Career clusters and vague roles

The world of work has become much more complex. The world today is full of 'vague roles', where we have gone from structured professions where we have a pretty clear idea about what people do in those careers, to something that is a lot more amorphous and hard to define (Lengelle, 2019). In the 1970s, The Netherlands did some research and found there were around 5000 defined roles and few vague roles (Lengelle, 2019; Young, 2019). However, if we roll the clock forward to 2012, "the Central Bureau of Statistics in the Netherlands[ repeated that research, and ...] What they found was that there were only about 1,000 of those definable professions[ left: ...] like dentist, English teacher, nurse, those type of things; and - if you can believe it - 23,000 of those vague roles (Lengelle, 2019; Young, 2019).

In 2018, the consultancy firm AlphaBeta produced a report For Tertiary Education Commission - aka TEC - to help guide departmental policy. The research team analysed over a million New Zealand job ads and identified six career clusters, as follows (AlphaBeta, 2018):

1. Inventors "have technology and business skills, alongside creativity and problem solving"
2. Organisers have "service-oriented and administrative skills"
3. Healers "have caregiving expertise and some administrative and corporate skills"
4. Operators have "manual skills, good communication skills and a positive attitude"
5. Engagers "have sales skills combined with deep interpersonal skills"
6. Crafters have "sophisticated industrial skills and organisational skills" (AlphaBeta, 2018, p. 5; Betts, 2024, p. 18).

The result of this is that employers are unwise to seek narrow, overly-defined skills to fit a candidate to a particular job. Instead we should hire on broader transferrable, interdisciplinary skills, and assume, as the report found, that training for one job has portability to another 12 (AlphaBeta, 2018, p. 5). 

This should help employers find fewer skill gaps. It may also encourage recruiters and employers to write more accurate job descriptions. 

In addition, our systems may put a lot of pressure on school leavers to pick their career, rather than to begin experimenting. Other actions that young people can take are: networking, internships or job shadowing, working part-time, and trying many roles for potential fit (Betts, 2024). 

It all sounds so easy. 

Sam

References:

AlphaBeta. (2018). Hidden Links, New Opportunities: How big data and job clusters can improve the 1.2 million job matches in NZ each year [report]. https://www.tec.govt.nz/assets/Reports/49efa6f071/Hidden-Links-New-Opportunities-Report.pdf

Betts, R. (2024, August 31). Just the Job. New Zealand Listener, 34, 16-21.

Lengelle, R. (2019). Scared, Lost or Confused? Develop Your Warm Inner Compass through Career Writing [webinar]. CERIC. https://ceric.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Reinekke-Lengelle-Presentation-CERIC-Webinar-Career-Writing-2019.pdf

Young, S. (2019, October 14). The growth in vague roles. https://www.samyoung.co.nz/2019/10/the-growth-in-vague-roles.html