The OECD has published a new report on the state of global teenage career preparation. As they say on their website:
This report sets out key findings from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) as they relate to teenage career development.
As the executive summary to the report says:
Using data from the OECD Programme for International Students Assessment (PISA), which compares data from 2000 to 2022 across more than 80 countries, this report explores the state of career preparation among teenagers worldwide and highlights several key findings and concerns.
A significant portion of students are uncertain about their career plans, which is linked to poorer employment outcomes later in life. This uncertainty has grown substantially since 2018. Students who participate more in career development activities tend to have clearer career plans and better employment outcomes.
The report reveals that while educational ambitions have increased, socio-economic background still plays a significant role in determining these ambitions. The study shows that social background is a stronger determinant of educational plans than academic ability. High-performing students from disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely on average to expect to complete tertiary education than their less academically successful but more advantaged peers.
Despite the rise in educational aspirations, students' job expectations have changed little and remain misaligned with actual labour market demands. Many young people continue to aspire to a limited number of traditional, high-status jobs. Students' career expectations are increasingly concentrated in professional occupations, which do not align with the actual distribution of jobs in the labour market. Confusion about how the education system can be used to access desirable jobs is particularly pronounced among students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Many students demonstrate anxiety about their career prospects.
The report underscores the importance of effective career guidance and employer engagement in helping students understand the opportunities available to them. However, it finds that too few students are participating in career development activities that are most strongly linked to better employment outcomes. Disadvantaged students, in particular, are less likely to engage in these activities, exacerbating existing inequalities.
It also calls for greater investment in career development systems that begin early in students' educational journeys and involve frequent, meaningful engagement with employers. It suggests that such systems can help students make informed decisions about their education and career paths, ultimately leading to better employment outcomes and a more balanced workforce.
I am well aware that there are some people who think that the OECD is 'the rich countries' club', and what it has to say should therefore be ignored, but my own experience of working with it over an extended period suggests that would be unwise. The reality is that it frequently researches topics that would otherwise not be addressed, and that it has the resources to do so. This is an example of one such study.
The findings of the report is damning of the current state of the education system, and it's failure to prepare young people for the world that they will actually face when they move into work.
Not only does it show that over more than twenty years, there was no significant move to tackle the problems created by inequality, and consequent access to the workplace, but it also shows that social perceptions, no doubt backed by education systems that have desperately sought to reinforce social hierarchies of power in many countries around the world, have not adapted to the world we live in, or the fact that an old order has disappeared, whatever the neoliberals might like to pretend to the contrary.
To be blunt, working in most of the 'old professions' is a grim experience for most people now, and offers few career prospects.
Accountancy has not adapted to the real world, and still presumes that shareholder priorities matter most when the vast majority of young people think otherwise.
Like the legal profession, accountancy has also completely failed to comprehend, so far, what AI might mean for it.
Medicine is being totally commoditised, and the concept of care is being removed from it.
Other professions which once offered the prospect of a stable career for life, from banking to teaching, and much else, are no longer doing so, either because of the deliberate downgrading of staff numbers and skills within them, or because funding is not available for moe mature staff, meaning there is no chance of a lifetime career for many.
But still education seeks to train people in single silos, presuning that mastering just one of these is all a person will ever need to do.
It is not. People need to learn how to manage multiple careers, requiring skill sets that can adapt as time develops. They cannot, therefore, afford to become too specialist. Instead, they need skills that are adaptable, whether in communication, accounting and budgeting, IT, social media, using the web, marketing, entrepreneurship and related issues like money management and tax, and much more. But who is training these things? Almost no one. And so young people are left wholly unprepared for the world they will need to live in.
When will anyone listen?
That will be when the neoliberals who are dedicated to that education to reinforce the status quo are swept from office. Until then, there is no chance of change.
My thanks to David Lowry for drawing this report to my attention.
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Agree with most of the article. Oddly, Russell in “History of Western Philosophy” commented on silos and specialistion (although did not use the word silo) & much ofthe book was written in the early 1940s. The ambition (“People need to learn how to manage multiple careers, requiring skill sets that can adapt as time develops”) is worthy, how to accomplish this? given it takes time and effort – the former often at a premium these days.
I will have suggestions, soon.
Thank you. To witness the dire consequences of these neo liberal’s entropic educational stance is plain to see in the UK’s present incompetent and politically unidimensional political ruling class. All conflictual class siloes utterly devoid of any critical thinking skills.
Thank you, both.
The situation is particularly dire here, as Sara highlights, but that does not stop the Foreign Office from sending delegations from the stock exchange, higher education (not teachers) and health (not healthcare professionals) to advise developing countries on “best practice” and in the hope that such know how can earn a return.
I really hope they rumble us.
I was recently TUPE’d into another organisation a the grand age of 59.
Since doing so, I have had to deal with chaos everyday.
I was invited to a new starters event and raised the fact that I felt that I had not had an induction into my department. A sympathetic manager passed onto me my new organisation’s official induction process for managers and I saw had not had anything in that list from my new manager.
This was because her manager was being promoted and she had to fill his gaps. It speaks of all round poor organisational management. Talking to members of my new team, they had not had an induction either.
And we’re all encouraged to work from home, which really messes with the pedagogical side of things and when ever we meet up, the stress this is causing just comes out.
So what I’m saying is that if this my experience as it stands as an older worker and it makes wonder about the world of work my children are entering. I have recently read that the UK does more homeworking than anywhere else in Europe. I see this at work and I think we are losing the plot – we are losing feedback loops and developing unrealistic systems of working which means that services are going to get worse and respond more slowly.
Having worked in education for many years I have saw the good the bad and the ugly. We need an education that gives all young people the confidence that they can contribute positively to our society, that prepares them for a life in which what they do will be valued. Everyone deserves this opportunity. Our young people would stand a better chance of happiness if they knew that waiting for them was a rewarding long term career. One where they can afford their rent and a good standard of living. Young people need something meaningful to do, to feel useful, a purpose, I’m not sure that our education provides this. There are some tremendous teachers out there but most of our education is still classroom and desk based and even on an island with a smaller population I have been surprised that most of the teaching is still traditional but we have farmers, gardeners, fishermen, artists, musicians, marine experts, rangers, chefs , builders and nature literally on our doorstep as well as all the amazing entrepreneurs and we really don’t tap into this enough. We need change from the top right down to the bottom. I worked as a Forest School leader for several years within education and it was so difficult to implement but was so rewarding and it made a massive difference to the children we worked with but this was either done mostly in your own time with little support from Education and Government. We need young people who are engaged, healthy, happy and contented in life, knowing that what they do is for the wider community, nature and the planet. We keep going back to, we need to start caring again.
I jamieson, I watched film recently, showing pre-school children in Finland going to play in forest, testing themselves doing daring things, helping each other. Such a contrast to the start age 4, homework-from-reception UK system my children had to contend with. So glad some children get Forest School here, good for you! Sad to hear it is an uphill struggle.
Might it be that relationships, not least socio-economic relationships, may be reasonably placed on a continuum between the symbiotic and the parasitic?
Might it be that Neo-liberalism imposes/is a deceit for a relationship between rulers, their backers and their associates, which is close to the parasitical pole, to the cost of regular citizens and their children?
Might the relationship between recent and current rulers and young people and children be even nearer to/at the parasitical pole?
Might this ruler parasitism extend to:
1) Permanent food deprivation/starvation, which also harms growth, learning and life opportunities
2) A mass education system which inculcates subordination and a perception of knowledge which is fixed, often dated and shallow, and which obstructs questioning as well as critical and lateral thinking.
https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2024/11-october/news/uk/uk-experiencing-record-levels-of-hunger-and-hardship-says-trussell-trust
https://www.suttontrust.com/news-opinion/all-news-opinion/without-action-rising-levels-of-child-food-poverty-will-limit-the-potential-of-too-many-young-people/
Much to agree with
Yes.
I heartily disagree with the idea that students in their late teens should plan their careers in detail, with the help of “career development advisors”. Jobs now exist which were not even a glint in someone’s eye 15 years ago; some promised jobs never materialised. Remember when it was assumed that everyone should learn to program and design their own apps? As an example, I looked at the jobs of the BakeOff contestants last year, and I think only 2 were recognisable. Do we know how to train people to be flexible, adaptable, and go on learning after they leave formal education? I doubt if we even know that much.
I can promise you, I never planned on being a social media creator when I was at university.
The best training I ever got was to type, write and think for myself – and a mentor encouraged me to do all those things as a teenager, and monitored my progress. Everything else has been a footnote to those skills.
What can they be taught that AI can’t? There is nuance, but it will not be long before AI has mastered that too?
Do we just keep our heads buried in the sand and just keep teaching the same way we have for the last 100 years?
Do you really think AI will ever provide real nunace?
Thank you, both.
Colleagues and I are using AI for data gathering.
There are systems out there to detail what has been effected by employees versus what should have been. That goes back a bit before covid. AI can’t provide nuance or the context for actions and next steps.
Neoliberalism does not care, because the fact is there isn’t a seat at the table for everyone, it’s an ubermensch belief system, and we should care very much about that.
The primary purpose of education should be to teach us how to think, collaborate, create, and imagine. Not numb us.
English education teaches us how to conform, starting with the teachers, who are deprofessionalised, stressed, and fearful of performance management and Ofsted.
In Finland teachers work in a culture of learning, where learning about learning and teaching children to think and learn is the focus. What do you want to learn and how can I help you learn are questions in a Finnish teacher’s mind,
And on a practical note, it would help if there was a central platform for jobs, internships and training opportunities for young people, which employers both Public and private used. That would be a good way to apply AI.
At least there would be some sort of level playing field where young people could find all the opportunities.
Instead what happens is swathes of this knowledge and information is not shared, it circulates amongst those with cultural capital, and so inequality is perpetuated.
Let me ask a philosophical question.
In our school system might we be in danger of confusing education with training?
Both have their place but imo
serve different purposes.
Agreed
We are very short of both.
Recent reports show only 79% of American adults are literate. 54% have literacy below 6th Grade. 20% are below 5th Grade. Is this the result of years of neoliberalism? Usually, this country follows what happens in the USA. Is the literacy rate here going to plunge too.?
These numbers need to be treated with care.
One in five people in the US are functionally illiterate. This does not mean that they cannot read.
It means that they cannot read and then interpret the instruction that they might have been given, which is something quite different.
The challenge is, in that case, to work out how these people can survive in complex systems.
The problem is not the creation of neoliberal education, although it has certainly not improved on it. That failure is, however, because neoliberal thinking does not recognise diversity of need.
Yes, the inability to comprehend diversity of need is the informing structure of neo liberal ideologues. Psychologically, a replacement of human collective empathy with inhumane singular egoism. I have long since thought that our present global neo liberal ruling class’ rallying political banner should read:
THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE
🙂