Tuesday 14 February 2017

Occupational information: where is the theory?

As part of my PhD I've been grappling with the question of how we, as a profession, decide on the content of career-related information.

If you are looking to find out about a particular occupation, you can typically find details about job duties, requirements (qualifications and personal qualities), prospects, salary, maybe something about working conditions (travel, typcial hours, locations etc) and how to maximise your chances of getting a job. 

This feels like a terribly sensible list of subheadings. Surely these are important things to know about any job you might be considering? But are they the only things? The most important things? And how have we reached this conclusion?

My interested in this was piqued a few years ago when I was looking at the research on job satisfaction, and found out that salary has more or less no impact whatsoever on how happy you are at work. I wondered then why you can always find the average starting salary for any given occupation, but no-one ever seems to try and put a measure of average job satisfaction. (I still think this would be a good idea).

And as I thought more, it seems to me that there are a host of other criteria which might be useful for people to know about. So how did we come to the consensus that the conventional sub headings are the right ones? I did a bit of digging around in the literature and have come up with a sort-of explanation.

In 2002, the OECD commissioned a report into how to improve occupational information. In this, the author (Tricot) suggested that there were three possible starting points for deciding on the content of career-related information. First you could provide the kind of information which the clients ask for. Second, you could provide the kind of information which you know people use in their career decisions. Finally, you could give the kind of information which is likely to lead to more satisfied workers. 

In practice, it seems that the widely agreed content choices seem to map most closely onto the first approach: the list of questions which our clients want answered. Offer (2000), Bimrose (2006) and the Canadian Career Company (1998) all provide some information about what clients are asking and yes, it does seem that people want to know about routes in, maximinsing the chances of getting a job, qualifications required and progression. So this is great. We want to provide our clients with what they ask for. 

But maybe this isn't enough. We know that clients don't always know what they don't know (Tricot, 2002), they aren't always aware of the barriers they are facing (Julien, 1999), and sometimes they ask questions about things they think they ought to ask about, rather than things they actually want to know (Hawthorne, 1994).

The second idea from the OECD is that information should be based on the things which individuals base their decisions on. We do actually know quite a lot about the work factors which people base their decision on, and a lot of these are not typically covered in career-related information. Whilst these are probably much more tricky to identify and communicate, it would surely be possible to find a way to include something about values, prestige, identity, colleagues and motivations.

And going back to where I started, Tricot's third suggestion is that we base occupational information on the factors which are known to lead to higher levels of job satisfaction. There has been loads of research done in this area, and we have a pretty clear sense of what these factors are: variety, colleagues, working conditions, work load, autonomy and educational opportunities. Again, this may be marginally more challenging data to collect, but surely we could find a way?

So. We know what work factors people base their career decisions on, and we know what work factors lead to job satisfaction. Why aren't we incorporating this data in our occupational information?

One interesting possible explanation comes from Offer and Sampson (1999) who warn that if we don't have a clear theoretical underpinning to the content of occupational information, we will probably just end up using the information which already exists. And I wonder if this is what has happened? The occupational information which is offered reads a bit like an HR pack of recruitment information. It's akin to a job description, a person specification and some information about the selection process. And whilst I can see that this is useful information for potential applicants, it has not been designed with our clients in mind: it's aimed at finding the right person for the job, not the right job for the person. Another common source of career-related information in the UK is the desinations survey which identifies the jobs that graduates are doing six months after leaving University. Again, this is interesting and relevant information, but the main purpose of gathering this data is to assess the quality of universities, so it might not be quite the data that we would gather if we had the needs of our clients in mind.


Have I missed something? Is there some theoretical framework which underpins it all which I haven't found? Or is there some work which needs to be done to improve this important part of our support to clients trying to make good career decisions?

 




Julien, H. (1999). Barriers to adolescents’ information seeking for career decision making.Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50 (1), 38-48. 

Offer, M. (2001)  The discourse of the labour market.  In B. Gothard, P.  Mignot, M. Offer & M. Ruff  (2001). Careers guidance in context. London: Sage, 76 - 92. 

Offer, M., & Sampson Jr, J. P. (1999). Quality in the content and use of information and communications technology in guidance. British Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 27(4), 501-516.

Tricot, A. (2002). Improving occupational information. A paper prepared for an OECD review of policies for information, guidance and counselling services. Commissioned jointly by the European Commission and the OECD.