Careers, Employment and Job Market Trends

Every employer needs the same kinds of job

Business is not only a subject about companies. It is also a map of the jobs that exist inside them, and that map is far wider than most people expect. Almost every organisation of any size needs somebody to look after the money, somebody to work out who the customers are and how to reach them, somebody to make the product or deliver the service, somebody to look after the people who work there, and somebody to deal with the customers directly. Those jobs exist in a factory, in a hospital, in a school, in a bank and in a charity. That is the single most useful thing to understand about business careers: the function travels. A person who has learned to keep accounts can keep accounts in almost any organisation, which means the decision about what kind of work to do is a separate decision from the one about where to do it, and the two do not have to be made at the same time. This module covers that landscape, where to go for guidance that costs nothing and has nothing to sell you, and how the world of work is changing in Wales, in the rest of the United Kingdom and beyond. It does not tell you what to choose. Nobody can do that from a screen.

Five words for the landscape

Learn these before you use them. They are the words that turn a vague idea about jobs into something you can reason with.

What each one actually involves

Who would you go to?

Somebody in Wales is in Year 11 and wants free, impartial help deciding between an apprenticeship and staying in full-time education. Which service is designed for exactly that?

• Careers Wales
• The National Careers Service
• UCAS
• The human resources team of a local employer

The same job in two places

One useful way to see the landscape is to hold the job still and change the employer instead. Here is the same finance role in two organisations that could hardly be less alike.

Research a career in this order

Five things to do when a kind of work interests you. Put them into the order that saves the most wasted effort.

• Work out which business function the job actually sits in
• Find out what somebody in that job really does in a normal week
• Check which routes lead into it, and how long each one takes
• Look at how demand for that kind of work has been changing
• Talk the whole thing through with somebody impartial before deciding

What a job advert really tells you

A job advert is a description of what one employer needs. Which THREE things can you reliably learn by reading one carefully?

• Which business function the role sits in
• Which skills that employer treats as essential and which as merely desirable
• What qualifications or experience the employer expects you to arrive with
• Whether the people who already work there are happy
• Whether the role will still exist in ten years

A trend is not an instruction

The direction in which the job market has been moving is worth knowing, and it is not the same thing as a prediction about any one person. Three directions are widely reported and not seriously disputed. More roles now expect a level of comfort with digital tools, including roles that were once entirely paper based. An ageing population across the United Kingdom is raising demand for health and care work. Automation keeps moving routine, repeatable tasks away from people and towards machines, which changes what the remaining human part of a job consists of. Now notice what none of that tells you. It does not tell you that a particular job will disappear, because a trend describes a whole market and not one employer in one town. It does not tell you what to study, because a direction of travel says nothing about what you are good at or what you would be willing to spend years doing. And it does not come with a date attached. The useful response to a trend is to ask which of your skills would still be worth something if it carried on, rather than to pick a job off a list of the ones currently growing. One more thing: anybody who hands you a figure for how many jobs will exist in a given year is guessing, however confidently the figure is printed.

Complete the careers words

One of the areas of work that every organisation needs, such as finance or marketing, is called _____. Charities, social enterprises and voluntary organisations together make up _____. Something you can do that is useful across many different jobs rather than in only one is _____. Advice from somebody who has nothing to gain from your decision is _____.

A cafe in a small town

Picture a cafe in a small town that is run as a social enterprise. It sells coffee and food like any other cafe, but any surplus it makes goes back into training young people who have found it hard to get a first job. Now look at who works there. Somebody keeps the accounts, because a social enterprise has to balance its books exactly as a company does, and has to be able to show funders where every amount went. Somebody decides what goes on the menu and how the cafe reaches the people in the town, which is marketing whether or not anybody calls it that. Somebody orders the stock, plans the shifts and keeps the kitchen up to standard, which is operations. Somebody recruits the trainees, arranges their training and deals with it when something goes wrong, which is human resources. And everybody behind the counter is doing customer service. Five kinds of work, one small cafe. Not one of those jobs would stop being that job if the person doing it moved to a supermarket, a hospital or a bank, and that is the point worth carrying out of this module.

Find the sentence that goes too far

Five sentences from a talk about work in the local area. Tap the ONE that turns a direction of travel into a rule for an individual.

• Demand for health and care work has been rising across the United Kingdom as the population ages.
• Many roles that once involved no computer work at all now expect a basic level of digital confidence.
• Machines have taken over a good deal of routine, repeatable work in warehouses and in offices.
• Several employers in the area have said they find technical roles hard to fill.
• Anybody choosing a career now should therefore avoid office work, because those jobs are all going to disappear.

Say what a trend does and does not mean

Choose the option in each gap that states a trend honestly, without either ignoring it or over-reading it.

Careers landscape run

Five quick questions on the landscape. Three lives.

Helping a friend decide

A friend in Wales has finished Year 11 and is interested in working in business, but has no idea which part of it. They are weighing up an apprenticeship with a local employer, a college course, and applying to university in two years. They have asked what you think. Work through three decisions.

• What is the most useful first question to ask them?
• They say they like organising things and keeping track of detail, but they have never heard the word operations. What now?
• They ask who they ought to talk to before deciding anything.

Explain the landscape

A younger pupil has told you they want to work in business, but they think that means being the boss of a company. Write a reply explaining what business careers actually look like and how they could find out more. Do not tell them what to choose.

• Explain what a business function is, and name at least three of them
• Explain why the same function turns up in a factory, a hospital and a charity
• Mention the third sector and say what makes it different from a private business
• Name where in Wales they could get free, impartial guidance, and say why impartial matters
• Say one thing a job market trend can tell them and one thing it cannot