Life-Patterns, Career Outcomes and Adult Choices

This report forms part of a larger investigation of 14 countries which attempts to describe young people's transition to work has changed during the 1990s. This background report describes the general context of youth transitions and discusses some key policy concerns.

Patterns of success and failure in the transition from school to work in Australia, 2001

A significant number of Australian school leavers, 60 per cent, do not enrol in either a university or TAFE course when they leave school. Instead, they make alternative choices such as seeking employment or going into an apprenticeship or traineeship. In this report, the pathways of students are followed during the seven years after school completion. The analysis is based on a sample of Year 10 students in the late 1980s. It measures their post-school education and training and employment experiences. In addition, a second group of students from the mid-1990s were examined in their transition experiences over three years after school-completion. The report aims to identify who makes a successful transition into full-time employment and those who do not. This report, published by the Australian Council for Education Research (ACER), is part of the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY) research program.

Contrasting employment, education, and training developments occurred during the 1980s in Britain and Australia. High school completion rates in Great Britain and Australia have been low in comparison to the United States, but the work pattern changed when the market for unskilled youth labor collapsed in the 1980s. Australia increased proportions of completers; Great Britain focused on employer-based training. Australian government officials withdrew job creation and employment subsidies and supported curriculum reform through policy coordination between education and labor departments. An increase in high school completers resulted. In Great Britain, an employment-based solution, the Youth Training Scheme, was favored whereas school reform was not, resulting in a low increase of school completion. The two countries differed in government coordination: British agencies followed a divergent path, whereas Australia's coordinated approach increased education participation rates. U...

2005

Journal of Youth Studies, 2017

Young people's transition from education into the labour market are diverse: sometimes direct from school to work or inactivity, sometimes characterised by stop-starts and combinations of different activities. This paper explores the association between transition pathways of Australian youth and their outcomes, in terms of earnings, perceptions of employment opportunities and debt. It builds on analysis by Fry and Boulton [2013. Prevalence of Transition Pathways in Australia. Canberra: Productivity Commission Staff Working Paper] who identified five pathways most typically taken by 15-24 year old Australians over a 10 year period, including quasi linear transitions from education to work with and without study, combinations of work and study, multiple churning between labour market statuses, and transitions into prolonged periods of inactivity. The present study adds four more years of panel data that have since become available, and compares the labour market outcomes of the different pathways at age 29-38. Earnings and employment perception converged over time, but debt did not. Socio-demographics were most strongly associated with outcomes, but earnings were also greater for churners and for young people in extended education increasingly combined with work. Transitions that combined learning and work seemingly strategically or 'flexibly' appeared most rewarding in the medium term, although neither compensated for socioeconomic difference.

2018

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The early part of the twenty-first century has been characterised by a global economic boom, financial crisis and ongoing high rates of youth unemployment/ underemployment. In Australia, despite overall growth in employment, the labour underutilisation rate of young people aged between 15 and 24 years increased from 20% in 2008, just prior to the Global Financial Crisis, to 28% in 2014. Although high rates of both unemployment and underemployment persisted long after the crisis passed, the plight of young Australians has received little attention. Many young people engage in part-time employment whilst attending secondary school and gain some work experience before completing school, however, the value of this type of work experience is questionable. For those who leave school before completing Year 12, the employment outcomes are particularly dire with less than half being in paid employment. In this paper, we examine the increasingly complex pathways between education and employment in Australia. We track three cohorts of 15/16 years olds for four years using panel data collected between 2001 and 2012 by the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) project. Our findings show that the effect of engagement in paid work whilst at school varies according to the number of hours worked. Furthermore, hours of paid work whilst at school predict post-school levels of engagement in paid work and/or study.

Journal of Education and Work, 2010

Not having clear pathways, or the social means and personal capacities to make a productive transition from schooling can inhibit young people"s participation in social and economic life thereafter. This paper advances an analysis of how policy documents associated with senior schooling from across Australian states address the needs of students who are most at risk of not securing productive transitions. The review identifies that many of the goals emphasised the autonomy of students in taking control of their own transitions. However, such individualistic views downplay the importance of the mediating role that access to cultural, social and economic capital is likely to play in the negotiations involved in making a productive transition. Thus, the needs of 'at-risk' students who may have limited access to the forms of capital offering the best support for these negotiations are not well acknowledged in the policies.

Education and work are two essential parts of young people’s lives. Currently, the relationship between education and work in the youth policy field is predominantly discussed from the perspective of a narrow economic discourse of education to work transitions. This is despite the fact that this narrow paradigm of examining youth transition from school to work which was prevalent in the 1980s and early 1990s has been consistently problematised and re-worked in the past few decades. Drawing on longitudinal data collected from a cohort of Australian young adults reporting their self-assessment of and their reflections on the connection between their study and work, this paper provides new empirical evidence in support of some of the arguments that have emerged within the field of youth studies regarding transition. Grounded in a broader conceptualisation of transition and informed by theories of youth citizenship, this paper highlights the complexities involved in young people’s navigation of education and work, and proposes the metaphor of a double helix which considers education and work as two interconnected venues through which recognition and meaning are achieved by young people in a postmodern society

2001

Drawing on data from the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth, this paper examines the main pathways by which young Australians move from school to work. It identifies which young people take which pathways, discusses the mapping of pathways to work using longitudinal data, and outlines some policy challenges.