March 4, 2010 Careers Advice
My Dad has a story about how he came to get a job. It was the mid-60s, and he was going to leave school with a miscellany of o-levels. The teacher called him in and said,
“well Pettinger, what’s it to be”.
“dunno sir”
Mr Heckthorpe starts reading from the list of possible careers, starting at A.
“Accountant?”
“ Yeah, that’ll do.”
Mr Heckthorpe gets the yellow pages to start calling all the accountants in Bradford, alphabetically. This is long before professionalisation made accountancy a graduate-only occupation. At ‘C’ (for Claridge Turner), he finds an opening, and my Dad starts his training. (It’s not quite the youth employment officer who thinks Billy Casper’s only right for manual labour in Kes.)
Dad reckons he considered holding on till Mr Heckthorpe reached bricklaying… and the Pettinger world would have been quite different.
In the recent discussions of careers advice (renamed careers guidance… advice is a dangerous thing to proffer too readily), it’s very easy to find funny stories about its failures, as Philip Hensher does. But it is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do well: matching people, with all their presumptions about work, their knowledge and abilities, to a spectacularly wide range of occupations. To know what jobs exist, yet alone have an inkling of what they demand, what pleasures they offer, what you need to do to get them, would be an enormous undertaking.
Now, as a sociologist of work, I’ve being asked to contribute to a career development module to improve the ‘employability’ of students – because the main benefit of education is, apparently, to provide an oven-ready workforce. No mind that my research expertise is in customer service work (please, no rubbish jokes about the likely destinations of sociology graduates: our students learn to think independently and question commonsense understandings of how the world works, which some employers value). There are two things I want to tell them:
- the jobs they’ll end up in ten years are probably not ones they think are possible now: there’s more complexity to the labour market than they can imagine.
- that asking people to talk about their careers produces stories about luck and happenstance as much as decision making and direction (see e.g. Arthur, Inkson and Pringle, 1999).
But luck and happenstance demand decision-making in turn, and even good possibilities throw up conundrums that need worrying out. When a friend asked for advice about what direction to take in a career he’s well established in, I stuttered a tepid, milksop answer, one that stressed feeling and intuition. I had no expertise to offer in the moment, no wise-sociologist suggestion to assess the possibilities of each role, to consider how each would be formative of future possibilities. This means I encouraged him to make decisions based on values which Boltanski and Chiapello (2007) associate with the ‘new spirit of capitalism’: emotional responses to a quest for autonomy, creativity and self-fulfilment, which those engaging in the flexible network of the ‘projective city’ ought to aspire to. Not certainty, a ladder, security and a plan for a future as a company man.
And I wonder whether it is right of me to reproduce these new spirit values as the ones that matter most. For my friend, already a winner in the global labour market, it works well. For my students, the selling of autonomy and flexibility as virtues maybe more problematic: they certainly understand that work should be fulfilling, suit their personalities and such like, but I don’t know that sort of work is so easy to find and hold. And if a lad like my Dad is about to leave school in Bradford with a few GCSEs, I’m pretty certain he’ll find it harder to get work that has meaning to him, and certainly impossible to leverage the sort of mobility Dad found when he stepped onto the bottom rung of a well-placed ladder.
References
- Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2007) The New Spirit of Capitalism. Verso, London, trans Gregory Elliot.
- Arthur M. B., Inkson K., and Pringle J.K. (1999) The New Careers: Individual Action and Economic Change. Sage: London.
Comments
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At 4:28 pm on March 4, 2010 Randy Pena said:
so we need to help them to engineer luck & happenstance. Like engineering serendipity. Part of it is what resources you have to draw on (skills & capabilities & confidence) and part of it is what activities you take to generate the luck.
I’m not convinced that teaching them about the ‘sociology of work’ will help (much). But teaching them about the ‘work’ of sociology might…
And so we need to start thinking about the nature of a ‘sociology industry’: what kinds of skills does it require, what kind of sophistications and orientations? What is a ‘practical sociology’? And how does it relate to ‘open’ sociology?
Savage & Burrows have some thoughts which I’ve sort of developed
At 12:47 pm on March 5, 2010 Ben Anderson said:
Even if you can’t see career ladders clearly anymore, I think you underplay the structuring of opportunities in this and the processes of matching people to jobs beyond what their agency can make happen. A third point to tell the students then is that you can’t just decide! especially since sometimes class matters more later in working lives than earlier. Sociological advice could also include identifying what ‘bridges’ there are between different jobs and trajectories, how some paths close down others and vice versa. And the importance of social capital suggests that students should make as many smart friends as possible whilst they’re still at University…!
At 4:13 pm on March 8, 2010 Dawn Lyon said:
Dawn, you’re right. You so often are.
Ben, you’re asking me to engineer the souls of my students; seriously, i’m not (we’re not) that powerful. There’s no recognition of structure in what you say.
As for not being convinced that there’s much to be said for teaching them about the sociology of work, I’m stunned: spending all this time making sense of why work is organised how it is, but then not telling the students about that, right at the time when many of them are thinking about moving full time into the workforce, doesn’t make sense to me.
Randy, welcome!
At 5:52 pm on March 9, 2010 Lynne said:
My friend Dave told me he had one interview with a careers adviser at age 15. It went:
“Mill or pit?”
At 9:32 am on April 3, 2010 fourcultures said:
Interesting coming to this when starting to get my thoughts together about an event on e-portfolios and PRP (the link should come up). The project we are working on is a pedagogic enterprise, aimed at enabling students to develop their abilities to reflect on their skills and abilities and to come up with a convincing narrative of themselves for employers/future studies. It has benefits for ‘study’ and ‘work’, if these terms can be meaningfully divided when talking about students and, indeed, with researchers in academia, think-tanks etc. We’re not coming at it from the ‘careers advice’ angle, thus we’re not working on giving people advice but rather tools for handling their entry into the workplace… again, very social capital, very Bourdieu in its thinking.
I think the point of it all — what we are doing and other people are elsewhere — is trying, possibly futilely, to help students who would probably not have been at university ten, twenty, thirty years ago to *act* in graduate-like ways. ‘Graduate’ jobs require a lot of narrative and reflection on the part of the applicant, particularly if they are milkrounding it. If this is beyond the experiences of your family and friends, how do you learn to do this, if it’s what you want? Who can mentor you? How do you get beyond or change the ways in which so many of the professions have typically recruited ‘new’ members through an exclusive use of social and cultural capital… families of doctors… the public school and Oxbridge ‘old boy’ network… ‘recognised’ routes such as studying x at y Oxbridge college if you want to do z, that don’t always make it into the careers advice guides… If we think it is important that the composition of our professions reflect our society, then this is a major issue. Equally, with the newer ‘brain’ or creative industries, the routes in may be more fluid but class still has an impact, through knowing who you know, being able to take internships or crapply-paid jobs, being able to raise capital for a start-up… in many ways it seems as though education since the 1960s has moved far more towards a notion of meritocracy than the working world has, wants or needs (or knows it wants or needs). Thus our students/graduates need to be able to talk two ‘languages’ and to be able to build up their social capital.…
At 12:26 pm on April 16, 2010 Kate Bradley said: