Conference Agenda

In this symposium we draw on a 2023 global collection where seven international longitudinal studies investigate the relations between young people’s career engagement and subjective wellbeing in their own national systems. While there is danger in international studies, perhaps particularly of career engagement, of over-simplifying policy contexts from around the globe and not attending to national and contextual factors that are inherent in individual education systems (Watts & Sultana, 2004) we temper this by drawing on international literature and evidence-based studies.

We trace the urgent and critical task of ensuring career activities and wellbeing are aligned in both ways and exhort research and practice to extend ways of measuring, understanding and implementing these around the world. The group’s core aims were to:

• improve understanding of the determinants of young people’s career engagement and wellbeing during education-to-work transitions;
• examine the impact of wellbeing and careers interventions on young people’s experience of education, career management and employment outcomes;
• extend our understanding of young people’s education-to-work transitions from an interdisciplinary perspective; and
• develop a conceptual model and recommendations for careers and wellbeing-oriented prevention and intervention programmes to assist young people as they transition into the world of work.

Across the globe, young people find it increasingly difficult to attain and maintain jobs. Moreover, young people often lack human and social capital and career competencies, and are, therefore, vulnerable to labour market instabilities, such as economic downturns. Lack of employment opportunities allowing young people to build skills and experience progress is a major social problem faced by many industrialised nations over the last few decades, especially in the COVID-19 context. Within such uncertain and ambiguous work context, nurturing young people’s career competencies and wellbeing is crucial for maintaining and sustaining their involvement and resilience in labour markets and to achieve happy, healthy and productive careers. Wellbeing must not be seen just as ‘surplus value’ but in a modern world focused on decent work there is real importance to go beyond job matching.

There has been previously little research investigating the relation between career engagement and either subjective or objective wellbeing. While a similar collection of international studies has not been found, there is a wealth of data on wellbeing and career activities captured all across the world at a point of compulsory schooling and later in the transition to work (e.g., career aspirations at the age of 15 or longitudinal measurements of life satisfaction). This has meant data was available in longitudinal cohort studies across the world, e.g., Longitudinal Survey of Australian Youth (Australia), Education Longitudinal Study (USA) and Understanding Society (UK), as well as the International Study of City Youth. Making use of longitudinal data from nationally representative datasets, this collection has aimed to highlight theoretical common grounds for understanding the relevance of career resources for young people’s subjective wellbeing. There were three major similarities across the practice and policy findings of the chapters which we have understood as the following: taking a whole person approach, wide understanding of where and how career support is received by young people and, perhaps most strikingly, multiple opportunities to engage with career guidance and education activities.Overall, the contributions highlight the importance of (i) sensemaking role of time; (ii) resource-based approaches to careers; as well as (iii) acknowledging systematic barriers in the labour market. Having thus illuminated some new understandings about how career engagement is relevant for wellbeing, this symposium aims to consider how young people transition into labour markets and to draw contextualized policy recommendations.

The initial career choices that young people make can shape the course of their working lives. These choices are influenced by their occupational aspirations and goals as well as the opportunities that are available to them. Whether a person’s occupational aspirations are achieved or not can have an impact on their sense of wellbeing. We know from existing research that a person’s wellbeing is enhanced when they are able to fulfil their goals (Pavot & Diener, 2008). However, failing to achieve their goals can result in disappointment, frustration or social withdrawal. The overall aim of the research was to understand how occupational aspirations and outcomes affect young people’s wellbeing in the UK. We investigate the occupational aspirations of young people when they were aged 16 to 18 and their achievements five years later, assessing their levels of wellbeing (measured as satisfaction with job, income, leisure time, health and overall life satisfaction) at each age. Two main questions are addressed: 1. To what extent do young people achieve their occupational aspirations? 2. Are young people’s occupational aspirations and achievements associated with their wellbeing? We draw on goal setting theory to help us interpret the findings from our research and examine a potential relationship between career aspirations, outcomes and wellbeing. Data were drawn from Understanding Society, which is the largest longitudinal household panel survey of its kind in the UK and includes questions on life changes, education and wellbeing. The sample of 208 (59% female, 82% British) was derived from respondents aged 16 to 18 in Wave 3 of the survey (covering Jan 2011 to Jul 2013), and then matched with their responses five years later. The outcome variables included changes in each of the measures of wellbeing between the two time points, and hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to investigate any possible relationship. We found that just over half of the young people in this study either achieved the occupational aspiration they held at the age 16-18 or overachieved (52.3%). Furthermore, the data showed no significant relationship with individual levels of wellbeing and the fulfilment of their occupational aspirations. However, those who did not fulfil their aspirations reported lower levels of financial wellbeing compared to those who achieved their occupational aspirations. Overall, it appears that young people’s wellbeing is not impacted by achieving or failing to achieve occupational aspirations.

Pavot, W., & Diener, E. (2008). The Satisfaction With Life Scale and the emerging construct of life satisfaction. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 3(2), 137–152. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760701756946

Life satisfaction among students, a positive global cognitive appraisal of their lives, boosts mental and physical health and scholastic achievement. It is thus important to understand its determinants. Social cognitive career theory (SCCT) stresses outcome expectations – the career-goals students set – and goal efficacy – students’ self-perception about their goal-related competences. SCCT only sketchily addresses the sources of goal efficacy and outcome expectations as ‘environmental resources’. We suggest that sociological frameworks might enlighten the role of significant others as environmental resources. Specifically, teachers, parents, and peers are important sources for goal efficacy and outcome expectations. This study set three goals. First, we investigate whether SCCT is valid in Flanders, a rigidly tracked educational system. Tracks cater to different futures, with academic tracks preparing for higher education and vocational tracks preparing for entry into the labor market. It is possible that goal efficacy and expectations are more consequential for life satisfaction in a comprehensive than in a tracked system. The second goal is to explore the role of significant others as environmental resources. We highlight the peer and teacher expectation culture – respectively, the shared expectations students and teachers have about students’ futures – and we distinguish between parental support – positive parental involvement – and parental pressure – parents pushing children towards academic or vocational goals. The third research goal is to test this elaborated SCCT longitudinally, by differentiating between the short-term and long-term effects of significant others, on goal efficacy, expectations and ultimately life satisfaction. Multilevel analyses on the ISCY dataset, gathered from 2013-2014 onwards from 2,346 students in 30 secondary schools in Ghent, showed that significant others’ career-related thoughts are associated with life satisfaction. In the short term, teachers with higher expectations boost students’ goal efficacy and life satisfaction. Higher parental support, but lower parental pressure relates to higher life satisfaction. In the long term, parental support and goal self-efficacy increase students’ life satisfaction. Moreover, students who expect to continue studying had a larger increase in life satisfaction than those who were still undecided, and this is due to undecided students having lower goal efficacy. Moreover, parental academic pressure reduces life satisfaction, but only for undecided students. We conclude that it is fruitful to add students’ significant others as environmental resources to SCCT. Policy-wise, we advise to support all students, but particularly undecided students, so the socioemotional side implications of career choice in this life phase are softened.

Lent, R. W. (2005). A Social Cognitive View of Career Development and Counseling. In Career development and counseling: Putting theory and research to work (pp. 101–127). John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

In the United States, there is an increasing focus on preparing students earlier in their educational studies for specific careers through skill training and career exploration. Schools are providing more and different types of work-based learning experiences, vocational coursework, career preparation opportunities, and postsecondary support to students in hopes of improving their employability. These experiences may encourage students to engage in more purposeful and focused career thought and enhance their wellbeing. While wellbeing is a multi-dimensional construct, this study focuses on occupational wellbeing as it relates to career thought and the educational supports and experiences offered by schools. Social cognitive career theory provides a lens by which to understand the development of career thought and wellbeing through work-based learning (WBL) activities in secondary school. SCCT identifies three factors that help individuals develop career thought: self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and personal goals. Using a nationally representative dataset—the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS)—this study responds to the following research questions linking WBL participation to well-being as measured by career-goal alignment and job satisfaction in early career: 1. What factors influence participation in work-based learning experiences in high school? 2. How do WBL experiences in high school influence individuals’ feelings about the relationship between early career occupation and long-term goals? 3. How do WBL experiences in high school influence job satisfaction in early career? Using school-fixed effects models to account for unobserved between-school differences as well as a robust set of additional student covariates, we find the SCCT variables of self-efficacy and expectation of school to develop skills for employment to be significant predictors of participation in WBL. We find that only certain types of WBL are significantly related to this career-goal alignment: cooperative education, and completion of a predetermined sequence of vocational courses. Meanwhile, only cooperative education was significantly linked to higher job satisfaction, while mentorship was associated with significantly associated with lower job satisfaction in early career. These findings present some implications worth considering. First, WBL appears to be beneficial with respect to occupational outcome, though this is dependent on type of WBL. Second, WBL participation is relatively even across student demographics and academic histories. Finally, school and family contexts have relatively little influence on occupational well-being. All told, promoting career thought and development for secondary students is likely to have significant benefits later in life. Work-based learning is one avenue by which to achieve these goals.

Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.

The dominant discourse about the role of higher education (HE) in the UK is focused on its suitability for preparing graduates for employment, measured by labour market outcomes such as graduate-level employment or wages. However, graduates’ wellbeing, values and broader ideas about the role of HE warrant further attention. This paper investigates how strength of career clarity throughout the university experience affects graduates’ wellbeing after graduation, and highlights individual and structural barriers to graduate employment in the UK and Italy. In the UK analysis they use the rich, nationally representative, longitudinal Futuretrack survey, which followed entrants to full-time HE in the UK in 2005/06 through their HE experiences and through to their early post-graduation outcomes. This part of the paper makes two contributions. First, we found that students’ ideas about their careers change over the course of their HE journeys, and higher career clarity scores at the beginning of the HE journey mattered less for graduates’ wellbeing after graduation than career clarity scores later in the HE journey and after graduation. Second, we found that certain structural factors (socioeconomic background, ethnicity, disability, but not sex) were negatively associated with wellbeing even after controlling for career clarity. This suggests that while career clarity can still be a useful resource for students and graduates for improving their wellbeing, it alone may not be able to entirely mitigate the impact of structural barriers. The Italian contribution to the paper investigates the young graduates’ job and career satisfaction, intended as two complementary indicators of work-related well-being and career thoughts, through the analysis of the cohort of graduate workers who entered the Italian labour market in 2014. Relying on a rich and unique dataset on Italian graduates’ early career paths (made available by AlmaLaurea), we examine the level of graduates’ satisfaction with their jobs, careers and earnings five years after graduation along with the relevant determinants. Our findings suggest that young graduates’ expectations and well-being evolve over time in an adaptive way. Italian graduates, initially declare that one of the most important reasons for their participation in higher education is the desire for career improvement. However, when such expectations are curtailed by first work experiences impacted by poor quality of the labour market, it comes out that the relatively high level of job satisfaction reported by Italian graduates does not stem from satisfaction with career and earnings, but it depends on non-monetary factors.

Agovino, M., Busato, F. (2017). From college to labor market: a transition indicator for Italian universities. Quality & Quantity, 51(6), 2577-2604.