Invisibility, perceptions and image: Mapping the career choice landscape

Abstract

The education and training market, particularly for 16 year olds, is highly competitive and an understanding of how young people make decisions about careers and how that affects and interacts with choice of further and higher education pathways is a crucially important issue. The complexity of the decision-making process has been largely under-estimated in favour of an oversimplification of the economically rational view of choice. However, young people make choices which have an impact on the relationship between labour supply and demand and, therefore, an insight into how young people make choices is fundamental to the operation of both post-compulsory education and training markets and the labour market. The models presented in this paper attempt to provide a broad picture of some of the complex perspectives and processes at work in career choice and the link between perceptions of careers and post-compulsory education and training pathways – career ‘invisibility’ and the range of complex images which influence young people's perceptions of adult world jobs; the development of a model of the careers environment in terms of a careers choice landscape; and the implications of these perspectives for careers education and guidance. © 1999, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.