Youth and Youth Activities
Psychological needs change with age, and these changes affect our attitudes toward work, toward living, and toward understanding. Early youth is the stage in which the individual straddles adolescence and maturity. It is a stage in which traditions are created within a few weeks and lost just as quickly.
Desire for Change
Youth is aware of change and welcomes it. Adolescence, with all its random trial and error toward adjustment, has given way (with some exceptions) to better-planned behavior. The man just out of college, entering a career in technological development, sales, or manage-
. menl, seizes every opportunity to get ahead and generally has the stamina to take the competition. The young woman may want to earn her own living before settling down to family responsibilities, or to get an early start on a well-adjusted life-style that mayor may not include marriage. Both people want and expect challenge, for this is the path to experience and recognition. This attitude contrasts with that of old age, in which for most people change is unwelcome and often resisted. The dream of better days ahead is over, and the world is narrowing. Competition is shunned because few have the stamina to keep up the pace. Boredom begins to tal:e over as time becomes more difficult to fill.
Problems of Youth
The problems of youth are numerous and varied. However in contrast with those of adolescence. the problems facing youth are better defined. The college student in his or her graduating year must decide whether to take a job or to continue with formal education. When the young man begins working, he must 'somehow adjust his need to get started early with his desire to raise a family at a time when he can least afford it financially. Particularly for the young woman, the best years biologically for having children come at about the same time that both husband and wife have to work in order to establish a home of their own. Youth sometimes spends money before learning how to make it.
On the job youth must look for an opportunity where anticipations can be realized and enthusiasms rewarded. One may not succeed at first. But youth has one big advantage: Disappointments are soon overcome by hopes for a better future. Dissatisfaction with one job may be remedied by taking another. The opportunities for youth in our changing, expanding economy 'build up attitudes of both confidence and defiance-just the reverse of the feelings of the older person. A youth at the worker level, regardless of his limitations in education, is optimistic about the future. His physical strength and vitality to some degree make up for his lack of training and experience. Desires that are not readily fulfilled today may be tomorrow. The more highly educated youth shares in this optimism, but with a greater sense of reality. Understanding the problem lessens that satisfying feeling of confidence in the future. This caution is characteristic of the college sophomore, who begins to sort out emotional and intellectual problems with some sophistication.
Search for Opportunity
Moving up socially and economically is a problem which the sophistlcated student plans for. Recent research emphasizes that upward mobility depends not only on training and aspiration but also on opportunity. Workers often feel that pull and luck spell advancement. In contrast, for the more thoughtful individual, getting ahead is a game in which education, formal or otherwise, is essential for understanding how opportunity can often be made. There is some tendency for people to advance during their careers. but for most people the advancement is not very far. The skilled industrial worker finds himself basically a commodity, the demands for which fluctuate with the economy and with technological change, Above the skilled level the individual is in many respects more on his own,
Do opportunity and income increase with age? Economists answer both "yes" and "no," In managerial jobs and in the professions earnir:gs do increase with age. This is not true in the lowest-paid manual jobs. For such work, a man reaches his peak in his early twenties; after that he goes downhill. .
In early childhood career thinking involves a fantasy stage in which interests are generally unrelated to potential capacities and change rapidly. The child wants to be a fireman, doctor, teacher, or astronaut without considering how and why. Following this period, in early adolescence, comes the stage of tentative choices. Here there is some vague relationship between interests and vocational preferences, but career planning is little more than daydreaming. In the late teens comes a third stage of more realistic planning, when school or work alternatives are forced on the person.
Not all people have a choice in selecting their careers or jobs. Opportunity, economic responsibilities, intelligence, and various other circumstances enter in. One person may have to quit school early because of a family problem. Another may stay in school longer only because work opportunities may not be available. And one reason students with some types of technical training (e.g., computer programming) never finish their formal education is that their services may be in such demand that they cannot turn down an uffer. The same is true of many jobs related to the health field.
Change
Technology is spreading irresistibly and bringing with it new problems. For some persons, automation expands the world of career choice; for others, it closes opportunity .. Change, along with accommodation or resistance to it, is bringing about the retraining of the worker to give him new skills and is causing the manager to wonder how he can best use the computer in decision making. Unskilled jobs are becoming a smaller and smaller fraction of all jobs, making for some less than a bright future.
It may be well to remember that throughout a lifetime a person may have several careers. The man who is twenty years old may expect to make at least six job changes during his working life and to retire earlie.r than his father did. Choosing an occupatic1n ranks second in importance only to the selection of a mate in marriage. How and where a person will spend even his or her nonworking hours is influenced by such choice. Most important, occupational chokes must be made carefully because in many cases there is no going back. True, some people change their occupations, sometimes for the better. However, for most people in our culture, the general area of vocational choices lasts for a lifetime, although specific; jobs may be changed several times.
From many studies on the relationship between fathers' and sons' occupations come several conclusions. First, college students' stated choices tend to coincide with the occupations of their fathers more often than would be expected by statistical chance. Serond, the greater the father's income, the more likely the student is to gravitate toward a money-making career. The mo:e money currently earned by
the father, the more the student expects to be earning in the future. Third, sons tend to enter and remain in occupations similar to those of their fathers. Fourth, when occupations of fathers and sons are compared according to level (e.g., corporate vice-president or foreman), sons whose fathers are at very high levels tend to enter lower occupations, and those whose fathers are at lower levels tend to enter higher' occupations. Mothers influence daughters in career planning, just as fathers influence their sons.
Abilities and Choices
There is a rough correspondence between an individual's intelligence and the intellectual requirements of the occupation he pr;efers. It is very difficult, of course, to get an exact measure showing the relationship between interest and actual ability. However, there is much evidence showing a relationship between interest and perceived ability. The activities which are most highly preferred are those in which the person believes himself or herself to possess the greatest ability. This is certainly a type of finding useful to the student in trusting (to some extent!) self-perception.
Many data from test scores and from practical situations support the position that verbal and quantitative scores are related to choice of work. Persons with abilities related to an occupation tend to choose that occupation. One follow-up study of over two thousand high school students found that those who entered the mechanical, electric, and building trade5 had their highest scores in mechanical reasoning. Those who succeeded as clerks had superior knowledge of grammar and spelling.
One psychologist, who has been following thousands of students in their career development, has come up with the following practical theory about vocational development: "The process of vocational development is essentially that of developing and implementing a self concept: It is a compromise process [ITALICS ADDED] in which the self concept is a product of the interaction of inherited aptitudes, neural and endocrine makeup, opportunity to play various roles, and evaluations of the extent to which the results of role playing meet with the approval of superiors and fellows."
