Invisibility, perceptions and image: mapping the career choice landscape

Abstract

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.

University as vocational education: working‐class students’ expectations for university

“…In contrast, Lehmann (2007b) showed how persistent habitus dislocation led working-class university students to drop out of university. Foskett and Hemsley-Brown (1999) argue that young people's perceptions of careers are a complex mix of their own experiences, images conveyed through adults, and derived images conveyed by the media. Media images of careers, perhaps, are even more important for working-class youth with high ambitions as they offer (generally distorted) windows into a world of professional employment to which they have few other sources of access.…”

Vocational Anticipatory Socialization of Adolescents: Messages, Sources, and Frameworks That Influence Interest in STEM Careers

“…Exposure is a student's contact with a career resulting from his or her unique set of circumstances (Foskett & Hemsley-Brown, 1999), and refers to information the student encounters by chance. Racial and ethnic culture and economic class (Simpkins, Davis-Kean, & Eccles, 2006) may limit youths' exposure to and pursuit of higher education and professional careers (Lucas & Buzzanell, 2004).…”

Evaluating employer career interventions in English schools

“…Foskett and Hemsley-Brown (2001) found that students placed a greater premium on 'experiential information' (including face-to-face contact with outside visitors such as employers) than paper-based information. Foskett and Hemsley-Brown (1999) also observed that whereas guidance interviews tend to explore the personal choices learners bring to the…”