Attractiveness Of Careers Research Articles

Legislating for Equality? Working Hours and Progression in Science Careers

Abstract: This article presents some recent research on the progression of women in science careers in five EU Member States—the UK, Italy, Austria, Portugal, and Greece, examining the growing gender pay gap in science careers. It focused on the recruitment and participation of women, but also on their retention and progression. The interviews with scientists highlighted the importance of various dimensions of ‘time‐use’ to an understanding of the progression of women and men in science careers. This article focuses on three dimensions of time: (1) time over the working day; (2) time over the working week; and (3) time over the working year. It describes the typical working schedules of the respondents, the functional use of that time and the particular challenges this presents for scientists with caring responsibilities. The results confirm previous findings1 underlining the importance of working hours in science both to the attractiveness of science careers—and the ability to recruit and retain men and women—and to career progression. Within this context, the article considers the potential of recent European legislation designed to regulate working time (Council Directive 93/104) to create a more level playing field and improve the progression of women in science.

Are Canadian General Internal Medicine training program graduates well prepared for their future careers?

BackgroundAt a time of increased need and demand for general internists in Canada, the attractiveness of generalist careers (including general internal medicine, GIM) has been falling as evidenced by the low number of residents choosing this specialty. One hypothesis for the lack of interest in a generalist career is lack of comfort with the skills needed to practice after training, and the mismatch between the tertiary care, inpatient training environment and "real life". This project was designed to determine perceived effectiveness of training for 10 years of graduates of Canadian GIM programs to assist in the development of curriculum and objectives for general internists that will meet the needs of graduates and ultimately society.MethodsMailed survey designed to explore perceived importance of training for and preparation for various aspects of Canadian GIM practice. After extensive piloting of the survey, including a pilot survey of two universities to improve the questionnaire, all graduates of the 16 universities over the previous ten years were surveyed.ResultsGaps (difference between importance and preparation) were demonstrated in many of the CanMEDS 2000/2005® competencies. Medical problems of pregnancy, perioperative care, pain management, chronic care, ambulatory care and community GIM rotations were the medical expert areas with the largest gaps. Exposure to procedural skills was perceived to be lacking. Some procedural skills valued as important for current GIM trainees and performed frequently (example ambulatory ECG interpretation) had low preparation ratings by trainees. Other areas of perceived discrepancy between training and practice included: manager role (set up of an office), health advocate (counseling for prevention, for example smoking cessation), and professional (end of life issues, ethics).ConclusionGraduates of Canadian GIM training programs over the last ten years have identified perceived gaps between training and important areas for practice. They have identified competencies that should be emphasized in Canadian GIM programs. Ongoing review of graduate's perceptions of training programs as it applies to their current practice is important to ensure ongoing appropriateness of training programs. This information will be used to strengthen GIM training programs in Canada.

Future of Food Supply Veterinary Medicine

The Food Supply Veterinary Medical Coalition (FSVMC) was formed in 2004 with a mission to assure the public that food continues to be abundant, safe and wholesome by ensuring that veterinarians are appropriately involved throughout the food supply system. The premise of the Coalition is that food production is enhanced, both in safety and wholesomeness, when veterinarians are included in all steps of production and processing. Listed alphabetically, the following organizations are the founding members of the Food Supply Veterinary Medical Coalition (FSVMC): American Association of Avian Pathologists, American Association of Bovine Practitioners, American Association of Food Hygiene Veterinarians, American Association of Small Ruminants Practitioners, American Association of Swine Veterinarians, American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges, American Veterinary Medical Association, Association of Veterinary Consultants, and the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service. Although not officially a member, the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association was very supportive of this research program, and was instrumental in data collection in Canada.
 This study was commissioned by the FSVMC in May 2004 to implement a far reaching research program to examine the demand and supply trends for food animal veterinarians and the issues shaping those trends. The study was funded by the FSVMC and a grant from Bayer Animal Health. Similar in spirit to earlier extensive research on the veterinary profession provided in the KPMG mega study and the Pew report, the final report, entitled "Estimating FSVM Demand and Maintaining the Availability of Veterinarians for Careers in Food Supply Related Disciplines in the United States and Canada" consists of over 1600 pages that describe many different studies on various facets of the supply and demand for food supply veterinarians. Representing 16 months of literature review, data collection and analysis, the entire report can be found at the following website: http ://www.avma.org/public_heal th/f svmc/fsvmc_toc.asp. Three summary articles have also been published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association (JAVMA) that highlight the major findings from the research program. The first article deals with veterinary student career path attraction to food production medicine in the USA and Canada. The second article, examines career switching and the retention of food supply veterinarians in the career. The third article15 addresses the patterns of growing demand for food supply veterinarians. Each article contains recommendations to improve the profession based directly upon the results from this research.
 The research program that examined demand issues from 2004 thru 2016 in food supply medicine was comprised of thirteen panels of experts who participated in a multiple-round Delphi forecasting exercise. The research program addressing career attraction and career retention issues consisted of 1 7 studies, seven focus group studies and ten surveys, which provided insight into FSVM career path attraction and retention in the United States and Canada. Unlike some previous studies, this study found that there will likely be a 4% to 5% yearly shortfall in bovine-interested veterinarians graduating from US and Canadian veterinary colleges over the next 10 years. As demand for these veterinarians will rise only a modest 1% per year, most of this shortfall will be due to a lack of supply of new bovine-interested veterinary college graduates. To alleviate this shortfall, multiple tactics were suggested to: increase the likelihood of recruiting bovine-interested veterinary students into veterinary college, create cattle interest in students already in veterinary college, help these students as they begin their careers post-graduation, and provide further ongoing support to prevent them from switching from bovine medicine in their first five years of practice.

Saving the clinician‐scientist: Report of the ANA Long Range Planning Committee

Daunting obstacles to the development of careers in academic medicine represent the most important threat to the future of academic neurology. The Long Range Planning Committee of the American Neurological Association has for the past 2 years considered what practical methods might be undertaken to enhance the attractiveness of careers as neurologist investigators and to ensure that aspiring clinician-scientists are encouraged and retained. The deliberations have resulted in several recommendations. First, a plan has been developed to introduce flexibility during residency training in neurology. This will permit trainees who plan careers in academic medicine to have a substantial exposure to research during residency, shortening the subsequent transition to independent careers. Second, the American Neurological Association will create an annual course in clinical neuroscience research, to be held each summer for academically oriented residents. Improved mentoring and career guidance was identified as a third priority, addressed in part by the development of several new courses for trainees and mentors. Finally, planning is under way for a new postresidency training program in clinical research that will link small and large departments of neurology. Beyond these recommendations, the entire continuum of training for physician-scientists should be reexamined, from the first days of college to the successful launch as independent investigators. The development of additional demonstration projects to improve the quality and reduce the total length of training would be highly desirable.

Science policy for risk governance.

Rather than regarding risk governance as a burden, science should embrace it as an opportunity to build public trust

Trends in dental and allied dental education

Educational programs play an important role in preparing a qualified dental work force. This article reviews the current status and trends in dental, advanced dental and allied dental education programs in the United States and examines their impact on the dental work force. This analysis focuses on survey data collected by the American Dental Association during the past 10 to 15 years and compares recent patterns in applications, enrollment and graduation with previous trends. The numbers of educational programs, applicants, enrollees and graduates have increased in dentistry, dental hygiene and dental assisting, while dental laboratory technology has declined in all measures. The proportion of women in dentistry has increased, while the ethnic profile of dental and allied personnel has shown little change. Both the cost of dental education and student debt continue to increase. Despite increases in the number of educational programs and overall numbers of graduates from dental and allied dental education programs, the proportion of underrepresented groups still lags behind their representation in the overall population, and the number of allied personnel falls short of practice needs. Patterns in applications, enrollment and graduation are important determinants of the dental and allied dental work force. The cost and funding of education significantly affect the attractiveness of dental careers and the sustainability of educational programs and should be monitored carefully by the profession.

Redefining the future of trauma surgery as a comprehensive trauma and emergency general surgery service.

Dwindling operative opportunities in trauma care may have a detrimental impact on career satisfaction among trauma surgeons and on career attractiveness to surgical trainees. Addition of emergency general surgery may alleviate some of these concerns. The trauma service at our institution incorporated nontrauma emergency general surgery over a 3-year period. The institution's trauma registry and hospital perioperative database were queried. The changes in operative caseload are described. Current trauma faculty anonymously completed a Web-based questionnaire about the addition of emergency general surgery to the trauma service. Operations for trauma decreased in 2002 compared with 1999, despite a higher number of penetrating injuries and total trauma contacts. Nontrauma general surgery operations performed by trauma faculty increased in proportion to coverage provided by the trauma service. In 2002, 57% of all cases performed by trauma surgeons were emergency general surgery, which accounted for 32% to 74% of an individual surgeon's caseload. In anonymously completed Web-based questionnaires, current trauma faculty expressed satisfaction with the combined trauma and emergency general surgery model. The combined trauma and nontrauma surgery service increased operative caseloads and improved satisfaction of trauma surgeons. A comprehensive trauma and emergency general surgery service may be an attractive model for the future of trauma surgery and provide logistical and medical advantages to the emergency general surgery patient population.

Is It Worth Doing a Science or Technology Degree in Canada? Empirical Evidence and Policy Implications

This paper looks at the early careers of science and technology graduates in Canada using three waves of the National Graduates Surveys. Employment rates, earnings levels, job satisfaction, the job-education skill match, and the overall evaluation of the education program are studied in order to evaluate the attractiveness of careers in science and technology and the degree to which these graduates' skills and talents are being efficiently utilized. We find that computer science and health graduates have generally done very well; that engineers have performed in a solid, although not spectacular, fashion; and that pure and especially applied science graduates have lagged behind, especially at the undergraduate level. The implications of these findings for the accumulation of the science and technology knowledge bases in Canada in the context of the emerging knowledge-based economy are discussed.

Mother teresa meets Genghis Khan: The dialectics of hierarchy-enhancing and hierarchy-attenuating career choices

We replicated and extended earlier work showing the connection between social dominance orientation and the perceived attractiveness of hierarchy-enhancing and hierarchy-attenuating careers using data from two large and independent samples of UCLA students. Consistent with expectations, the data from both studies showed that the greater the students' level of social dominance orientation, the more attractive hierarchy-enhancing careers such as criminal prosecutor, police officer, and FBI agent were perceived to be. Similarly, the greater the students' social dominance orientation, the less attractive they found hierarchy-attenuating careers such as public defender, civil rights lawyer, and human rights advocate. These conclusions held even after controlling for the effects of socioeconomic status and political conservatism. Canonical correlation analysis disclosed that the attractiveness of these career paths within the general domain of law made only one, bipolar and unidimensional projection within social dominance space. The nature of this bipolar dimension reproduced the hypothesized distinction between hierarchy-enhancing and hierarchy-attenuating social roles. Theoretical implications of the results are discussed.

The Career Paths of Teachers: Implications for Teacher Supply and Methodological Lessons for Research

these questions matter to various actors in the educational system, including school board members and superintendents evaluating the adequacy of teacher salaries and teacher recruitment budgets and college students assessing the potential attractiveness of careers in teaching. The primary sources of quantitative information for addressing these questions are teacher supply and demand models. In fact, numerical projections of the size of the impending teacher shortage or surplus, based on the National Center for Education Statistics'

A Career Ladder’s Effect on Teacher Career and Work Attitudes

Interest in teaching career attractiveness and school effectiveness has spawned a variety of incentive packages across the country. Career ladders are part of this move to reform teaching. Though career ladders can be a significant change in the way teaching work and careers are organized, they take a variety of forms. A study of a career ladder designed to affect the work structure and career opportunities of teachers was designed to examine the redesign effect on teacher attitudes about their work and careers. Factors associated with teacher attitudes were examined, as well as differences in attitudes between teachers at various career stages, level of participation in the change, and level of teaching. Teachers were found to differ in their responses to career ladder work efforts, the impact of the reform on the work of schools, peer supervision, career growth opportunities, and the stability of career opportunities. The implications of the research for the future structure and assessment of teacher career ladder job redesign efforts and the target populations they are aimed at are discussed.

Sex-role related effects of sex bias in language

Despite recent efforts to eliminate sexist language from journal and other publications, controversy persists over whether sexist language contributes to the perpetuation of sex bias. Seventy-two female and 57 male undergraduates were exposed to three levels of sexist noun and pronoun usage in a description of “Ethical Standards of Psychologists.” All subjects then rated the attractiveness of a career in psychology for males and females, and their own willingness to refer a male or female friend to a psychologist. In several instances, ratings of career attractiveness and willingness to refer were found to vary in sex-role stereotypic directions as a function of degree of exposure to sexist language. Recent demands for nonsexist language may be supportable on the basis of a genuine relationship between sexist language and the maintenance of sex-biased perceptions.

Faculty work orientations as predictors of work attitudes in the physical and social sciences

This study examines the relationship between university professors' work orientation and attitudes toward their work. Specific and global work orientations are related to extrinsic and intrinsic attitudes toward (1) career attraction, (2) work satisfaction, and (3) commitment to the profession. The major findings of the study are (1) global work orientation is a strong predictor of attitudes toward intrinsic aspects of work in the social sciences and is a moderate predictor in the physical sciences; (2) specific work orientation is a strong predictor of attitudes toward extrinsic aspects of work in the physical sciences and is a moderate predictor in the social sciences; (3) global work orientation is not related to extrinsic work attitudes in the physical and social sciences; and (4) specific work orientation is not related to intrinsic work attitudes in the physical and social sciences.

How Do Human Capital Investors Form Earnings Expectations?

The net capital value of life-cycle earnings is widely considered to index the economic attractiveness of alternative careers. This basic idea is fundamental to a rich and varied empirical literature ranging across such issues as the distribution of income, the demand for higher education and the theory of occupational choice. Estimates of the attractiveness or expected profitability of human capital investments invariably employ some variant of current earnings as a measure of earnings. Implicitly these estimates assume that the market for human capital is efficient in the sense that all current information is reflected in these earnings. They are treated as unbiased estimates of future earnings. Unlike markets in securities and some commodities, however, there is good reason to expect that here current prices are not the best estimates of future prices. Interperiod arbitrage in labor services is too costly to have much of an equalizing effect on prices at different dates. As Freeman [3] has shown, a lagged adjustment to current earnings, as may occur for lengthy investment periods like those for higher education, can produce cycles in earnings. These earnings cycles can then feed back to suppliers of training, by introducing severe variability in the demands for their services. Such a cyclical pattern need not necessarily occur, however. Even if demanders of training do not have sophisticated expectations about earnings cycles in their chosen career, suppliers of this training are quite likely to learn of these patterns. They should therefore be reluctant to adjust their capacity slavishly to accommodate these cycles. We thus might expect the behavior of suppliers to act as a dampener on the variability of this type of human capital investment. The greater the costs of adjusting capacity to accommodate demand cycles, the more inflexible, over time, will be the supply of this training. In addition, the intensity of the cycles in the production of human capital will depend on the sophistication of the demanders. While lagged adjustment to spot prices can produce the cycles described, demanders have incentives to forecast future market conditions, thus mitigating such cycles. Although Freeman's [3] results support indirectly the hypothesis that