The Aspirants : How faith is built in emerging occupations

Abstract: Anticipating future demands in skills and workforce development has been a longstanding practice and challenge for governments and policy-makers. While such developments are examined closely at the national and regional levels, an even more pressing issue is to advance our understanding of how people who take on jobs in new and emerging fields embark on and persist in their occupational pathways. A striking feature of these occupations is their weakly defined and unstable nature. How do individuals traverse career trajectories with these characteristics? What drives and enables them to take the road less travelled? To address such questions, this research project set off from a distinctive occupational school in Sweden that prepares individuals for emerging occupational roles in digital work. Using an interpretative, longitudinal, and multi-method approach, this study focuses on a group of aspirants who were being trained to become specialists in extracting, analysing, and using digital data for the growth and profit of organisations. These individuals can be viewed as experiencing a double “not-yet” situation, since not only are they at the stage of aspiring to certain work roles, but the occupations to which they aspire are also in a nascent, not yet fully defined stage. This study accompanies them through significant events over the years: from when they are in training, to when they search for jobs, and, finally, when they are in work.The monograph contains three empirical sections that are sequenced by the aspirants’ school-to-work pathways. The first section examines the processes of socialisation into the occupational school; the second analyses their efforts to meet the labour market; and the final one investigates the ways in which they persist in their occupational trajectories. Following these stages reveals how a strong school culture, coupled with a strong labour market, facilitates the building of “faith” into weak-form occupational pathways. Through the ceremony of being selected into the educational organisation and performing everyday rituals that engender confidence in their individual and collective futures, the analysis reveals types of “scripts” that are fashioned into the school’s methodology as well as the expectations of future hirers. It becomes apparent that aspirants generally accept these scripts as necessary and adhere to them to navigate the constantly changing demands of the labour market. However, when these interpretive schemes fail to help them cope with their unclear occupational futures, uncertainties of worth, and the unstable normative logics they encounter at work sites, the aspirants are compelled to deliberate and adapt conceptions of what is possible and permissible through individual and collective projections. In all, the empirical findings form the basis for a sociological model that offers a perspective on how to treat temporality, anticipation, and the “not-yets”, particularly in the context of education to work transitions.