More and more young people are prepared to change careers. Unlike their baby boomer parents, members of Generation Y tend to be open to the idea of following more than one career path in their working life. As many as two-thirds of them want to change career, according to surveys, with almost half saying they are looking for something which gives them more job satisfaction.
Anticipating they will live longer than their parents, and not expecting to draw their pension until well into old age, is also influencing the thinking of this group. Despite fears of financial insecurity and of making the wrong decision, the 18- to 34-year-old age group shows an unprecedented willingness to switch careers, research by the London School of Business and Finance suggests (pdf).
The school’s rector, Prof Maurits van Rooijen, was involved a study last year of 1,000 working-age adults who were quizzed about how happy they were with their current career, whether they would switch and what was holding them back. He says: “Obviously I think young adults are more interested in changing careers than at a later age – they are more interested in finding out if they are in the right workplace. But I think society is also changing: the old days of a very large employer employing people who would move up the pyramid of career progression is now an out-of-date concept, full stop.”
Today’s young professionals, van Rooijen says, can expect to make up to five career changes in their working lives. “The prediction is that you will have a basket of careers. Maybe three or five major career changes in a lifetime – not just moving sectors, but a whole new type of work.”
Andy Winfield is a typical Generation Y career changer. The 25-year-old, who gave up his job as a physics teacher a year ago to retrain as a children and family social worker, admits he was scared of switching and was anxious about money. He was keen to move into social work because he wanted to have more influence to change children’s lives.
“Physics to social work is quite a leap,” says Winfield. “But when I went into teaching, I didn’t realise just how much a lot of the kids had going on at home behind the scenes.” As a social worker, he adds, he could have a greater influence on that.
He decided to join the two-year social work leadership development programme, Frontline, precisely because it took away financial worry. There is a bursary worth between £16,000 and £19,000 in the first year and Winfield is being paid a professional social work salary of around £30,000 in year two. He spent his first year in on-the-job training with a south London council where he completed his professional social work qualification and was supported by a consultant social worker. He is spending the second 12 months working as a newly-qualified social worker in his host authority while he also completes a master’s qualification with access to a professional coach.
Some four in 10 recruits to Frontline in its first two years were career changers. Most came from careers in teaching, or jobs in the voluntary sector or the wider social services. Winfield says: “I wanted to do social work in depth and, as I had already started earning, I didn’t want to go back to being a full-time student. I think being worried about failure was in the back of my mind as I had only just begun to settle into teaching, but I focused on the long term – that, long-term, social work is right for me.”
Sharing his learning surrounded by other career changers has also helped Winfield. “It made me feel comfortable to meet other people in similar situations to me. That was reassuring and quite nice.”
Frontline’s attraction manager, John Batteson, says career changers bring a different perspective to social work than that of new graduates. “They have personal skills they have learned in their previous careers and there is also their life experience,” he says, adding that their experiences can prepare them for the programme.
Batteson thinks the bursary and social work salary in year two make a bigger difference to career changers as, unlike most new graduates, they may well have financial and family commitments. These are factors that career changers take into account when deciding to apply to the programme, he says.
Placements with host local authorities are available across London and the south-east of England, the West Midlands, north-west and north-east. The first Frontline cohort is just about to graduate and by 2020 it is expected that there will be 1,000 alumni. These high-achieving trainees have been developed to become the social work leaders and policy-makers of tomorrow.
Applications for the 2017 Frontline cohort open in September, with 300 places on offer.
Content on this page is paid for and produced to a brief agreed by Frontline
