Effective Career Guidance - Career Guide

included: how the guidance process inevitably became a matter of a adjusting the indi-
vidual to opportunities available; how guidance should be centred around an individual’s
immediate problems; and how careers services should concentrate on developing a good
information service and more on placement and follow-up. The primary role of practitioners,
according to Roberts, was to service the needs of the labour market, rather than to educate,
facilitate, or indeed anything else implicated by other theories (Roberts, 1977).
Roberts’ critique of developmental theories and new model of occupational allocation was
received with caution and scepticism by the guidance community in the UK. A strident critic
of Roberts’ early ideas was Peter Daws. He criticised both Roberts’ (1977) opportunity
structure model and his views about the limited effects of careers guidance as both con-
servative (Daws, 1977) and fatalistic (Daws, 1992). In response, he promoted the value of
careers education programmes as being capable of encouraging social change by support-
ing and educating the individual (Daws, 1977).
Far from changing his ideas as a result of these criticisms, Roberts revised and expanded
his determinants of occupational allocation as a result of research into comparative labour
markets (buoyant compared with depressed) in the UK. He emphasised (Roberts, 1984) the
importance of local labour markets on job seeking for young people, finding that:
distance to work: a key issue because the average was three miles because of the costs
of travel;
qualifications:continued to be important, since even low exam grades made a difference
in finding work;
informal contacts:crucial, since large firms operated as internal labour markets for young
people;
ethnicity:race operated as multi-dimensional disadvantage (i.e. housing, education and
employment);
gender: identified as a significant inhibiting factor because, since the aspirations of girls
and women were found to be low and short term;
cyclical and structural factors:operating within the economy resulted in a demand for
smaller labour forces in which higher skill levels were required. In these circumstances,
young people were found to be particularly vulnerable.
Further research into comparative labour markets in the UK and Germany revealed striking
similarities in the labour market constraints operating upon young people in these different
European countries. Bynner and Roberts (1991) assessed the importance of a country’s
education and training system for its economic prosperity. Key findings included, first, that
broadly similar routes to employment in the two countries were found to exist (career trajec-
tories); second, that for each career trajectory, these routes originated in education, family
and background.