Archive for April, 2011
Social mobility needs more than paid internships
Posted by Vanessa Freeman in Career success, Classic theories, Equality, Inheritance, Relationships, Socio-economic factors on 13 April 2011
The UK Government recently released Opening Doors, Breaking Barriers: A Strategy for Social Mobility.
The report quotes some depressing statistics about social mobility in the UK.
- Only one in five young people from the poorest families achieve five good GCSEs, including English and maths, compared with three quarters from the richest families.
- 25% of children from poor backgrounds fail to meet the expected attainment level at the end of primary school, compared to 3% from affluent backgrounds.
- Almost one in five children receive free school meals, yet this group accounts for fewer than one in a hundred Oxbridge students.
- Only a quarter of boys from working-class backgrounds get middle-class (professional or managerial) jobs.
- Just one in nine of those with parents from low income backgrounds reach the top income quartile, whereas almost half of those with parents in the top income quartile stay there.
- Only 7% of the population attend independent schools, but the privately educated account for more than half of the top level of most professions, including 70% of high court judges, 54% of top journalists and 54% of chief executive officers of FTSE 100 companies.
- The influence of parental income on the income of children in Britain is among the strongest in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. Parental income has over one and a half times the impact on male incomes in Britain compared with Canada, Germany and Sweden.
What does success mean to you?
Posted by David Winter in Career satisfaction, Career success, Work-life balance on 5 April 2011
In this post, I’m doggedly continuing my pursuit to explore the idea of career success.
We started with a simple binary distinction: objective success versus subjective success. We realised that this was somewhat crude and that a bit more subtlety might be useful.
In the previous post, we added an extra dimension about how you might measure success (self-referent versus other-referent comparison).
Now it’s time to take things multidimensional!
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