Private Sector Careers Research Articles

‘Private sector’ Emiratisation: social stigma’s impact on continuance intentions

ABSTRACT This study examines the continuance intentions of the small number of nationals working in the United Arab Emirates’ ‘private sector’. The analytical framework is informed by job satisfaction measures alongside the Arabian Gulf Social Contract and Social Stigma constructs. A survey of 653 individuals was conducted and found that the nature of the job, pay and benefits and career development opportunities enhanced continuance intentions. However, perceived negative societal sentiment towards such jobs, vis-à-vis classic public sector jobs, reduced these intentions. Recommendations for further research to be conducted on the format of university mandated internship programmes and government-funded workplace training programmes are made, as both were found to help normalise private sector career paths. While this paper is the first to specifically canvas this cohort on their vocational intentions and sectoral preferences, its applied element was limited by being cross-sectional in nature.

The lure of the private sector: career prospects affect selection out of Congress

AbstractDoes the potential for a successful private sector career induce legislators to leave office? How does this affect the representation voters receive? I show that when former US senators—who now work as lobbyists—become more successful, currently serving senators with similar characteristics are more likely to take private sector employment. I replicate all results on data from the House. A number of tests suggest that senators react to the opportunity costs of holding office. Investigating selection effects, I find that legislative specialists are attracted the most in the Senate. Preliminary evidence suggests that the least wealthy respond most strongly in the House. This suggests that the revolving door shapes the skill set of legislators and the representation voters receive.

An integrated, modular approach to data science education in microbiology.

We live in an increasingly data-driven world, where high-throughput sequencing and mass spectrometry platforms are transforming biology into an information science. This has shifted major challenges in biological research from data generation and processing to interpretation and knowledge translation. However, postsecondary training in bioinformatics, or more generally data science for life scientists, lags behind current demand. In particular, development of accessible, undergraduate data science curricula has the potential to improve research and learning outcomes as well as better prepare students in the life sciences to thrive in public and private sector careers. Here, we describe the Experiential Data science for Undergraduate Cross-Disciplinary Education (EDUCE) initiative, which aims to progressively build data science competency across several years of integrated practice. Through EDUCE, students complete data science modules integrated into required and elective courses augmented with coordinated cocurricular activities. The EDUCE initiative draws on a community of practice consisting of teaching assistants (TAs), postdocs, instructors, and research faculty from multiple disciplines to overcome several reported barriers to data science for life scientists, including instructor capacity, student prior knowledge, and relevance to discipline-specific problems. Preliminary survey results indicate that even a single module improves student self-reported interest and/or experience in bioinformatics and computer science. Thus, EDUCE provides a flexible and extensible active learning framework for integration of data science curriculum into undergraduate courses and programs across the life sciences.

Self-Selection into Public Service When Corruption is Widespread: The Anomalous Russian Case

Drawing on experimental games and surveys conducted with students at two universities in Russia, we compare the behavioral, attitudinal, and demographic traits of students seeking public sector employment to the traits of their peers seeking jobs in the private sector. Contrary to similar studies conducted in other high-corruption contexts, such as India, we find evidence that students who prefer a public sector career display less willingness to cheat or bribe in experimental games as well as higher levels of altruism. However, disaggregating public sector career paths reveals distinctions between the federal civil service and other types of public sector employment, with federal government positions attracting students who exhibit some similarities with their peers aspiring to private sector careers. We discuss multiple interpretations consistent with our findings, each of which has implications for the creation of effective anti-corruption policies and for understanding of state capacity in contexts where corruption is widespread.

Pathways to the power elite: The organizational landscape of elite careers

To capture elites, we must map out the organizational landscape through which they pass during their careers. This organizational landscape moulds the character of elites, tells us about the prestige of organizations that are elite incubators and provides valuable indicators about how different sectoral experiences serve to accumulate capital for the elite. Unpacking the organizational experience challenges theoretical and methodological understandings of the elite character, calling for a renewed focus on the organizational embedding of elites after school. By analysing the occupational history of 416 highly central individuals in a Danish elite network, what we term ‘the power elite’, a very distinct set of career trajectories, running through a subset of large, well-established, interconnected organizations, is mapped and analysed. To understand the different ways in which the members of this power elite accumulate ‘organizational capital’ in different fields, sequence analysis on six distinct channels, sector, subsector, size, level, rhythm and geography, is applied. Through this multi-channel sequence analysis, 10 distinct clusters of career trajectories are identified, distinguishing primarily between four private sector clusters: corporate ambassadors, industrial inner circle, bankers and landed gentry; and six public sector clusters: state nobility, professional politicians, lobbyists, scientists, unionists, and education and local politics. Analysing the careers, private sector careers are shown to be more homogeneous than public sector careers, while careers based on positions with a democratic mandate, mainly politicians and union leaders, are more turbulent and unpredictable. We link pathways to social backgrounds, showing preference for pathways for the natives in the upper class.

Expect the unexpected: private‐sector careers

Expect the unexpected: private‐sector careers

Dishonesty and Selection into Public Service in Denmark: Who Runs the World's Least Corrupt Public Sector?

Are country-level dierences in corruption related to the dishonesty level of individuals entering public service? Recent studies have found that dishonest individuals self-select into public service in high-corruption settings. Little is known, however, about what is driving this pattern and whether a similar pattern exists in low-corruption settings. This paper examines selection into public service in the world’s least corrupt country, Denmark. We subject a relevant student population to a standard experimental dishonesty task and develop a novel method to estimate individual-level dishonesty from the experimental data. We then relate estimates of dishonesty to subjects’ job preferences and characteristics. In contrast to previous findings, dishonest individuals in low-corruption Denmark are less likely to want to enter public service. This self-selection is not related to risk-aversion or ability. Instead, we find that dishonest individuals who self-select into higher paid private sector careers such as finance are less altruistic and place a higher weight on their own earning opportunities. Accordingly, counterfactual wage questions suggest that higher public sector wages would attract more dishonest candidates to the public sector in Denmark.

Does it pay to be a public-sector employee?

Direct wage comparisons show that public-sector employees earn around 15% more than private-sector employees. But should these differences be interpreted as a “public-sector premium”? Two points need to be considered. First, the public and private sectors differ in the jobs they offer and the type of workers they employ, which explains a large share of the wage gap. Second, public- and private-sector careers also differ in other important dimensions, such as job stability and income progression, which are relevant to individual career choices. So any comparison of the two sectors should take these points into account.

When Government is No Longer the Employer of Choice:What May the Sector Perceptions of Public Managers Be Like After the Economy Recovers

In today’s economic climate, government is now considered by many to be the “employer of choice.” However, employers at all levels of government may eventually lose their recent gains in the war for talent, as the economy improves. Accordingly, it is important to explain how public sector managers viewed the relative advantages and disadvantages of government employment before the economic downturn along specific parameters, including opportunities for women and minorities, managerial autonomy, and employee talent and innovativeness. This paper assesses these views for state-level public managers across a broad range of public services, using survey data that preceded the economic downturn. Specifically, it examines how their past public and private sector career experiences, controlling for their contemporaneous government work experiences, affect their views of the public and private sectors. The study emphasizes career experiences not because past work experience are the only or the most important predictors of sector perceptions generally, but because career trajectory may be the most important consideration for developing strategy for response to government workforce dynamics once the economy improves. Thus, the findings are explained in terms of the related processes of workplace socialization and attitude formation and change, which see public and perhaps also private sector occupational norms and expectations and experiences, past and present, amalgamating to render personal values conducive to favoring one sector over the other. The importance of sector perceptions for human resources management and for broader government workforce concerns as the economy recovers are discussed, as well theory development regarding the career trajectories of public managers.

Private sector career trajectories for women in Denmark and the USA: Welfare state services versus corporate diversity programmes

According to welfare state theories, women pursuing high-level careers benefit from access to maternity-leave programmes and child care. Yet this is not the complete picture. While theories exploring public policy highlight the contribution of welfare services to the relative productivity of women compared to men, these theories should be complemented with a focus on conditions internal to the firm and in particular the organization of human resources. I focus on IT and pharmaceutical firms in the USA and Denmark, and show that US companies manage compliance by setting clear goals for gender diversity while this is not the case in Denmark. Furthermore, US subsidiaries in Denmark view the US paradigm of equality of outcome as more attractive than the Danish paradigm of equality of opportunity. The Danish welfare state is increasingly seen by human resource managers as inadequate when it comes to promoting female managers in the private sector.

Sharing experience of careers work in different settings

What do the practices of career support given to individuals in various settings have in common? Whether labelled career advice, career education, career guidance, career counselling, career coaching or career development, what are the differences between them? The answers to these questions could throw new light on practice in the career field and suggest ways to enrich it. However, the relative lack of contact between career professionals working in different settings – such as schools, colleges, higher education, public employment services, the voluntary sector, private-sector career services and the workplace – gives little opportunity to address these questions. We therefore propose that practitioners from a variety of settings should engage in dialogue; and, importantly, that researchers should also take part in this dialogue, and help to stimulate and disseminate learning widely across the whole career field.

President George W. Bush and His War Cabinet

George W. Bush certainly did not expect to be a war president. In his private sector career and as Governor of Texas he had seldom traveled abroad, and he did not demonstrate much interest in international affairs. In his campaign for the presidency he expressed skepticism about foreign entanglements and a disdain for “nation building.” Yet events conspired to make war the central concern of his presidency; after the terrorist attack on the United States in September 2001, Bush saw the war on terrorism as the primary mission of his presidency. “I'm here for a reason, and this [the war on terrorism] is going to be how we're to be judged.”1 Soon thereafter he decided that the U.S. should conduct a campaign for regime change in Iraq, by military means, if necessary.