Capabilities and employability of unwed mothers

In this paper we assess the economic capabilities of a sample of unwed mothers who gave birth in the spring of 1998 in hospitals that serve low-income residents in seven cities that are part of a national sampling frame. We show that recent unwed mothers who are not in a cohabiting relationship are especially vulnerable to economic hardship because they are more likely to encounter multiple barriers to employment than mothers who do cohabit with their newborn's father. However, analyses of earnings capacity suggest that most single-mother families would be poor even if the mothers worked 1500 hours per year, and near poor if they worked full-time, year round (2000 hours). Analyses of income portfolios indicate that low-income mothers are quite resourceful packaging cash and income transfers from multiple sources to meet the needs of their families. These results are discussed in the context of recent welfare reforms.     

Navigating employability from the bottom up

ABSTRACT

Research focusing on young people’s career trajectories has emphasised ‘graduate employability’ with much less attention being afforded to the employability strategies used by disadvantaged youth, including the social, political and labour market contexts in which these emerge. This study explores how young people enrolled in entry-level, vocational training courses in Australia attempt to enhance their employability. Interviews explored perceptions of individual employability, the strategies utilised to improve employability, and the economic, personal and employment consequences of these strategies. Three main employability strategies were identified: gaining qualifications to meet employment expectations; securing work experience in a competitive labour market; and addressing economic and social challenges to secure and sustain employment. The study reveals how the dominant narratives of employability in education and employment policy are misaligned with the economic, social and labour market challenges faced by disadvantaged job-seekers with respect to notions of career and ‘fit’ between the individual and the labour market. Policy responses need to take account of the diverse ‘bottom up’ experiences and circumstances of different cohorts of young people.     

Spiritual development in youth worker preparation: a matter of resolve

Once we are convinced that attentiveness to spiritual development has the potential to enrich and improve youth work practice, equipping youth workers with the necessary skills and capacities can proceed. A model for such preparation begins with youth workers' reflecting on their own spiritual autobiographies.     

Negotiating employability: migrant capitals and networking strategies for Zimbabwean highly skilled migrants in the UK

In this paper we focus on highly skilled migration from Zimbabwe to the UK, exploring these migrants’ social capital sources/structures and content. In doing so we pay attention to routes of migration and how they shape migrants’ networking capabilities and patterns. We further take a Bourdieusian perspective and explore the intersection between social capital and cultural capital in the process of migrants’ negotiation of employment opportunities, giving closer attention to how the distinctive habitus associated with being highly skilled migrants from Zimbabwe shape migrants’ attitudes towards work. By exploring the interplay between external processes and internalised structures, we bring to the fore the multiple positioning of our participants, who we see not as simply depending on social networks, but as complex actors whose negotiation of employability in the UK is shaped by various factors including intersecting aspects of differentiation.     

Using occupational structure to measure employability with an application to the Brazilian labor market

We propose measuring individual employability as a weighted average across occupations of a worker’s predicted wage for each occupation. Weights are given by the individual occupational probability distribution. Under this measure, a worker is more employable than another if she has a greater chance to obtain a better paid occupation. After normalization, expected employability corresponds to the population correlation between occupational predicted wages and the chance to obtain employment in these occupations and serves as a measure of the allocative efficiency of labor market. We apply the methodology to Brazil and found that employability increased and became less unequally distributed from 2002 to 2011. We used a decomposition method to investigate the causes of these changes. Although average normalized employability is weakly positive, it has increased for the period, which suggests that there is room for efficiency gains in the allocation of workers to occupations in the Brazilian labor market.     

Doing good while doing business: Using financial viability to enhance employability for the disadvantaged

The employment social enterprise (ESE) model can provide an opportunity to create a financially viable business that helps individuals with employment barriers become integrated into the labor force. This research studied eight ESEs. Findings suggest that by applying private‐sector business principles to a workforce development programs, social enterprises can provide participants with meaningful and valuable work experience, while offsetting program costs. Analysis identified four promising practices that social entrepreneurs should adopt when setting up a new enterprise. Enterprises should (a) provide soft‐skill training and social services to participants; (b) operate at a size that allows for economies of scale in production and the provision of support services; (c) have few occupational skill requirements; and (d) hire supervisors with both industry knowledge and the capacity to support individuals with employment barriers.     

Planning to work for free: building the graduate employability of planners through unpaid work

In the context of an increasingly precarious and competitive graduate labour market, exposure to pre-graduation professional work experience is becoming an increasingly critical feature of graduate employability. Outside the creative professions the contours of this shift have received comparatively little empirical attention. This study provides evidence of increasing participation in unpaid work beyond the creative industries where it is well established as a common practice. This study examines the complex patterns of opportunities and challenges that are created for and by Australian urban planning students in gaining relevant exposure to professional work, with a particular emphasis on participation in unpaid work experience. Through the lens of employability and the voices of early career professionals, this study explores the complexity of decisions to engage in unpaid work and identifies the potential personal and professional implications of these decisions. Focussing on the ways decisions around unpaid work are shaped by a range of factors including labour market conditions and disciplinary norms the findings yield new knowledge of how unpaid work is practised and shaped as a principal means through which employment-related advantage and enhanced employability in education to employment transitions is sought by participants and the potential implications of this.     

Fostering employability among youth at-risk in a multi-cultural context: Insights from a pilot intervention program

Recent studies indicate that the transition from school to work is a critical juncture in shaping the professional future of youth at risk. This period may thus serve as a window of opportunities for fostering employability among these youths and, thereby, for promoting their social mobility. However, systematic evaluations of intervention programs aimed at fostering employability among at-risk adolescents—and especially in a multi-cultural context—are relatively few. The current study describes the strengths and weaknesses of a pilot, nation-wide, multi-cultural, holistic intervention program, aimed at fostering employability among at-risk adolescents before they actually enter the labor market. The program integrated efforts in three main domains: cultivating work-related skills, fostering personal and interpersonal skills, and providing a supportive personal and group climate. During the years 2011–2013, the program was operated in 40 localities in Israel and in three culturally different sectors: The Jewish-Israeli majority sector in the periphery, the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish minority sector, and the Israeli-Arab (Muslim) minority sector. The current study describes the results of an evaluation study that accompanied the implementation of the program in nine representative localities (117 adolescents, ages 14–19) during 2012.Overall, the functioning of the adolescents (as evaluated by the professional program instructors) improved in all examined work-related domains: personal-emotional functioning, work-related functioning, CV writing ability, and future education prospects. Regression analyses highlighted several factors as predictive of improvement in the different employability-related domains, most notably, having a working father, being active in group meetings, having no Internet connection at home, helping other participants in the program, and being involved in selecting the topics of a professional course. Importantly, this improvement was linked with the cultural affiliation of the participants, and participants from the different sectors indicated different factors as contributing to their advancement.The results of this evaluation study suggest that intervention programs for promoting employability among at-risk adolescents should integrate a holistic and flexible national model with adaptations by local steering committees, whose members are from the same cultural group as the participating adolescents. Such a strategy will enable each unique community to tailor the local operation of the program to the culturespecific needs of—and to maximally utilize the resources available for—the different sectors in a multi-cultural society, while establishing a dialogue and reciprocal learning in national forums. A dilemma has been identified, however, with respect to increasing the local involvement of the national committee to provide the local committees with different viewpoints.     

“一带一路”倡议视域中新疆高职院校的发展机遇与路径

本文立足于推进一带一路倡议的时代背景,以新疆所处的重要的地理位置、资源以及政策导向为立足点。以此为契机,分析研究新疆高职院校发展所面临的机遇,并相应提出具体的发展路径,促使新疆高职院校教育进入新的发展阶段。     

Attitudes and Vocational Information

This article addresses the dearth of African American women in high school U.S. history textbooks. The authors conducted a content analysis of the images in an African American history textbook and found that black women are underrepresented. Women are found in less than 15 percent of the images in the African American history text, while they make up nearly 30–50 percent of the images in two mainstream texts that the authors analyzed. The authors use Rachel Mattson's five heuristics to show how to incorporate images of black women in more meaningful ways in the curriculum: sourcing, inside-the-frame/outside-the-frame, intertextuality, framing historical questions, and using visual codes and conventions.