Ideas about career

We asked students to indicate a level of agreement with a range of statements about what constitutes a career. We developed the statements from previous work with young people in transition from school and making career decisions (Boyd, with McDowall, & Ferral, 2006; Hipkins, 2005; Vaughan & Kenneally, 2003; Vaughan et al., 2006) and from emergent career development and workforce trends which reference the demands and possibilities of globalisation and knowledge societies. These emergent trends are focused around shifts from lifelong (fixed and hierarchical) career to lifelong learning, from career as elitist (only some people have careers; others have jobs) to career for all (Watts, 2004), and more recent or recently important concepts such as work-in-life balance, flexible working conditions and contractual arrangements, and skill portability and transferability. We particularly wanted to know whether and how any of these emergent trends were reflected in student perceptions.

What is a career?

In the section on best things and hardest/easiest things about leaving school, we saw that students think establishing a career is different from finding a job, and also something that is harder to do. But what do students actually think a career is? Their responses, given in the following figure, show that 70 percent or more of the students agree or strongly agree with statements that reference the idea of having one job and developing expertise in it:

• having a job you can do well (80 percent);
• having a qualification you can keep building on with more qualifications and experience in the same area (70 percent); and
• having a job where you get promoted within the same workplace (70 percent). 
  

Figure 4: Students’ notions of “career”

Generally, percentages are low for strong agreement and strong disagreement with most of the statements. There are some small differences in students’ degree of agreement with the statements shown in Figure 4 and these appear to reinforce a distinction between a career and a job which showed up in students’ ideas about what was best and hardest about leaving school (see Section 2). For example, although 67 percent of students were in agreement that a career means “having a job” and just 18 percent are in disagreement with that, only 13 percent could strongly agree with this, suggesting that a job was certainly part of a career but not the entirety of it. Put another way: students may recognise that having a job is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for having a career.

A similar, fairly small proportion of students were able to strongly agree with ideas more specific than simply “having a job”:

• being in paid work with enough time for leisure, family, friends (19 percent);
• having the type of job which pays more than $35K (18 percent);
• having a job with high status (16 percent); and
• having a job that requires a university degree (14 percent).
  

However, many of the statements with which students were able to strongly agree are linked with traditional status-related ideas about career—as requiring university qualifications, as involving a high salary, or the high esteem of others. Other statements linked to emergent career ideas of flexibility and earning-while-learning tended to draw more uncertainty or disagreement from students. But, overall, 70 percent or more students agreed or strongly agreed with statements linked to traditional ideas—having a job you can do well, having a qualification you can keep building on with more qualifications and experience in the same area, and having a job where you get promoted within the same workplace.

On-the-job training

The statement that a career was “a job that requires on-the-job training” drew an almost even split between those who agreed, disagreed, and were unsure, making it one of the statements with which the fewest students could agree. Students’ responses to statements tended to focus on career in its elitist sense (a career rather than a job) and in terms of markers of status (salary, esteem, university qualifications). It is perhaps not surprising that on-the-job training was seen as less relevant to the idea of “career” given that it is generally associated with non professional jobs or occupations with lower status, involving lesser regarded forms of learning (hands-on and vocational), and low or no recognised achievement in school (through qualifications or credits). While professional occupations—more closely associated with “career” than “job”—also often have a training component, the training is usually understood to be “professional development”, is awarded through professional bodies or tertiary institutions, and does not suffer from the same lack of status as “on-the-job training”.

Those students more likely to agree that having a job with on-the-job training constituted a career, were in the lowest quartile for cognitive competency (44 percent), as opposed to the highest (22 percent). Not surprisingly, about half of the students who aspired to be tradespersons (52 percent) agreed with this characteristic of a career.

Students more likely to disagree that a career is a job needing on-the-job training showed a similar profile to those aspiring to university study. The variables are shown in the following table:

Table  24: Disagreement that on-the-job training constitutes “career”

	Lowest quartile or category	Highest quartile or category
	% who disagreed or strongly disagreed
Focused and responsible	28	43
Social skills	28	49
Social difficulties (reversed)	17	40

Skills portability and status

Students in the lowest quartiles for focused and responsible (48 percent) and cognitive competency (42 percent) were more likely than students in the highest quartiles (34 percent, 27 percent) to agree that a career was having a qualification that allowed you to travel and get work somewhere else. This may be a reference to trades qualifications and skills which have a reputation for being “portable” and in demand in other countries.

Students from decile 1 and 2 schools (78 percent) were more likely than students from schools of all other deciles schools (48 percent) to agree that a career was having a job with high status. Students in the lowest quartile (61 percent) for cognitive competency were also more likely to agree with career being a job with high status than those in the highest quartile (38 percent).

Not surprisingly, students who aspired to be professionals (47 percent) were more likely to agree that a career was having a job that needs a university degree.

Traditional and emergent conceptions of career

The following table shows the 13 statements broken into two groups, each associated with traditional or emergent views of career.

Table 25: Views of career

	Statements provided to students	Agreement     %	Disagreement %	Unsure     %
Traditional view of career	A job you can do well	80	17	10
	A job where you get promoted to higher positions at the same workplace	70	16	20
	A job	67	18	15
	The type of job which pays more than $35K a year	49	21	27
	A job with high status that other people regard as special or important	48	30	21
	A job that needs a university degree	42	32	25
	The same job in the same workplace for more than five years	38	31	30
	A job that needs on-the-job training	31	34	33
Emergent view of career	A qualification that you can keep building on with more qualifications and experience in the same area	70	16	20
	Being in paid work and having enough time for family, friends, and leisure activities	60	13	25
	A qualification that enables you to travel and get work somewhere else	37	28	33
	Different kinds of jobs in different workplaces that use the same sorts of skills	32	26	41
	Several different jobs at any one time that relate to one broad career area	23	36	39

It is perhaps fitting that student responses tend to show more uncertainty about the more recent and uncertain looking (emergent) career ideas—ideas which are themselves addressing future uncertainty at the level of the individual (e.g., career portfolio construction and adaptability), the workplace (e.g., outsourcing and global competition, new skill demands), and society and economy (e.g., technology-driven changes, demands for constant innovation, and equity considerations). It is not surprising that students in our sample seem to be responding this way. They are likely to be experiencing the sort of school-based careers guidance that tends to be ad hoc overall and privileges the provision of information about jobs over the development of self-management and career management skills, therefore often failing to equip school leavers with the skills they need beyond entry to a course of study or the labour market (Vaughan, 2007; Vaughan & Gardiner, 2007).

However, despite a lack of solid agreement with (or perhaps understanding of) emergent views of career, students do show a fairly high level of agreement with two of the career ideas suggesting the active involvement of the individual, firstly in “producing” a career in relation to the individual’s different identities and whole-life portfolio (Vaughan et al., 2006)—for example, qualifications you keep building on with more qualifications and being in paid work with enough time for family, friends, and leisure activities. Other research has also shown that some young people who have already left school are thinking of themselves as an ongoing enterprise and linking disparate qualifications and jobs in creative ways (Vaughan et al., 2006). And in the previous section on Occupations and qualifications, we saw that more than half of the students expected to study towards qualifications more than once in their lifetime.

However, care is needed in understanding this pattern because students’ reasons for studying towards qualifications more than once tended to be about developing skills and expertise in one area—suggesting a continued attachment to more traditional ideas of career, at least in some respects. It may simply be that there is not yet consistency across young people’s school-based careers education experiences (as well as their broader learning experiences at school) and emergent trends of career development. This idea addresses people as they make education, training, and occupational choices throughout life (rather than only as they leave school) and in terms of people managing—or actively constructing—their careers (International Symposium on Career Development and Public Policy, 2006) but is clearly not yet an idea that is widely understood or possible for all people.

Students’ agreement (60 percent) with “being in paid work and having enough time for family, friends, and leisure activities” does suggest a fairly high level of interest in work-in-life balance—one of the key emergent career ideas. Some New Zealand agencies continue to refer to the binary of “work-life balance” (e.g., Equal Employment Opportunity Trust, Department of Labour). However, Career Services, the organisation which leads New Zealand’s provision of careers information, advice and guidance, and decision making leading to better quality work and life choices, has signalled a move to the term “work-in-life balance” (Career Services, 2006, 2007b) in explicit recognition that “work” and “life” can be integrated, rather than sit in opposition to, or tension with, each other. This follows existing New Zealand youth transition research which showed some school leavers taking an integrated approach to “work”, “career”, and “life”, although the ways they do this vary (Vaughan et al., 2006) and it is not clear whether and how it may be linked to nascent trends in “downshifting”, anti-consumerism, sustainable living, and the “slow” movements.