A new report on career guidance in British schools finds that while students feel they have plenty of information about possible careers, they still have difficulties making choices based on that information. "The report suggests that too much information and the wrong sort of information, rather than too little, is the problem when it comes to making decisions about the future. Young people are overwhelmed by the amount of information and the way that it is presented and feel there is no way of making sense of it all. As a result, they switch off from decision-making altogether. This highlights the importance of presenting good careers information, advice, and guidance in a way that young people find useable in order for them to make informed decisions about their future study and career options." (Newsletter of the Institute for Effective Education at the University of York)
Abstract information, then, is not enough to allow students to make informed choices. This implies that the usual practice of explicit, information-based career counseling employed in most schools may be useless or even counterproductive. Consider this quote from the authors' summary of the report: "Overall, the young people we spoke to seemed to have essentially based, or were seeking to base, the decision of their overarching career ambition on whether they had an image of themselves doing the job that they found appealing. This image often came from a variety of sources, including family and friends, personal exposure, and the media." Having an image of oneself doing a certain job is not something that can be imparted through declarative teaching. It requires either observing other people doing the job (and/or hearing them talk about their job), as happens naturally with family members and friends, or actually doing the job (or parts of it) oneself. If we want to broaden students' career prospects, then, we have to get them into close contact with professionals in different careers, ideally in a work context, and make them experience a wide range of different professions 'from the inside', through mini-internships, practice companies, and goal-driven projects. Once they gain a (hopefully realistic) image of what it is actually like to do these jobs, our students will be able to make truly informed choices about their career paths, using the whole spectrum of possible careers as a reference, rather than just the narrow set of jobs their parents and friends happen to do. You can find the full report, entitled "Moments of Choice", here (PDF).
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