Adult World Of Work Research Articles

Career readiness programming for youth in foster care

Career readiness preparation is essential to successful employment outcomes for young people in foster care who are often disrupted in their vocational development as a consequence of their challenging life circumstances. Efforts by social service providers, however, to prepare young people in foster care for economic self-sufficiency have met with varying success. The purpose of this paper is to offer findings from a formative evaluation of Works Wonders, a career readiness program for young people in care, that contribute to the understanding of the factors that affect their career preparation, self-determination and work outcomes as they transition from foster care to the adult world of work. Works Wonders included a career club that provided the skills and knowledge to explore career options, prepare for a job search (e.g., preparing a resume, learning how to interview, drafting cover letter), conduct a job search and retain the job once secured (e.g., relational competencies important for being effective in the workplace.) The program also provided individual support around career planning, and hands-on work experiences. One hundred and eighty randomly selected young people between the ages of 14 and 21 who were in Rhode Island's foster care system or alumni of care were enrolled over five years. Interviews with young people and staff service records provided information about program engagement, career readiness, self-determination, and work status. Data were collected at enrollment, after completion of career club (about six months following enrollment) and 12 months following enrollment. Results support a significant relationship between career readiness and employment. Young people who completed the career club and participated in a hands-on work experience while in enrolled in the program were more likely to be working at follow-up compared to those that dropped out. Self-determination also increased for young people who completed the group compared to those who did not.

“Back to Square One”: The Experience of Straddling Adolescence and Early Adulthood in Unemployed UK University Graduates With Common Mental Health Issues

We investigated the experiences of unemployed university graduates with common mental health issues. After conducting semistructured interviews with 12 unemployed bachelor’s degree graduates with common mental health issues, we used interpretative phenomenological analysis to generate three superordinate themes: “fall from grace,” “vulnerability,” and “life on hold.” Our focus in this article is life on hold and its constituent themes: “stagnation,” “moving backward,” and “feeling left behind.” Graduates struggled to complete the broader structural life transition from university student to the adult world of work, experiencing a nebulous state of straddling adolescence and early adulthood. This undermined their sense of adult maturity, leaving them vulnerable to becoming entrenched in their mental health-related difficulties. We discuss these findings in relation to the developmental perspectives of life-course theory, status passages, and separation–individuation in early adulthood, which raise important issues for the applicability of life-course frameworks for these graduates, who are a disadvantaged minority group.

Influence of Staff Attitudes and Capacity on the Readiness to Adopt a Career Development and Employment Approach to Services in Child Welfare Systems

Young adults aging out of the nation's child welfare systems are often ill prepared to join the labor force. Poor vocational outcomes are partially explained by a lack of readiness to adopt best practice by foster care agency supervisors and staff. Findings from a survey that explored the influence of supervisor and staff capacity and attitudes on uptake of career development and employment best practices are presented. Implications are discussed for utilizing the survey as a tool to assist agency leadership in planning and implementing changes that support the vocational services needed to ensure the successful transition of young adults in foster care to the adult work world.

Pathway from Adolescents' Career Indecision to Career Decision: Basis for Career Guidance Program

Adolescence is an important developmental stage when decisions and plans are being envisioned. The important factor that adolescents deal with is the imminence of the reality that they will soon end their high school life and reach the period of independence of young adulthood when they have to transition to the university (Herr, Cramer & Niles, 2004). As the adolescent makes a transition to the adult world of work and academic life, it is inherently difficult to separate home from the workplace. A large number of high school students continue to reflect uncertainty about their career plans and therefore desire for more career guidance. The researcher conducted a focus group discussion with adolescents in order to have a realistic view about their situation of career certainty and indecisiveness.As Shakespeare's famous phrase in Hamlet says, To be, or not be, is the question (Shakespeare & Pearce, 2008, p.44). This quote can represent a student's process of choosing a major or making a career. Although the basic foundation for a career decision begins when a child is still in the elementary school, it is at the adolescent stage of life when decision about the future is made and carved out. In order to enter into a good career and make it successful, one needs to make an appropriate decision. Unfortunately, there are many who fail to make a good decision, few are hesitant to make decisions, some fear to make decisions, and still others are forced by others to make decisions. Besides involving one's emotions, vision, surroundings, a good decision is made by one's self. In other words, as Donald Super puts it, making one good decision is an individual and a psychological task.Another quote from Hamlet, To thine own self be true (Shakespeare & Pearce, 2008, p.16), is apt to the situation of adolescents who are being undecided, in which case the institution needs to pay a special attention on this matter of career decision. When a person is confused over making choices regarding his career in spite of being at the right age, then he tends frequently to change his mind; such a state is called career indecision. Therefore, the objective of a phenomenological study is to take the phenomenon of the client's problem as the topic of inquiry.MethodParticipantsFor the interview the researcher conducted a focus group discussion for 2 groups of 14 members each in two different schools and went through deliberation according to the goal and purpose of the researcher. There was an equal distribution of males (50 percent) and females (50 percent) with a modal age of 16 (80 percent). The participants represented the 4th year students who were enrolled in the year 2014-2015.Instrument and procedureThe researcher developed a questionnaire which was validated by three registered guidance professionals. The interview questions were open-ended and derived from the literature and previous studies on career indecision and certainty. Upon receiving the consent of the participants and their parents, the interview session was scheduled depending on the availability of the participants. For a phenomenological inquiry, a semi-structured interview was conducted to follow up the queries and clarify the inquiries to be answered by the participants. By bringing together a group of participants to discuss or share their views and opinions, new strands of thought emerged. The said session, which lasted for 45 minutes, was audio recorded to ensure that everything that transpired in the process was captured.Mode of analysisTranscribing the interview materials was done solely by the researcher. After the interview or discussion, thematic analysis was conducted in order to limit the expressions of the students. The process of this analysis was done in the following way: bracketing the phenomenological expression, delineating units of meaning, grouping into mass of meanings to form themes, summarizing the interests, and finally extracting general and unique themes from the session. …

Extracurricular Paths into Job Markets in Contemporary Japan: The Way of Both Pen and Soccer Ball

The literature on education in Japan typically focuses attention on achievements in the classroom. In this study, I cross the border of scholarly attention to bukatsu (extracurricular school clubs), including their demanding schedules and mandatory activities, to analyze their rich roles in preparing students for future jobs. Refocusing attention from the classroom to the playground blurs hierarchies of activity and suggests a more holistic view of education. Drawing from extensive fieldwork in Japan that includes interviews and participant observation, I locate the value of bukatsu as generating a specific type of embodied cultural capital that is explicitly requested during the hiring process in the adult work world. The bukatsu experience reinforces certain attitudes that correspond with the bu (‘warrior’) part of the old bunburyōdō (‘the way of both pen and sword’) ideal. This research demonstrates the limits of academic credentials (i.e., test scores) in achieving larger societal goals. What seems to matter increasingly in a shrinking job market are dispositions derived from long-term participation in sports organizations, gained specifically through the institution of bukatsu.

Fighting fate: A seventy percent unemployment rate

When children with disabilities imagine joining the adult world of work, the joys of choosing a future career path are marred by the high unemployment rates. As I maneuvered through the world of work as a young adult, my optimism remained slightly dampened by an acute awareness that 70% of blind Americans are unemployed. In my experience, the ultimate strategy for success in securing meaningful employment involved a combination of an honest assessment of one's skills and limits, and stubbornly searching for that niche position.

Employment Day: Forty Years of Transitioning High School Seniors Into the Workforce

The author describes an innovative career development event that has endured for nearly 40 years: Employment Day. This is a consummate collaborative undertaking of school professionals, higher education participants, and the community of employers in the Greater Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, region. It embodies the principles of the American School Counselor Association (ASCA; 2000) national standards, the ASCA (2003) National Model, and the New York State Comprehensive Model (New York State School Counselor Association, 2004) as a culminating activity. Employment Day is an event worth replicating by professional counseling associations.

School mathematics in work and life: what we know and how we can learn more

Underlying current K-12 math education reform initiatives are two premises. First, math education is necessary and should aim for success in the adult world of work and everyday life. Second, aligning the methods and content of K-12 math programs with those of real-world adult math use will facilitate learning. The existing research, however, challenges these premises. Studies of the actual demands of everyday adult practices reveal that most occupations involve only a low level of mathematical content and expose the disparate natures of everyday and school mathematics. Several limitations of existing mathematics-in-practice research, however, make it problematic to draw clear implications for school programs. In this article, I summarize the current research and identify some of its shortcomings for guiding educational content and pedagogy, including its focus on occupations and practices known to involve little math, its use of stereotypical conceptions of math, and its reliance on surveys and worker self-report. I propose a conceptual framework for future investigations of math-in-practice that would better inform K-12 education.

Developing career and employability skills: a US case study

As a result of education and business partnerships, there is general consensus that career and employability skills should be taught in high schools, since many students leave education without the requisite skills to succeed in the adult work world. This leads to the question of whether teachers are competent to provide instruction on employability skills, and whether teacher training programs are preparing teachers to do so. As an example of how to rectify this situation, one US university has developed and implemented a new course on teaching career and employability skills for its technical teacher preparation program. The case describes how the course was developed and how it is being delivered, as well as the content and process skills students are learning. The potential impact of the new course is discussed in terms of the extent to which new teachers are using the skills, the capability of their students, and ultimately, how local organizations view the graduates.

Learning The Hard Way: The Extent and Significance of Child Working in Britain

Abstract This article examines the extent and significance of contemporary child working in Britain, and explores some of its implications for the movement between school and work. It draws on data generated from two cohorts of young people in the Coventry labour market and argues that child labour is an important formative experience for many working class youngsters. Child working allows youngsters to gain experience of the social relations of production, helps structure subsequent occupational choice and provides important continuities between the social relations of schooling and adolescence, and those of the adult world of work. Without acknowledging such a contribution the article concludes that systems of vocational preparation for young people will be destined for, at best, only partial success.

Children at work: The home workplace

Young children's early experiences with the adult work world have generally been ignored by researchers. Consequently, little research base exists for understanding children's conceptions of the adult work world. This study, part of a larger investigation of families who work at home for income rather than in separate workplaces, focuses on children's experiences with work in such families. Twenty-seven children ages 7 months to 18 years were observed or interviewed in the family work setting. Findings indicate that all the verbal children held concrete knowledge of their parents' work, as was evidenced by their ability to label jobs, describe procedures, and name tools. Furthermore, all the children were involved with their parents' work in a developmental progression: (1) playing and watching, (2) simple tasks, (3) regular assistance, paid or unpaid, (4) regular paid work. Their experiences suggest that home-working parents play a powerful role in their children's work socialization.

Antecareer Crisis: Military Recruiting and the Youthful Job Applicant

Generally, young job applicants have not been adequately prepared by either family or school to make wise occupations decisions. Further, today's occupations structure has an increasingly broad array of job alternatives that must be considered. "Antecareer crisis" denotes the dilemma that confronts the person seeking entry into his or her first full-time work experience: it is a crisis of unpreparedness. Help in the sense of vocational guidance is needed by our youth to resolve the antecareer crisis and effect a smoother entry into the adult world of work. Nowhere is this more true than during entry into the very special occupation milieu of the armed services. However, although the Department of Defense is the largest vocational training establishment in the world and depends inordinately upon youthful workers, the military recruiting services have not adequately addressed the problem.

Professionalization of Attitudes: A Review and Critique

This paper contains an in-depth, three-part overview of the literature and ideas pertaining to professionalization of attitudes toward play. The first section focuses on the popular ideology which assumes that similar values are operative in both the sport world and the adult work world. The second part of the paper consists of a review and critique of the research and theory centering on value orientation and its relationship to age, athletic status, and gender. The last section contains an examination of the properties and assumptions of the Webb Scale and suggestions for scale improvement. The author attempts to show that thus far the existing research has failed to prove empirically (a) that significant differences in value orientation can be attributed to participation in athletics, and (b) that involvement in competitive sport socializes an athlete into the value system of the work world. The author also argues that the professionalization of attitudes is a complex and multidimensional phenomenon, a concept which has not been reflected in the measurement of such attitudes.

Educational Evaluation and Shifting Youth Policy

Social programs, including interventions helping disadvantaged youth, offer implicit models regarding what behavioral changes will cause various social and economic outcomes. Responding, in part, to the work of evaluators, federal and state youth policies advance different intervention models. This article reviews five causal metaphors running throughout youth employment and education programs: (1) The functionalist economic model, arguing that increased skills will improve youth employment; (2) the institutional socialization model, suggesting that earlier entrance to the "adult work world" will ease youth "transition"; (3) a psychosocial view of youth development, emphasizing the individual's sense of social efficacy in learning and work situations; (4) the subcultural model, pointing to the importance of local opportunity structures and social norms functional within specific subcultural conditions; and (5) a self-determined community development vision, urging local economic growth in disadvantaged areas. Evaluation evidence, increasingly abundant, should begin to look across these models to improve program strategies. A review of such research for youth employment efforts is included. When feasible, evaluation sponsors and evaluators should explicitly articulate programs' causal models to nurture broader theoretical understandings and minimize being overly confined within the immediate program model one is evaluating.

The effects of unemployment on the psycho‐social development of school‐leavers

School‐leavers deal with important developmental tasks which are to some extent interwoven with the transition from school to the adult work world. But many school‐leavers are currently being denied work opportunities. This study used Erikson's notions of psycho‐social development to investigate the impact of unemployment on students leaving school and attempting to secure their first job. Those who found work, particularly girls, showed significant psycho‐social development while those who returned to school or were unemployed showed none.

Understanding Industrial Society

The Schools Council Enquiry No 1 (HMSO) published in 1968 revealed that employers, parents, teachers and the pupils themselves considerd the preparation of pupils to cope with the demands of the adult world of work in social and economic terms to be a major responsibility of the school. However it was equally apparent that little of what was done as a specific part of the curriculum in schools was designed to meet this aim, and at meetings of teachers and advisers at Teachers' Centres in Warwickshire, Coventry and Staffordshire it was decided to devise a course to fulfil this need.

The Classroom Teacher in Career Education

Career education, the author believes, is a method of teaching skills to students, rather than an "extra" subject. Creative teachers, stimulated to interest and involvement in career education, can provide exciting, meaningful preparation for the adult world of work.

Work and the Teen-Ager

Adult and adolescent differences in attitude toward work partly result from age-grade differences charac teristic of all cultures, but they are accentuated and prolonged by adult edict. Although teen-agers recognize the values of work, they are forbidden to enter the adult labor market and, in the absence of creative alternatives, are compelled to go to school even when school is wholly nonfunctional to them. Entrance into the adult work world is, thus, made difficult. Even when the teen-ager does enter it, he is discriminated against. The change from school to work often results in culture shock in the neophyte. This could be mitigated by suitable pre-employment socialization in which responsibility as well as mechanical skills would be recognized. It is conceivable that, as industrialization changes the nature of work and automation reduces the quantity required, adult culture will be organized around leisure rather than around work. In this sense, teen-age culture, with its emphasis on fun, may be a functional prototype of future adult culture.