I’ve been analysing the data from the first live application of my Work Talk Framework. It’s part of an evaluation I’m carrying out for SAND College, a post-16 setting for young people with SEND down the road from me in Worthing.
SAND College has an enterprise focus, and trainees engage in a wide range of work encounters during their courses. So as part of the evaluation, I wanted to capture how young people talk about the kinds of work they want to do – and how these conversations change over the year-long period of the evaluation.
But: I wanted the evaluation to explore how young people talk about the features of work they like – not the jobs they want. It’s part of my drive to move towards career conversations that aren’t about jobs.
This initial analysis suggests the trainees at SAND College are drawn to work in which they can:
- earn good money
- work in a team with other people
- have good work-life balance
- follow instructions
- be creative
The results are based on a year-long wiki survey – or what we called a ‘would you rather?’ quiz, in which trainees used their phones to vote on an open-ended number of random pairwise contests between different work attributes from the Work Attribute Framework. More detail on that in other blogs like this one and this one.
The SAND College 2022-23 impact evaluation will be coming out later this year.