Career guidance, social inequality and social mobility: Insights from international data
- Emma Anderson
OECD Education Spotlights
Young people from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds face additional barriers as they seek to convert their qualifications and experience into successful employment. They encounter particular challenges in seeking to enter high status jobs. The barriers they face can be productively conceptualised in terms of economic, human, social and cultural capital accumulation. Schools can help to build these resources through programmes of career guidance, but to be successful they must actively respond to predictable barriers relating to access to trusted information and useful experiences. PISA shows a need for socially focused interventions. Career uncertainty and confusion is shaped by SES. Low SES students are also less likely to engage in most commonplace career development activities. Equitable guidance systems will target greater provision at low SES students and aim ultimately to provide personalise provision to all students, encouraging and enabling understanding of and progression towards careers promising greatest personal fulfilment. Insights from longitudinal data provide new opportunities for more scientific and strategic approaches to delivering effective provision.
Across the OECD, a majority of students now expect to work in adulthood as either senior managers or professionals. However, in the competition for such work, young adults from more socially disadvantaged background struggle to compete equitably with similarly attaining peers from advantaged backgrounds. Career guidance has a key role to play in challenging social inequalities and supporting social mobility. New analysis of data from longitudinal surveys and the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) provides insight into the impact of socio-economic background on teenage career development and the forms of intervention that can be most confidently expected to enhance employment outcomes for young people.
This policy brief draws on evidence from the OECD Career Readiness project to explore the following questions:
• How does socio-economic status shape the career development of young people?
• How can schools challenge social inequality and enhance social mobility through guidance
interventions?