Career Trajectories: Convergence or Divergence?

2000 ◽  
pp. 50-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen Drew
Keyword(s):  

2021 ◽  
pp. 000494412199746
Author(s):  
Tebeje Molla

For young people, the end of secondary school represents a critical transition point. This article aims at understanding how schools support a particular group of disadvantaged students to transition into education, training, or employment. Drawing on a life-course perspective and with refugee-background African students as an empirical focus, this qualitative case study documents career support practices in nine government schools in the State of Victoria. The findings show that schools provide transition opportunities that support African students to envision their post-school educational and career trajectories. The arrangements include career planning, alternative pathways, and employment of community engagement officers. However, there are persisting challenges that impede this group of students from fully benefiting from these arrangements. The main barriers identified here are academic disengagement, doxic aspirations, misconceptions about qualifications, and low self-efficacy. The article also argues that the persistence of these challenges is attributable at least in part to such overlooked factors of engagement as institutional practices, student agency, and home environment.





2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 190-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Torsten Kahlert

AbstractThis article investigates interwar internationalism from the perspective of the highest personnel of the first large-scale international administration, the League of Nations Secretariat. It applies a prosopographical approach in order to map out the development of the composition of the group of the section directors of the Secretariat over time in terms of its social and cultural characteristics and career trajectories. The analysis of gender, age, nationality, as well as educational and professional backgrounds and careers after their service for the League’s Secretariat gives insight on how this group changed over time and what it tells us about interwar internationalism. I have three key findings to offer in this article: First, the Secretariat was far from being a static organization. On the contrary, the Secretariat’s directors developed in three generations each with distinct characteristics. Second, my analysis demonstrates a clear trend towards professionalization and growing maturity of the administration over time. Third, the careers of the directors show a clear pattern of continuity across the Second World War and beyond. Even though the careers continued in different organizational contexts, the majority of the directors remained closely connected to the world of internationalism of the League, the UN world and its surrounding organizations. On a methodological level, the article offers an example of how prosopographical analysis can be used to study international organizations.



ILR Review ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 001979392199483
Author(s):  
Hani Mansour ◽  
Daniel I. Rees ◽  
Bryson M. Rintala ◽  
Nathan N. Wozny

Although women earn approximately 50% of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) bachelor’s degrees, more than 70% of scientists and engineers are men. The authors explore a potential determinant of this STEM gender gap using newly collected data on the career trajectories of United States Air Force Academy students. Specifically, they examine the effects of being assigned female math and science professors on occupation choice and postgraduate education. The results indicate that, among high-ability female students, being assigned a female professor leads to substantial increases in the probability of working in a STEM occupation and the probability of receiving a STEM master’s degree.









2021 ◽  
pp. 000183922110167
Author(s):  
Callen Anthony

Analytical technologies that structure and process data hold great promise for organizations but also may pose fundamental challenges for how knowledge workers accomplish tasks. Knowledge workers are generally considered experts who develop deep understanding of their tools, but recent observations suggest that in some situations, they may black box their analytical technologies, meaning they trust their tools without understanding how they work. I conducted a two-year inductive ethnographic study of the use of analytical technologies across four groups in an investment bank and found two distinct paths that these groups used to validate financial analyses through what I call “validating practices”: actions that confirm whether a produced analysis is trustworthy. Surprisingly, engaging in these practices does not necessarily equate to understanding the calculations performed by the technologies. In one path, validating practices are partitioned across junior and senior roles: junior bankers engage in assembling tasks and use the analytical tools to perform analysis, while only senior bankers interpret the analysis. In the other path, junior and senior members engage in co-construction: junior bankers do both assembling and interpreting tasks, and senior bankers engage in interpreting and provide feedback on junior bankers’ reasoning and choices. Both junior and senior bankers in the partitioning groups routinely black boxed the algorithms embedded in their technologies, taking them for granted without understanding them. By contrast, bankers in the co-construction groups were conscious of the algorithms and understood their potential impact. I found that black boxing influenced the knowledge outputs of these bankers and constrained the development of junior members’ expertise, with consequences for their career trajectories.



2009 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 493-507 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Groeneveld

This article focuses upon gender differences in the satisfaction with career opportunities of civil servants in the Netherlands. Women have become better represented at all levels in the Dutch civil service in recent years, but they are still underrepresented in the higher level positions. Nevertheless, women are slightly more satisfied with their career opportunities than men are and they seem to be increasingly so. Their relatively positive evaluation of extrinsic aspects of their work situation is one of the explanations of this finding, as is their higher intrinsic work motivation compared to that of men. It is suggested that the career orientations and aspirations of women better fit the changing context of career formation in the Dutch civil service and the accompanying new psychological contract. Points for practitioners The Dutch civil service has set ambitious targets with respect to the representation of women at all levels in the service, but insight into the determinants of women’s careers in the public sector is still very scarce. The findings in this article show that there are gender differences in the weighting of intrinsic and extrinsic aspects of the work in evaluating one’s career opportunities. Besides, the article may assist human resource management practitioners in anticipating the impact of changing career trajectories on the career satisfaction of male and female civil servants.



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