CAREER DEVELOPMENT LEARNING – DOES GENDER IMPACT RESULTS?

Abstract

Career development learning (CDL) can help students understand their future workplace, including; employment options, how to prepare for finding a job and the keys features of relevant industries. CDL can mean students get to a job that suits them faster, and more often, and it can result in students feeling more satisfied with their careers. CDL also helps prepare students for other experiences like Internships or Industry project units. Using a self-perceived employability questionnaire (Rothwell & Arnold, 2007) we assessed how students perceived internal and external aspects of their employability before and after a 12 weeks class (N = 296). One dimension of significance was the change in confidence in their own skills. While initial analyses did not reveal any changes in confidence over the course of the subject, ad hoc analyses revealed that this was because male and female students had significantly different responses. Confidence is a particularly important factor in employability (Jackson et al., 2019). I will discuss the way in which students experience the confidence in skills aspects of this CDL class differently based on gender. I will focus on the quantitative responses and add depth to the finding by also discussing the qualitative results. REFERENCES Jackson, D., Fleming, J., & Rowe, A. (2019). Enabling the Transfer of Skills and Knowledge across Classroom and Work Contexts. Vocations and Learning, 12(3), 459–478. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12186-019-09224-13 Rothwell, A., & Arnold, J. (2007). Self-perceived employability: Development and validation of a scale. Personnel Review, 36(1), 23–41. https://doi.org/10.1108/00483480710716704