Have you, like I, wondered how you might make a contribution to the nation's September 11th recovery?
Remember, you are employment counselors. And this tragedy happened to employers, to employees, to people at their places of business. Firms as well as their workers are trying to recover - are in need of counseling. People are undergoing change, and need assistance with this. I have been interviewed by abcnews.com, ACA Counseling Today (twice), and Men's Health magazine. I shared our discoveries that people have quit their jobs to return to their hometowns, have reviewed their career (some for the first time), have left jobs to seek the job of their dreams, have been laid off due to the recession. The airline industry has been steamrolled to a near flat line reaction. I talked about how companies still need help understanding people.
How can you make a difference? Stay with NECA! Volunteer. Gather with us at the annual conference in vibrant New Orleans, Louisiana. After 35 years of continual service, offering unified employment counseling representation, NECA is preparing for the best annual workshop ever, March 22nd and 23rd, with innovative, intriguing, informative speakers. We've planned for a junior suite as central NECA social gathering and after-hours place. Cynthia Jackson and Kristy Greene are working on the details.
I've attended seven conferences this year. What I've discovered in my meetings with several NECA members formerly unknown to me, is that networking with others - these newfound friends and colleagues - provided the new insight and typically the 'meat' of the knowledge I brought back. I believe you will be inspired and informed by our upcoming workshop, as I am every year. NECA's stronghold is our years of service, and our background of selfless presidents, hard working board members and tireless volunteers. As a small organization, we have our struggles. As a result, I have also been sending out requests for donations.
Stay with us. Bring your friends and colleagues on board. Join us at the conference. Together we can do more. Unity through diversity: Employment for all!
Our country has been facing serious crises. All of us have been trying to figure out how to cope with the tragedy of September 11 here on the home front. The aftermath of this event, along with the economic downturn affecting our country, has caused many to lose their jobs, trapping those without education and training in a cycle of hardship.
To address unemployment and transition issues, our agenda for 2002 will focus on restructuring county, state and federal work force alliances to create more viable job opportunities. Critical to success with this agenda are initiatives in education and job training programs to help work force professionals move workers to higher-wage, permanent jobs--not from one low-income job to another, or in some cases, to welfare.
In 2001, NECA began to address this agenda by sponsoring the initial graduate level Working Ahead Workforce Career Development Facilitator (WCDF) Instructor training. Many of you have asked "What is this new initiative?"
Over the last two years, the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development of New Jersey's Rutgers University developed the new Working Ahead WCDF curriculum. One aspect distinguishing this curriculum from prior developments is the new competency focusing on the current One-Stop and Workforce Investment Act legislative policies as well as assessment, internet use and ethical issues. After the piloting process, the new curriculum was approved by the national certifying body--the Center for Credentialing and Education (CCE). This curriculum contains 12 modules (covering 13 workforce development competencies) providing front-line work force professionals with the skills needed to operate in a public or private one-stop career center, educational training or job service environment. Individuals with the necessary educational credentials were accepted for admission to the course designed for instructors. Those who successfully completed the course of instruction are listed on a registry by the Heldrich Center to teach the Working Ahead curriculum. These instructors are also eligible to apply for certification to CCE since the individuals have met the educational requirements for national certification by CCE as a Career Development Facilitator (CDF) instructor.
As the one-stop career center system is being established throughout the United States, it has become apparent there is a need to build the capacity of work force professionals to deliver a wider and more varied range of services. Certification as a Career Development Facilitator is one means of ensuring a minimum level of work force profession staff competency. Instructors in counseling and career development also need to continually upgrade professional skills to provide the highest level of education to human service and work force professionals in training.
For those who already are CDF certified instructors, a fast-track training workshop will be provided. Information will be forthcoming in the next issue of the NECA Newsletter.
If you have a background and or training in career development, you are invited to participate in the instructor training. An application form providing further information and requirements for admission will be emailed to you upon request. If you would like additional information, I can be reached at 368-322-4512 or by email at kbrawley@mindspring.com.
Some of you may know that I have completed a ten-year longitudinal study of the career development experienced by a sample of school children. Because the study focused on second to twelfth graders, I didn’t say much of it in these pages over the years because employment counseling, in general, revolves around adults and their interest in or need to choose, change or adjust to employment. However, there are some issues and findings from my study that should be of interest to anyone working in the broad area of career development.
In 1987, I selected a sample of 208 second graders in four elementary schools in Arvada, a suburban area of Denver. The children were those whose parents gave permission to be in the study. With some graduate student assistants, we met with each child individually and completed a structured interview document I called Survey of Interests and Plans. I gathered demographic data and academic grades from the school office. I also sent a form home with each child for each of their parents to complete about their academic and vocational history. The parents sent those forms directly back to me.
Two years later I interviewed the same children when they were in the fourth grade and repeated that process when they were in the sixth, eighth, tenth and twelfth grades. As you might expect, every two years I lost students due to their leaving the schools where the majority of the students were. Even so, as seniors in high school, ten years later I was able to interview 103 from the original 208. That in itself was remarkable but the schools were in a fairly stable, middle-class community. Nearly 90 percent of the children were Caucasian and the largest minority group was Hispanic Americans. The mean age of the sample when interviewed in the second grade was 7.8 years (Fall of 1987). When interviewed as seniors in high school (Spring of 1998), the mean age was just over 18.0 years.
Two of the principal variables I investigated were occupational aspirations and occupational expectations. Occupational aspirations were determined by asking the question: As an adult, if you could have any job you wanted, what job would that be? Occupational expectations were determined through the question: As an adult, what job do you really think you will have? These questions were never asked back-to-back, i.e., there were always other questions asked between these two. I was mostly interested in studying their occupational aspirations. In second grade 50% had the same aspiration as expectation and by senior year in high school, aspirations matched expectations for 71% of the sample.
I classified the occupational aspiration of each child as a ‘male,’ ‘female,’ or ‘neutral’ job. Using national Department of Labor data, which reports how many men or women are in each of the hundreds of the most common occupations, I classified an occupation a ‘male’ job if 70 percent or more of the job-holders were men, and a ‘female’ job if 70 percent or more of the job holders were women. The remaining jobs were neutral.
The vast majority of boys in the sample consistently reported an occupational aspiration that was a ‘male’ job all the way into high school. Girls reported wanting a ‘female’ job when they were in the second and fourth grades. By sixth grade, many switched to wanting ‘male’ jobs. Over the years, research has indicated that children want jobs of their own sex. By the pre-teen years (9-13) Linda Gottfredson’s theory suggests that social value of occupation is what drives occupational selection. The boys in my sample always wanted men’s work of high social value (lawyer, physician, scientist, etc.) so they did not switch the kinds of occupations they wanted as they matured. Girls, on the other hand, switched from women’s jobs (teacher, nurse, etc.) to men’s jobs because they also wanted higher social value occupations as the theory would suggest.
Every two years, students were asked questions about appropriate gender roles. Specifically, they were asked if they thought it was okay for married women to work. Over the 10 years of the study, between 80 and 86 percent said fine. This was true for boys and girls. When asked if it was okay for a woman to work if she had preschool children, my sample of students were not as sure. In fact, as second graders, only 41 percent said it was okay and by the time they were seniors in high school, only 22 percent said it was okay. The Not Sure category jumped from 6 percent in second grade to 26 percent in twelfth grade. There continue to be doubts and reservations in this white, mostly middle class sample about the appropriateness of moms working if their children have not started school.
Over the years, the occupational aspirations of many boys were fantasy occupations. At the earlier grade levels (second, fourth, sixth, eighth) between 29 percent and 42 percent of the boys aspired to such occupations mostly professional athlete. The percentage of girls who wanted such occupations (singer, artist, dancer, model) ranged from 10 to 20 percent. By tenth grade, most of the fantasy occupations were gone. Interestingly, of the 18 boys in eighth grade who wanted to become professional football players, by their senior year in high school, one-third wanted to become policemen or firefighters.
A final tidbit I’ll share for now is this. Over the years, most students reported, in general, a similar occupational aspiration. However, as seniors in high school, 56 percent of the seniors named an occupational aspiration that he or she had never named in the ten previous years. Clearly, near the end of high school, many students are choosing something new for themselves, perhaps because of the press of reality, better awareness of who they are and the world of work, and the need to choose work for themselves or select a college major.
I have presented various results of this study at the last six or seven ACA Conferences. This year I will do a poster session on the stability of Holland codes of the students’ occupational aspirations over ten years.
*************************** Once again, the national workshop and ACA Conference are at hand. Take time to renew and refresh yourself both personally and professionally. New Orleans can help. See you there.
"Tomorrow is closer than you think" Dr. Peter Drucker, Professor of Social Science and Management at Claremont Graduate University, California since 1971, explains how it will differ from today, and what needs to be done to prepare for it.
The next society, both in the developed world, and probably in the emerging countries as well, will be with us shortly and will be quite different from the society of the late 20th century. Much of it is already here, or is rapidly emerging.
In the developed countries, the dominant factor will be the rapid growth in the older population and the rapid shrinking of the younger generation.
In another 25 years people will have to keep working until their mid-70s, health permitting. They will participate in the labor force in many new and different ways; as temporaries, as part-timers, as consultants, on special assignments and so on. Within 20 or 25 years, perhaps as many as half of the people who work for an organization will not be employed by it on a full-time basis. This will be especially true for older people. New ways of working with people at arm’s length will increasingly become the central managerial issue of employing organizations, and not just of businesses.
The shrinking of the younger population will cause an even greater upheaval. In every single developed country, but also in China and Brazil, the birth rate is now well below the replacement rate of 2.2 live births per woman of reproductive age. Politically, this means that immigration will become an important and highly divisive issue in all rich countries. Economically, the decline in the young population will change markets in fundamental ways. The rate of family formation will fall steadily unless bolstered by large-scale immigration of younger people. The market will become middle-age-determined, or perhaps more likely it will split into two; a middle-age-determined mass market and a much smaller youth-determined one.
Creating new employment patterns to attract and hold the growing number of older people (especially older educated people) will become increasingly important because the supply of younger people will shrink.
The next society will be a knowledge society. Knowledge will be its key resource, and knowledge workers will be the dominant group in its workforce. It will be without borders, because knowledge travels even more effortlessly than money. It will be characterized by an upward mobility which will be available to everyone through easily acquired formal education. Together, those characteristics will make the knowledge society a highly competitive one, for organizations and individuals alike.
Information technology, is already having one hugely important effect – it is allowing knowledge spread near-instantly, and making it accessible to everyone. Given the ease and speed at which information travels, every institution in the knowledge society, not only businesses, but also schools, universities, hospitals and government agencies will have to be globally competitive, even though most organizations will continue to be local in their activities and in their markets.
The new knowledge economy will rely heavily on knowledge workers. At present, this term is widely used to describe people with considerable theoretical knowledge and learning; doctors, lawyers, teachers, accountants, chemical engineers. But the most striking growth will be in knowledge technologists – computer technicians, software designers, analysts in clinical labs, manufacturing technologists, and paralegals.
In today’s economy, these people are as much manual workers as they are knowledge workers; in fact, they usually spend far more time working with their hands than with their brains. But their manual work is and will be based on a substantial amount of theoretical knowledge which can be acquired only through formal education, not through an apprenticeship. Knowledge technologists are likely to become the dominant social, and perhaps also political force over the next decades.
Structurally, too, the next society is already diverging from the society almost all of us still live in. The 20th century saw the rapid decline of the sector that had dominated society for 10,000 years – agriculture. In volume terms, farm production now is at least four or five times what it was before the first world war. But in 1913 farm products accounted for 70% of world trade, whereas now their share is at most 17%.
Manufacturing has traveled a long way down the same road. Manufacturing employment in America has fallen from 35% of the workforce in the 1950s to less than half that now without causing much social disruption. But it may be too much to hope for an equally easy transition in countries such as Japan or Germany, where blue-collar manufacturing workers still make up 25-30% of the labor force.
Statistically, multinational companies play much the same part in the world economy as they did in 1913, but they have become very different animals. Multinationals now tend to be organized globally along product or service lines, although, like the multinationals of 1913, they are held together and controlled by ownership. By contrast, the multinationals of 2025 are likely to be held together and controlled by strategy. There will still be ownership, of course. But alliances, joint ventures, minority stakes, know-how agreements and contracts will increasingly be the building blocks of a confederation. This kind of organization will need a new kind of top management.
Against that backdrop, Dr. Drucker seeks to answer two questions: what can and should managements do now to be ready for the next society? And what other big changes may lie ahead of which we are as yet unaware?
The Economist, November 1, 2001
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January 15, 2002
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