Trading Choices - Young people's suggestions for change

We asked participants if they had any ideas about what could help others to get into nontraditional trades-related courses, training, or employment. We also asked young people in nontraditional pathways about what might make them want to stay or leave the pathway. We see young people as ‘experts’ in both their own experiences and their understanding of peers in their age group. We were aware that their suggestions would emerge from their individual experiences and ways of seeing the world, and that they might not see the ‘problem’ or possible solutions in the same way that we might. Therefore this section simply describes the interviewees’ various suggestions before the final chapter presents our analysis of the location of the problem and potential policy directions.

We list the young people’s suggestions under each of our three main areas of interest, as set out in our second research question; that is, their suggestions for addressing the question of:

• how to change today’s young people and wider society (such as information/experience-seeking and sense-making strategies, gender (and other) identities, socialisation experiences, individualisation, etc.)
• how to change the current pathways framework (such as the school system, its connection with post-school opportunities, pathways information provision, etc.)
• how to change the trades themselves (such as information about the trades, training opportunities, work demands and culture, historical developments, etc.).
  

These categories hint at an oversimplified model of career decision making, suggesting that these are three separate domains forming stepped layers. This does not necessarily reflect the complex nature of today’s pathways environment nor emerging theories of career management. In fact we did not find it straightforward to match each suggestion to only one of the areas, since they were often relevant to all three.

Also, it is important to note that a number of young people did not see the current gender balance in the trades as a problem, and/or they did not see that there were any solutions. Once again, young people often see the world in terms of individual choice, sometimes with some awareness of socialisation, and this is reflected in the types of suggestions that they make. The underlying assumption was that young women and young men who choose not to enter trades dominated by the opposite gender do this because they aren’t interested in them. The following, very thoughtful response from one young woman illustrates this:

I’m very wary of questions like that [about what might help] in this level playing field fetish…[which assumes that] as long as you have a good attitude, there aren’t any barriers to anything, so if you fail it’s actually all your fault ’cos you weren’t chirpy enough. There’s heaps of factors that contribute to lots of things – a large part of that is societal, and subject positioning, and your access to physical and ideological resources. And then there will also be a part that is about your resilience and attitude. They are all really related to each other and can’t be separated out… People think ‘We know the odds, so we can beat them.’ What I’ve been thinking about lately has been about agency – so you might want to consider that a form of agency and empowerment to these massive, massive shitty barriers is to claim more agency than there actually is – so that can be a survival tactic. I know this happens in diasporic ethnic communities and it happens with coloured women’s bodies where people don’t care about your body and the only way to be empowered in this place is to claim responsibility, which also means that you claim responsibility for all the shitty things that happen so that you claim agency. So I wonder how much that might be a response to, ‘Well it doesn’t get me anywhere if I only view myself with the wider social picture, so my empowerment might be to say that it’s all up to me and believe that, so it’s how I will operate in the world’ because otherwise you are essentially disempowered. (Ex-trainee, female)

Qualifiers aside, the following are the suggestions made by young people in our interviews.

• Support young people so that they are confident to go into a nontraditional environment and can ignore any challenges they might face.
• Make sure young people know about all the options on offer in and beyond school (e.g., via advertising, careers planning, careers days and expos, employee visits, etc.).
• Make advertising more realistic so that people know what the work really entails and that the subjects are ‘real’ (e.g., use videos rather than posters, real female builders rather than models).[26]
• Give young people less gender-stereotyped upbringings, and support families to provide better information and support to their children.
• Produce more television shows with less gender stereotyping so that young people are more open-minded.
• Ensure young people have more access to open-minded role models who could help them plan their careers, as well as improving access to mentors from nontraditional pathways (for example, one female trainee suggested she would like to offer herself as a mentor or contact person for young women who might be interested in finding out more about her field).
  

• Make trades-related options more enjoyable and interesting, especially for the nontraditional gender (like doing jewellery making in hard technologies).
• Provide more school-based support for nontraditional pathways.
• Advertise and tell students that both genders attend nontraditional school subjects.
• Provide more encouragement to females who show aptitude in male-dominated subjects.
• Start careers planning in junior secondary school.
• Provide Gateway and STAR experiences to more young people.
• Provide more trades-related work experience opportunities to students of all ages.
• Provide site visits for young people who express an interest and/or ensure all companies have an open-door policy.

• Offer women-only courses.
• Help develop trades niche areas that are particularly of interest to women and support a more feminine approach to work and social relations.
• Make sure people hear more about the ‘new school’ trades culture.
• Provide more ‘tester’ courses that require less long-term/economic commitment at the outset (e.g., night classes, etc.).
• Provide co-ordinators or mediators to ‘place’ young trainees in workplaces rather than having a direct recruitment link between young people and employers.
• Provide better financial incentives to trainees and employees, including better student and apprenticeship wages.
• Provide better financial incentives to employers so that apprentices cost them less money, for example better subsidise block courses.
• Ensure that trades-related career pathways and progression/promotion is possible and visible, and continue to support career planning throughout.
• Ensure apprenticeships and employment are readily available to young women.
• Ensure employers and managers support women and help to create a culture that is equally supportive.
• Establish better health and safety conditions that are adhered to by all.

 
These suggestions from young people provide a backdrop to the next chapter, which draws together and comments on the project’s findings, and makes some suggestions for the way forward. Our future-focused orientation leads us to acknowledge and maximise interconnections and overlaps between these three domains.