The effect of promotion on career path choice amongst secondary school pupils

Abstract

The choice of career path facing school-leavers is discussed, using a modified consumer choice model. As a case study, students from 12 high schools in Perth, Australia were surveyed to ascertain their perceptions of the armed services as a career path. The effects of external promotion and family involvement are considered. Major factors that emerged from the study were the difficulty students faced in selecting a career and the importance placed on training offered by the organisation.In recent years the failure of industrialised economies to absorb all school-leavers into the workforce has resulted in a re-appraisal of the processes of transition from school to post-secondary adult roles. Youth in transition have become a major focus for politicians and educators in most Western industrial democracies (Poole, 1985). In an Australian review, Anderson (1980) argues that the meaning of work varied for young people at different ages and in different social classes. For older youth, for example, work is related more to longer term social goals and roles. Factors such as sex, social class, rurality and ethnicity influence the transition process from school to employment, as does the actual availability of jobs in their preferred employment areas.Many research efforts in vocational choice and occupational psychology have attempted to clarify the process of individual career choice (Vroom, 1964;Holland, 1966). The majority of these approaches have been developmental and/or cognitive in nature. Typically the studies analyse the degree of cognitive sophistication achieved by individuals at various points in their progression towards the selection of a vocation.Most frequently, this chronology is measured in terms of either age or educational level. Fields & Shallenberger (1987) studied a 295 FRED FROST cross-sectional sample of university and high school students. They concluded that education rather than age plays the more critical role in determining what an individual rates as attractive about an occupation. The information gained through educational training appears to override information gained through simple chronological maturity. Deciding upon a preferred career is generally viewed by vocational psychologists and career counsellors as a key developmental task of late adolescence or early adulthood (Super, 1981).Many published studies of career decidedness have failed adequately to tackle two important issues. The first is the distinction between making a decision and sustaining a decision already made, both of which are necessary to produce a state of decidedness. The second concerns causality; do other psychological variables cause decision-making and/or sustaining a decision? Or are they caused by them, or both, or either? (Arnold, 1989). Robertson & Symons (1990) developed a model of occupational labour supply based on optimising behaviour of far-sighted individuals. They concluded that individuals choose occupations on the basis of personal tastes and relative incomes in those occupations. They al...

Reasons for choosing a technically oriented education: an interview study within the fields of pipefitting and industry

“…Problemsolving stimulates the personal development by a need of knowledge and competence. Concerning the competence in this type of business, the study illuminates that both pipefitting and industrial work presupposes successive learning (compare to Frost, 1992). The informants have good experience from workplaces and education offered by the companies, both internal and external courses.…”

“…This study does not investigate what the youth"s concerned think in the question about future careers, but both teachers in the study say that their students do not have any idea of what they want to do in the future. They begin their training without a clue of what they have embarked on, which can be compared to four of the informants in the present study and also to Frost (1992) who found that career choices often are delayed until late in the school programme. Frost (ibid.)…”