The majority of young people make a career choice without regard for salary, and base their decision on interest and enjoyment or a desire to help people. This paper examines students' perceptions of nursing as a career at a number of key stages in their education decision-making, and how this information influences their subsequent career decision either to choose or to reject nursing. Factors relating to image and status are also explored and some comparisons are made between nursing and young people's own choice of career, to highlight a number of significant issues. The findings indicate that although young people expressed admiration for the work of nurses, this was rarely matched by an envy of nurses, or a desire to become a nurse themselves.
The education and training market, particularly for 16 year olds, is highly competitive and an understanding of how young people make decisions about careers and how that affects and interacts with choice of further and higher education pathways is a crucially important issue. The complexity of the decision-making process has been largely under-estimated in favour of an oversimplification of the economically rational view of choice. However, young people make choices which have an impact on the relationship between labour supply and demand and, therefore, an insight into how young people make choices is fundamental to the operation of both post-compulsory education and training markets and the labour market. The models presented in this paper attempt to provide a broad picture of some of the complex perspectives and processes at work in career choice and the link between perceptions of careers and postcompulsory education and training pathways -career 'invisibility' and the range of complex images which influence young people's perceptions of adult world jobs; the development of a model of the careers environment in terms of a careers choice landscape; and the implications of these perspectives for careers education and guidance.
The development of a social market in education in England and Wales since 1988 has required schools to develop strategies to competition for pupils. They have done so within a context in which such concepts as `the market' and `marketing' have been alien. This paper develops an analytical methodology based on Cowell's interpretation within service organizations, through the examination of four key cultural and managerial developments the range of understanding of markets and marketing held within the school; their organizational responses to the market; their use of market analytical tools; and their development of appropriate marketing strategies. By applying this methodology to a sample of schools, the paper shows the variation in the development of a market culture between them, and derives an Index for Marketing Cultural Development. From this, a simple typology of cultural responses to marketization is derived.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.