Saturday 21 February 2015

Labour Market Information in Career Conversations: What should practitioners know and how can academic research help

I'm not a big fan of using labour market information in career practice. I know I'm out of synch with the prevailing view in the profession, but I have concerns about information giving being at the heart of our professional role.

But I spent yesterday with my career coaching students, and we had some great discussions about the role of information about the world of work in career conversations. Particularly interesting to me were our discussions about what kind of information practitioners should know. There is always going to be far too much information about the labour market for us to absorb, so how do we decide what is going to be most useful?

We talked first about having a broad overview. Whilst it might be impossible to know what kinds of selection tests are used in all kinds of employers, it could be useful to have a good sense of the range of tests which are generally used. We may not have a clear sense of exactly what standards of professional dress are expected in a particular organisation, but it might be realistic to know the smartest and most casual boundaries within a particular industry as a whole. So, an overview is good, and in terms of the detail, it's about knowing where to look - what are the best resources that you can direct clients to, which they can use to get the information for themselves.

The second area we discussed was that it might be really useful for us to have information which is difficult for clients to find themselves. Whilst the ONS website might furnish us with some great statistics, it's also an easy place for our clients to look. So, what might be more useful for us is to focus on the kind of information which is difficult to find. One example of the difference between easy to find and hard to find information is knowledge about what employers say and what they do. The literature is clear that when it comes to recruitment, what employers actually do is different from what they say they do. Employers are often quite explicit about the criteria against which they measure candidates, but there is oodles of evidence that despite the rhetoric, white candidates with middle class accents, well groomed hair and no disability are more likely to get jobs regardless of their teamwork, communication and leadership skills. Having this kind of information, I think, is adding something to our clients' job hunting toolkits which they would find difficult to access themselves, and which might genuinely make a difference.

For me, this is another argument for the role of empirical research in career work. Employers and employees are often happy to share lots of useful information about their roles, organisations and industries. This is useful, perhaps essential information for a good career decision and a successful job search. But if we can get it by looking on websites and finding people to talk to then so can our clients. Academic research is harder to get hold of and harder to make sense of. As career practitioners, we are often educated to post-graduate level, and we learn how to find and interpret this information. And it is these academic studies which are going to be able to uncover the information that even the employers don't know that they know.

At this stage I begin to get quite enthused about occupational information. This feels like an approach to LMI which doesn't aim to turn our role into information-givers, but instead gives us a challenging and skillful role to play, which can take our clients beyond where they can get to on their own.


Sunday 15 February 2015

Subjective Career Success: what is it and how can we get more of it?

Career Success is a good concept for us career practitioners to get our heads around. In particular I guess what's most important is the acknowledgement that what 'success' looks like will vary from one client to another and probably more important, our own conceptualisation will be different from those of our clients.The literature makes a distinction between objective and subjective success which I think is quite useful - objective being measured in terms of pay and promotion, and subjective in terms of your own assessment of your achievements.

Ng and Feldman have conducted a meta-analytic review (ie they've put the data from a large number of little studies through a single analysis) and have come up with some interesting findings about what factors are more likely to lead to subjective career success.

First they quite helpfully define subjective career success (SCS). They point out that it might be based on the same constructs as objective career success (pay and promotion), but the issue here is to what extent an individual believes that they have done well: two people earning the same salary might have quite different levels of SCS. In working out our SCS, we compare our current situation with a number of comparators including our personal aspirations, our past achievements, future goals and expectations and the achievements of others - co-workers, friends or family members. We compare particular aspects of our careers including interpersonal success, financial success hierarchical position and life success.

The meta-analysis found a whole range of factors which can help to contribute to SCS, including dispositional traits (in particular core self-evaluation), motivation (organisational commitment, work engagement), social networks (supervisor support - both general and career specific support) and organisational and job support (promotion organisation). But by a mile, the key factor was shown to be expectations. If an individual reports unmet expectations at work (and these could be in terms of their career overall, or within a particular role) they are significantly less likely to feel that they have done well.

The authors suggest that organisations should make a concerted effort to try and find out what employees want from their careers in order to see whether they can help ensure that expectations are met. Satisfied workers have been shown to work harder, be more productive, demonstrate more organisational commitment and have lower staff turnover, so the benefits are palpable for the organisation as well as the individual.

The paper makes a convincing read for those considering introducing career coaching within the workplace, which is great news.


Ng, T.W.H. and Feldman, D.C. (2014) Subjective Career Success: A meta-analytic review Journal of Vocational Behavior 85 169 - 179

Wednesday 11 February 2015

Is a job for life or just for Christmas?

It is a much vaunted notion that the job for life was once the norm, and is now the exception. It's so widely accepted that I don't think anyone knows where the idea came from or what data it's based on - it's so obviously true that it doesn't need to be backed up with evidence.

I have struggled to really get my head round this as the statistics don't seem to agree with the prevailing view, but also don't really agree with each other. One challenge is that statistics are often fairly blunt instruments. Gregg and Wadsworth (2002) illustrate this nicely. Looking at the data from 1975 to 2000 they highlight that the two following statements are both currently (at least were in 2002) true:

The typical worker today can expect to spend ten years in their current job
and
The typical job will last 15 months.

This is explained by the fact that 'job survival chances rise sharply with duration' which means that half of all jobs last around a year but that the other half are likely to last 5 or 10 years: if you make it through the first year, your chances of staying long term are high.

So that's quite interesting, but has this always been the case, or is this something new? Well, this depends on who you read. Most literature falls down on the side of no change (or little change) but there are some dissenting voices. In the UK, the Labour Force survey suggests no change, but the General Household Survey suggests a bit of a change. There are a number of confounding issues. The data is hard to trace as the question seems to have been asked in different ways at different times, so it's hard to know whether you're comparing like with like; economic cycles have a huge impact, so you have to be sure you're comparing the right times within two economic cycles; and finally, maternity rights came in in 1979 and were extended in 1994, changing women's access to continuous service.

Overall, there is some evidence that men's average tenure and women without dependent children's has gone down a bit, but mothers with dependent children's has increased. The decline in men's long term jobs seems to be concentrated in men over 50. For men, median job tenure has declined by about 20% since 1975.

Gregg, P. and Wadsworth, J. (2002) Job tenure in Britain, 1975 - 2000. Is a job for life or just for Christmas Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics 64 (2) 0305 - 9049

Monday 9 February 2015

Occupational Segregation

Occupational segregation is the idea that certain groups of people dominate in certain occupational groups. It's usually linked to inequality in society and a lack of social mobility.
This study looked at census data from the US from 1970 to 2010 and examined the demographics found in particular occupational groups. Their findings were a bit depressing, and they concluded that the US labour market is a system in which "individuals who are not white and male are predictably relegated to the least desirable roles.".
The authors found that whilst there had been a bit of change in the demographic make up, progress towards a more equal labour force over the 40 years had been slow and limited.They conclude that waiting for this kind of social change to happen naturally is not the way forward and more, and more effective direct action needs to be taken.
There have been some changes. White men now make up a smaller overall proportion of the work force than they did 40 years ago, as women are more likely to work and migration has led to a significant increase in the number of workers from BAME backgrounds. But what is interesting is where these new workers are working. Broadly, BAME workers have entered the workforce in lower skilled jobs. Women have made significant progress within certain previously male dominated arenas (such as law and medicine). But in the hard core male arenas of STEM subjects, women have made next to no progress despite policies initiatives and money being poured into the area. There have been some improvements within education - women in the states now make up about 20% of engineering degree students, but these women graduates don't enter the profession and if they do, they leave it three times as fast as men.
My last little vignette is about vets. This seems to be the one arena in which there has genuinely been a shift. In 1970 this was a profession almost exclusively inhabited by men but by 2010 it had shifted to a near equal gender balance. I couldn't even hazard a guess as to why, but I thought it was worth a comment.

Byars-Winston, A., Fouad, N and Wen, Y. (2015) Race/ethnicity and sex in US occupations, 1970 - 2010: Implications for research, practice and policy Journal of Vocational Behaviour 87 54-70