I’m all for clusters

Us humans like to put other humans into boxes – it’s a group thing.

Most of the time, it’s something I fight against – humans are complex, dynamic, and multifaceted and it’s not appropriate to just pop us into a box and expect us to stay there. Which is especially true when it comes to careers; the days of one linear career in one static industry are over (and they never even existed for the majority of people who couldn’t work full time), and we expect people to be able to shift careers and industries as and when they need to respond to their own life changes, and changes in the labour market.

But groups, boxes, even clusters can be helpful when you’re on the outside looking in, and trying to make sense of a big, complex, and fast-moving beast like the labour market.

Which is why I’m all for clusters.

Grouping career paths together makes it easier for us to understand them and their commonalities. Rather than trying to comprehend and compare thousands of disparate careers, we can group them into themes and learn about them at a higher level, before delving deeper with our career exploration.

In grouping careers into themes, it also makes it easier for us to compare their elements with what we know about ourselves, to see where we might best fit.

But, there are lots of ways to create categorisations. Take animals, for example. When we think about how we classify animals, most of us think of Linneaus’s Kingdom >> Class >> Order >> Species taxonomy. This groups living things based on their biological relation to other living things.

But this is just one way you could categorise animals – you could also group them by geographical location, so that all living things they exist within the same arbitrary lines on a map belong to the same group, even if they bare no resemblance to each other. Or you could group them by size, so that all the trees which grow above a certain height are grouped together, even if they grow on opposite sides of the world.

There are dangers in categorical thinking. In grouping things together without critically reflecting on the structure chosen, we may cling to inaccurate or unhelpful information, and disregard more useful information that falls outside of the existing method of categorisation.

Which brings me to how we currently categorise careers.

The major classification systems group jobs together based on industry. The Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations, for example, begins with major groups based around tasks and skill levels, then breaks them down into related industries. The O-NET Standard Occupational Classification System used by much of the world also breaks careers down into 23 groups which are then aligned with industries.

By themselves, these systems are a good base to work from, although they categorise jobs based on a static ‘snapshot’ of a job, and aren’t directly translatable into career paths, so, for example, at the top level managers are separated from administration even though many people in administration later move into roles in management.

Our ‘official’ occupational classification systems exist to help us make decisions about a specific job, at a specific time. For example, we need to know how much Eleanor should be paid as an Operating Theatre Technician (311214), so we can use her occupational classification to find the correct award (Health Professionals and Support Services Award MA000027).

But that classification system doesn’t tell us anything about the career Eleanor has had so far, which has led to her becoming an Operating Theatre Technician, and it also doesn’t tell us anything about where her career may go. She shares the same classification as other medical technicians, such as pharmacy technicians, as well as agricultural technicians, meat inspectors, and hydrographers, and while these careers all share some common skills, they vary widely when it comes to work environment and common tasks.

We also use a different classification system within the post-school education space. Courses are advertised in ‘Study Areas’ which correspond with major industries, such as healthcare, engineering, or commerce. Qualifications are often tied in as requirements for specific job roles, and similar qualifications in different industries are not directly transferrable – for example, a plumber undergoes a similar training program to an electrician, but they cannot work as an accredited electrician with their plumbing qualification.

As young people generally choose a ‘study area’ if they want to continue with their education post secondary school, this tends to be how they classify careers. This means they see all careers within the health space as related, even if they are vastly different, for example, a quick search in Course Seeker for health degrees brings up courses in public health, veterinary science, physiotherapy, and medicine.

If we want to make it possible for young people to begin a career based on accurate information, we need to rethink how we categorise career paths.