Editorial

Citation

Gibb, S. (2003), "Editorial", Career Development International, Vol. 8 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/cdi.2003.13708aaa.001

Editorial

A recent survey (O'Hara, 2002) of 25 to 70-year-olds found that just 12 per cent of the population were doing their "dream jobs". Dream jobs (see Table I) involve a simpler life, away from the vicissitudes of change and restructuring, and the "greasy pole" to success. Almost two-thirds of people would be willing to train from scratch, but most feel they do not have the time to do that. They fear failure and lack confidence. If these obstacles, and others, could be removed then more people may do something to reach for that dream job. Among the "nightmare jobs" (see Table II) there are the staples of office and factory work, and many public sector jobs.

Such surveys may be seen to reflect little more than unrealistic and uninformed fantasies, of either the good or the bad, based on popular culture representations. But they also provide a window onto a worrying picture. People are better educated and more affluent than ever before; but only a fraction are in jobs they really want to do. Is this a criticism of the careers industry, the institutions and professionals who are meant to best match people with opportunities? Or is it a criticism of organisations in some major employment sectors, which fail to provide an attractive image, and employment package, for their staff? Or is it a criticism of all the people who settle for what they have instead of doing something about it?

Academic analysis of these areas of debate is what Career Development International aims to provide. In this issue, some excellent papers offer diverse examples of what that can involve. In Chang's research, the effects of gender, in the form of occupational sex segregation, has an impact on mobility between male-dominated and female-dominated occupations. As well as the glass ceiling there is also a "revolving door". She seeks to explore this using concepts from social psychology, to explain why women move from male-dominated to female-dominated occupations. Bozionelos seeks to explain how the technique of causal path modelling, a technique for describing and depicting relations within a set of variables, can be used in careers research; highlighting how more sophisticated quantitative approaches can help to make sense of the increasing amounts of data available about careers. Backhaus addresses the classical issue of person-organization fit, a field of research which has had much to say in the past about why people might perceive some jobs to be "dreams" and some are "nightmares"; it is not the job, it is the organisation which is a dream or a nightmare. She seeks to extend this field of analysis by approaching it from the job-seekers point of view, and how important "fitting in" is to them. Finally, Tymon addresses two newer trends, social capital and knowledge work. He seeks to conceptualise how these contemporary trends might be inter-related for future career success.

Stephen GibbEditor

ReferenceO'Hara, M. (2002), "Faith, hope and a job with charity", Guardian, 14 September.