes a novel organizational explanation of employability in construction and highlights the need for managerial, professional, and policy responses that move beyond supply-side solutions to address the governance of risk and recognition in workforce integration.