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.
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