Carly was appointed to do eyelash extensions and was trained to do this at college. She has since been taught to thread by her Beauty Plus colleagues: there just weren’t enough takers for the extensions to keep her busy. She learned waxing during her NVQ, an altogether more brutal and messy hair removal technique. The shift to threading doesn’t come easily to her– as Ingold says, part of skill is the “coupling of perception and action” (2011; 53), and Carly can’t help but to stop and think. Whilst the other women who do the threading are employed because of their ethnicity — they learned to thread as a matter of course, as part of being a girl with Indian heritage — Carly is employed despite her ethnicity. She has her qualifications but few of the skills of her colleagues.  It’s been a few months since I saw her working there.

Reference

Ingold, T (2011) Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London and New York: Routledge.

Kerry was a careers advisor in a career she hated. She took redundancy and spent her pay-out ‘upskilling’, taking a vocational MA, which she thought would increase her chance of a job in the culture industries. She did what is supposed to be right: she aspired to higher qualifications, and she aspired to fulfilling work. She did well on the course. And she learned that what would make the difference to her chances of good, exciting work wasn’t the quality of her work, it was the quality of her network.

Unemployed since the end of the course, Kerry has just found the most temporary of jobs: as a “Peak Relief Assistant” at a local library. She provides holiday and sickness cover for full time workers. On a temporary contract, her working hours are flexible and contingent (on their being holiday and sickness) and her job content is unpredictable. Further, the continued existence of her job is dependent on structural changes to the public sector: in the aftermath of public sector spending cuts, two pincer moves might stymie Kerry’s chances of ‘good’ employment: firstly hers, the most precarious of jobs is easiest to cut, and secondly ‘efficiency savings’ will render more jobs ‘flexible’ so her chance of locating stable employment, and a stable life, will lessen. Kerry experiences of both sides of precarity: the precarity of networked life in the culture industries (Gill and Pratt, 2008), and the precarity of temporary, flexiblised service work (McDowell, et al, 2009). She scrapes an unpredictable living.

Cuts, rhetorical shifts, changing social welfare and the drive to ever more competition are producing a hyper-precarious labour market. This labour market has precarious employment relationships, precarious forms of work (what Barbier (2008) calls ‘jobs without status’), high and rising unemployment, and attacks on already undependable, and moralised, mechanisms of social support. It’s no way to make a living.

References

1. Barbier, J C (2008) ‘There is more to Job Quality that ‘Precariousness’: a Comparative Epistemological Analysis of the ‘Flexibility and Security’ Debate in Europe’. In Flexibility and Employment Security in Europe: Labour Markets in Transition. Cheltenham, Edward Elgar.
2. Gill, R. and Pratt, A.C. (2008). ‘In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work.’ Theory, Culture and Society Annual Review 25(7–8):1–30.
3. McDowell, L., Batnitzky, A. and Dyer, S (2009) ‘Precarious Work and Economic Migration: Emerging Immigrant Divisions of Labour in Greater London’s Service Sector’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33 (1) March 3–25 .

“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:

1. 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.
2. 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

1. Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2007) The New Spirit of Capitalism. Verso, London, trans Gregory Elliot.
2. Arthur M. B., Inkson K., and Pringle J.K. (1999) The New Careers: Individual Action and Economic Change. Sage: London.

Before students are allowed to touch a patient, they get a set of false teeth caked in fake plaque to hone their scraping technique on. I thought that the hard part would be dealing with the teeth at their dirtiest, but it turns out that scraping is more of a challenge as the teeth get cleaner. This means that the students start with few skills but an easy task. Who makes these dirty fake teeth?