When it comes to preparation for adult life, education works. It has long been clear that greater levels of academic success are strongly related to higher wages and lower rates of unemployment. But this relationship is complex. As this paper shows, the investments of time and energy that students put into their studies can be expected to benefit them in different ways depending on their personal characteristics. Some groups of students face more barriers than others in achieving their goals when they embark on their working lives, even if they leave education with the same levels of qualifications as their more fortunate peers.
How school systems can address this form of inequality is at the heart of this study. It presents new analysis of data from the OECD Programme for International Assessment of Adult Skills (PIAAC) to illustrate the ways that social background, gender and migrant status shape the outcomes of young workers. Although circumstances can vary, overwhelmingly it is young people from lower socio economic backgrounds, of foreign birth and girls who are at greatest risk of poorer outcomes.
Societies turn to guidance systems to help students plan for their working life, gaining the knowledge, experience and skills that will help them to activate their human capital in ways which will maximise their chances of fulfilling their career ambitions. Unfortunately, as new analysis of data from the 2018 round of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) shows, students who face the greatest risks of poorer transitions into the early labour market are less likely to engage in career development throughout their time at school and very often demonstrate the most worrying levels of career preparation.
Educational jurisdictions can act to create a fairer playing field and this paper includes multiple examples of ways in which guidance systems are actively addressing the additional barriers that can be expected to prevent good transitions. Included within them is the Canadian province of New Brunswick which created an innovative career education framework in partnership with the OECD that takes an active, systematic and evidence-driven approach to build equity into guidance. Such additional barriers are real and not difficult to understand. The children of parents who did not attend university or who are not routinely involved in managing hiring processes will have less family-based knowledge to draw upon as they apply for tertiary education or employment. Girls interested in working in professions where their gender is a minority are right to ask whether the working environments which they can anticipate will be fully supportive to female workers or hostile to their interests. Young people from migrant backgrounds can be expected to have less understanding of programmes of vocational education and training work which vary considerably in format and reputation between countries.
In spite of being more highly educated that any generation in history, the challenges that young people face in the competition for work are still substantial. In many countries, there is need for more strategic approaches to career guidance. In the first phase of the OECD’s work on teenage career readiness, analysis of longitudinal datasets in multiple countries revealed strong relations between teenage career development and better employment outcomes, linked to the ways in which students explore, experience and think about their possible futures in work. That analysis-built understanding of how guidance systems can become more effective in their provision. The current paper builds on the analysis to show that it is also possible to achieve more equitable provision. It broadens our understanding of how our school systems can respond to social inequalities. We know that education works, but some need more help than others in converting their human capital into successful employment. By addressing additional predictable barriers, guidance systems take an important step towards offering truly personalised support for all students. By so doing, it opens the way to a more efficient flow of interests and abilities into the labour market, creating new opportunities to address the rampant skills shortages that hamper the efficient growth of societies and economies.
This paper was drafted by Shinyoung Jeon, Anthony Mann, Vanessa Denis (all OECD) and Tristram Hooley (Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences and the University of Derby, UK). The authors would like to thank Dongwook Choi for preparing the paper for publication and OECD colleagues for reviewing drafts of this paper: Alison Burke, Lucie Cerna, Young Chang, Marta Encinas-Martin and Samo Varsik. Many thanks to Eda Cabbar for her communications co-ordination. They are also grateful to the International Centre for Guidance Studies (University of Derby) and to Tricia Berry (Department for Education and Early Childhood Development, New Brunswick, Canada) and Matt Diemer (University of Michigan) for their comments on the draft paper.
This report was realised by the Career Readiness team at the OECD with the support of the JPMorgan Chase Foundation and the New Brunswick Department of Education and Early Childhood Development. The views expressed in this report should not be taken to reflect the official position of the OECD member countries, the JPMorgan Chase Foundation or the New Brunswick Department of Education and Early Childhood Development.
Andreas Schleicher
Director for Education and Skills
