Students As Non-Standard Employees. Exploring Work Related Issues in Students' Perceptions On Their Term-Time Job**

Zusammenfassung

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The article presents the results of an explorative study that aimed at exploring work related issues in students' perceptions of their job as atypical employees. An individual picture of the experienced work reality of students is drawn according to work task, flexible working hours, instructions and training opportunities, students' relations to other employees, and social integration. By adopting a qualitative design, I was able to emphasize the subjective perspective of students describing their very own experiences as flexible workers. The study revealed various perceptions of students working as flexible employees and related this picture to current empirical and theoretical research in the field of non-standard employment.

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Students As Non-Standard Employees. Exploring Work Related Issues in Students' Perceptions On Their Term-Time Job**

Introduction

A while ago I had an informal conversation with one of my students who worked at the cash register in a large supermarket. During our chat he referred to his various experiences as student-employee working in a part-time arrangement. His perceptions of the job centred on typical HRM-issues related to flexible employment, like for example the low-end work task, missing training opportunities, or problems concerning social integration. In contrast, he was not simply stressing payment and flexibility issues or complaining about difficulties to balance work and academic life. Instead, he yet presented a subjective interpretation of his work experiences, touching various work related issues. The emerging individual picture differs from both previous studies on the rather negative experiences students make as employees (e.g., Tannock/Flocks 2003) and commonly held assumptions about workers on flexible employment contracts, portrayed as marginal and disadvantaged employees (e.g., Guest 2004a).

The working conditions of students in term-time employment and their perceptions of their employment as part-timers or temporaries have been widely disregarded by previous studies. As a consequence, the aim of the article is to present students work experiences as atypical workers. It is based on the results of an explorative study on term-time employment of students enrolled at Chemnitz University of Technology (CUT), a regional university located in the south-east of Germany. The study focused on students' perceptions of HRM-aspects typically raised in research on non-standard employment, such as work task, training opportunities, students' relations to the supervisor and co-workers, and social integration. Atypical workers are commonly ascribed to experience various disadvantages concerning these aspects, like poor payment, a low-skilled job, or problems of social exclusion. The present study, however, was interested in the subjective view of students working as part-time or temporary employees during the term. Hence, their individual experiences and interpretations of their work reality are explored in order to elaborate on the specific characteristics of this group of flexible employees and to address their very perspective of the flexible employment they are engaged in.

The paper proceeds as follows. A brief outline of the reason and nature of students' term-time employment constitutes the starting point of this article. In the following term-time employment is defined in terms of non-standard employment pointing out that students are generally employed in atypical employment relations. Referring to p...

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