A study of the career pathways of Canadian young adults during the decade after secondary school graduation : a thesis presented in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Social Work and Social Policy at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examined the career pathways taken by 47 young adults in Canada after \nthey graduated from secondary school. Based on a grounded theory analysis, this thesis \nexplored the way young adults made career decisions and how their resources (individual, \nfamily, social and environmental) and the messages that they heard from significant others \ninfluenced their career pathways. \nThe majority of the young people in this study either did not know what they \nwanted to do when they graduated from secondary school or subsequently changed their \nminds. Most engaged in a process of identity exploration through experimentation with \ntertiary programmes and different types of work as they tried to ascertain what constituted \nsatisfying work. As participants experimented with different career pathways, they obtained \na better sense of who they were and what types of work they found satisfying. Findings \nindicated that participants engaged in a process of finding a career-related place, an activity \nthat superficially involved selecting a career pathway but more substantively meant a \nsearch for identity and life purpose. Finding a career-related place was achieved through \nthe interchangeable use of five strategies: navigating, exploring, drifting, settling, and \ncommitting. These strategies emerged as a host of internal and external factors impinged on \na young person’s simultaneous search for a career and the identity that could potentially \ncome with it. \nThis contingent nature of finding a career-related place stood in sharp contrast to \nthe discourse of what is referred to in this thesis as the “career myth”. This discourse \nrelated to the belief that young people should follow a linear, predictable route from \nsecondary school to tertiary training, and then on to a permanent, full-time job. Based on \nthese findings, an argument is made that developmental and chaos-oriented approaches to \ncareer development should be moved into the foreground when professionals assist young \npeople in the immediate years after secondary school graduation. Accordingly, the trait and \nfactor ethos, which continues to dominate the career counselling field, should be \ndeemphasised. Six career design principles are identified that provide guidelines for how \nyoung people can engage in the process of finding a career-related place in a way that is \nproactive while at the same time accepting that career pathways and the identities that \nfollow may be uncertain.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".