Julia was privately educated in the 1970s at a school which assumed that women would have a career, and university was both expected and encouraged. Paradoxically, it was Oxford which let her down. She found the University and the Career advisers to be of virtually no help in offering her guidance about what she should do after her degree.
Alison, on the other hand, also privately educated, fared differently again. She found that her school had few expectations for its pupils beyond working as a secretary, teacher or nurse and waiting for Mr Right to come along.
Women who went to mixed-sex schools reported on different experiences. One woman mentioned that she was fortunate enough to be one of seven particularly bright girls in her year and they were encouraged to perform well in class and in exams. She is not so sure that the same would have happened if she had been the only girl with academic aspirations in her form.
Another talked of being very competitive and sporty when at a mixed school and about how she was more likely to be found playing hockey with the boys than netball with the girls. This was frowned upon by the staff and she had to work extra hard to be allowed to enjoy the things she wanted to do as opposed to the things that others thought she ought to do.
Nearly all the women I spoke to mentioned the lack of a range of possibilities offered to them by careers advisers. Sarah who, against great difficulties, did well in her O and A levels, looks back with disappointment at the advice she was given. ‘No one ever mentioned PR to me. I also wish that someone had suggested being a magazine editor – I would have loved to have aimed for that.’
The lack of appropriate career guidance at school is still cited as one of the most common obstacles to making the most appropriate job choice for the future, although the service does seem to be improving in some schools. The Institute of Management’s 1997 report (A Question of Balance – see here) found that 25% of the managers in the survey felt that their careers had been hindered in some way by a lack of appropriate guidance. When young people are faced with making important, life-shaping decisions about their futures, the range of choices must seem overwhelming. Well-known and recognized job titles, professions, trades and industries are joined by a whole host of other options which are not so familiar and about which little information is given. But, with the increasing use of computer-based questionnaires to help students find out more about their strengths and weaknesses and to point them in the direction of possible careers and, with easy access to databases, it is now comparatively simple to discover which subjects they need to study to follow a particular interest.
It is not difficult to find out which universities and colleges have the best reputations for specific subjects, or how the relevant courses and their faculties differ from one another. Inevitably, however, there is a limit to the depth of available information and students are often unaware of the entire range of possibilities offered by their preferred subjects. Because of this they are not always able to choose the most appropriate courses, or the ones which would suit them best. It seems to me that the present, rather limited approach to careers guidance is not helpful, particularly now when the possibilities of pursuing a job for life are not high.
The world of work is changing very quickly – much more rapidly than most adults from the conventional world of the professions and nine to five jobs realize. The traditional concept of a ‘career’ is disappearing and many representatives of the present and future student generations are more than likely to change direction several times during their working lives. The idea of a portfolio career – not relying on one single area of work or skill to generate income – is growing in popularity: especially when employees no longer feel they can rely on a company to provide them with the security that used to be seen as an employer’s duty to the workforce. Changes in companies’ policies which lead to redundancies or redeployment of resources mean that people are becoming used to the idea of additional training or re-training in order to fill another position within the organization or to find work elsewhere. This will become quite normal and the people who will fare best in an unstable job market are those who learn to be flexible and who develop a range of skills, knowledge and experience.
To this end, career consultants are beginning to emerge who offer a complementary service which can be used alongside the more traditional mechanical approach and which begins the process of thinking about the world of work in a new and exciting way. This approach looks at what kind of organizations the students want to work with, what kind of lifestyle they aspire to, and how they will measure personal success. It concentrates less on a specific area of work or profession and more on what the individual student hopes to give to and receive from his or her working life. Students can then begin to clarify the direction they wish to follow and also take the chance to research and explore the various possibilities that open up to them.
If young people were offered an improved careers guidance service, then I’m sure that it would not be so common to hear adults making dissatisfied comments, such as:
‘My career has tended to follow the path of opportunity rather than any clearly defined strategy’, or
‘… late discovery of what I wanted to do and late discovery of my talents.’
It is interesting to look at the two apparently conflicting meanings of the word ‘career’. As a noun, it implies the existence of a systematic path through your working life. As a verb, it expresses rushing about without any apparent focus. Which definition do you follow? Do you see a case for changing from one to the other? It would seem from these two definitions that each of us can make a considered choice about the next step in our lives – at whatever point it occurs.
This is not to say that everyone needs, or is suited to a clearly defined career path, but it does seem obvious to me that some of the wasted time and talent evident in many women’s early lives could be avoided with a more thorough and knowledgeable approach to career counselling from the outset.
The same principle applies later on. For example, one manager talked of:
‘Not having clear goals in the sense of promotion, failing to recognize opportunities for advancement, not reading how the system worked.’
Traditionally, the idea of designing your future in terms of work was more likely to be found among the boys than the girls and this is recognized by women managers:
‘I was probably less focused upon my career goals than my male counterparts. I was more concerned with job achievement than job progression.’
Having a limited academic education, or not being educated to degree level, are the two main reasons given by women, who describe themselves as late developers or for lacking confidence in themselves and their professional capabilities.
Case study – Judy
Judy, 43, is married with two young children and is the head of a central support team in a local authority. She has a degree in business studies and also trained as a barrister. She is a non-executive director of an NHS Trust.
‘No one in my family had been to university before – they had not even thought about it – but when I realized that university was a prospect for me I was encouraged by an uncle. Money was a problem, so I was driven to aim for a university degree with sponsorship funding. My father had been a shop manager, so business was seen as highly respectable and going into business was seen as a good idea. As I was female and good with people, Personnel seemed to be the obvious route to everyone else. BP offered me a sponsorship and I accepted a four-year ‘thin sandwich’ course, with a salary on graduation which was more than my father’s. From then on my feet didn’t touch the ground. I moved every six months, including a stint working in Scotland on the North Sea operation.
‘I obtained a good degree and specialized in Industrial Relations and Employment Law. I thought about professional qualifications and, because I had done well at law, the lecturer suggested I went for the Bar which I had never even contemplated. “Why not?” I needed