Edition 38 - Where we're at with the Clusters
Welcome to another edition of Pondering Careers, where we talk about lots of things related to work, jobs, and careers, and lots of other life related things as well.
This week, I'm going to share a bit of an update on the Clusters, now that we've passed one year of them being out in the world, and in particular I'm going to talk about some of the ways I've changed how I think about the Clusters over the past year.
I've found that as we talk more about the Clusters, and learn more about how other people relate to them, it's changed the way I see them. As more people have started using the Clusters in their own programs, I've also changed how I use them in response - I always said they'd become a 'group' project, and it seems like they're really coming to life as we use them.
Early last year, and not long after we released them, I had a conversation with a very experienced school Careers Advisor from Sydney who said that, for him, the Clusters really represented a paradigm shift. The Clusters make it difficult to continue using the older ways of talking about jobs and work, especially when you see the impact they have on young people, and this means a complete rethink of our programs as we know them.
This, of course, comes with it's own set of challenges - it's hard to continue on as-usual when you have started thinking so differently - but as we've gone through the year I feel like it's become easier to think Cluster-first, and it also feels like a lot of other things have fallen into place.
Whether you're familiar with the Clusters, or they're a completely new concept, I hope you find something useful in this edition.
Quick Cluster Recap
If you are already really comfortable with the Clusters then you might want to skip this bit.
The super short version is that we can use a set of six Career Clusters to reconceptualise the way we work.
These Clusters group together people who share similar skills, values, work environments, and core tasks at work, and people move between and through these Clusters throughout their careers.
To create the Clusters, we looked at lots of different methods of classifying jobs, and in particular we used some of the work done by The Foundation for Young Australians (FYA) in their New Work Order series as a starting point (with their knowledge and approval of course).
Over the past year, thousands of adults have taken the Career Cluster Quiz and also shared some demographic data about their career, which has given us some great insights into how the Clusters actually work, and the data pretty much confirms what we thought - at the start of our career, we tend to concentrate on one or two Clusters, but as we grow and develop we shift around and can work across a wider range of Clusters.
We've also found that people who are working in jobs related to their primary Clusters tend to be happier with their job.
That's why we started out thinking of the Clusters as just that - loose 'clusters' - rather than as rigid groups with boundaries.
This has made a huge difference when we're working with young people - they understand that we're not defining them or telling them who they are, just showing them where they could fit, if they choose.
The term 'cluster' also implies a sense of agency - it's an action, not a condition - so once again we're using very specific language to return control to the student or client without positioning ourselves as the expert in their lives.
There are six Clusters:
I find the best way to get your head around the Clusters is with an example, so, as we all work in education, here's how the Clusters work in our industry.
Typically, when we talk about a school, people tend to think of these key jobs - teachers first, then key front-facing admin staff, and potentially they also include people like the librarians.
But schools need lots of people to operate, and these people fall across all six Clusters.
We have people working behind the scenes to promote the school and encourage new families to enrol, others who build and maintain the school facilities, including the all-important technology provision, and a wide range of administration staff who keep the school running.
We also find people like Guidance Counsellors and OHS Supervisors keeping everyone safe and well, and a range of innovative people designing new learning materials.
What we've found over the past year is that young people get this really quickly, and when they do it helps them see how they can pursue a career in a pathway they are interested in but in a way that suits their skills and strengths.
We started out thinking the Clusters would be a conceptual tool, not a psychometric measure, but the data so far is showing that the quiz is quite reliable both with students and adults, so, while the process isn't complete, we expect that the Clusters can function as a psychometric assessment as well as a tool for starting conversations.
I'm going to be honest, I'm more in the qualitative camp than the quantitative camp, so I'm more interested in how the Clusters can help us think and talk about our careers, but it's nice to see the data coming through showing us we're on the right track.
What's changed over the past year?
It's not surprising that we've changed some of our ideas as the year has progressed. Like any new idea when it's launched out into the world, you can't control what other people do with it, and one of the things I've most enjoyed is seeing how other people have been creative with the Clusters.
There are, however, a few key things that have changed as we've gotten to know the Clusters better, and I think it's worth sharing them here.
Change 1 - We think broader
When we launched the Clusters the focus was almost entirely on our working lives, but over the year it's become clear that our Clusters actually blend at the edges with how we are in all aspects of our lives.
I'm a big fan of the 5 Love Languages , not because I think they are an actual 'thing', but because they help me understand how I interact with the people in my life (I'm an Acts of Service person), and it's become clear that the Clusters have the potential to do the same.
One of the key indications of this is actually found in the adult data - the number of Linkers in the adult dataset far outweighs the number of Linkers in the general population data (as delivered by the students).
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To start with, I wondered if we had something wrong in the questions, and that all adults were more comfortable with communicating and connecting. But once we thought about the type of people who took the quiz, it became clear that it wasn't about their age at all.
Adults who've taken the Career Cluster Quiz have generally found out about it through networking.
We've used our own networks (like this one) and other community networks to share the quiz, and therefore most of the adults who've taken it have been strong networkers.
And strong networkers also tend to share the traits of the Linkers.
These Linkers are often not working in jobs from the Linker Cluster, but their traits appear in other ways, like in their decision to take a quiz. I would imagine that, in whatever role they take on, strong Linkers tend to collaborate and connect with others.
What all this means is that we take our Clusters into other aspects of our work and lives, and that when we know our Clusters we can use those as a tool for understanding why we make the choices we make.
Change 2 - Some of the Clusters have morphed a bit
The fundamentals have remained the same, but as we meet more people who align with each Cluster, and learn more about how they work, we've shifted around some of what we include within each Cluster.
The first thing that's really changed is in how we see the Informers.
Originally, we thought that people in this Cluster would be defined by the way they shared their knowledge with others, for example as accountants, lawyers, or teachers. That's still the case, but what we've actually found is that as people build their knowledge and experience they tend to slide into the Informer Cluster, regardless of their original field.
For both students and adults, around 40% of people fall into the Informers, and with the adult data we can see that these people are spread across a broad range of industries, but with some bias towards professional sectors. Obviously it's hard to know exactly what's going on here, but my thought is that people who are Informers tend to gravitate to professions over other fields.
I've also changed how I see the Makers.
Originally, we lined up many vocational pathways with the Makers, things like construction trades, food preparation, even transportation, but over time more professions have started to fall under the Makers. I think this is because so many of us combine work in one of the other Clusters with the work of the Makers; some of the time we fall into one Cluster, but we also spend some time 'on the tools', actually operating the equipment or preparing the goods.
We found with the adult data that many Makers chose to enter fields that are quite hands-on - agriculture or hospitality, for example - but then they would sometimes work in a non-Maker role within that field.
We also noticed that Makers stayed clear of theoretical fields like law or psychology, where they would have few opportunities to get hands on.
It will be interesting to see how, as more data comes in, we continue to adjust how we view each Cluster.
Change 3 - We've given power to the people
One of the most significant things to come out of the data (in my opinion, anyway) was that we need to allow people to choose where they sit.
We noticed that there were a certain set of people who took the quiz multiple times, often on the same day.
Each time, these people would be strong Innovators or Informers (occasionally Linkers), and they would get the same result two or three times, before they eventually became strong Guardians.
My guess would be that, for some students, it is really important that they get a result that correlates with their existing career plans. So, to make it easier for people to do this, we've created other resources that allow students to take home the 'right' result, if that's what they want to do. We don't force them to take home their actual result, or first result.
This is important for a couple of reasons - first up, there's a big safety consideration here. Some kids need to be able to take home a result that won't generate conflict with an abusive parent, and, while I would much prefer to eradicate domestic and family violence, it's important that we don't put students in a position which could place them at risk.
We also don't want to be flagging this as a possibility for parents, so we make it easy for them to download the right report without triggering an additional email to a parent.
The other reason why it's important that we give people the power to align themselves is that we don't know them - we've just asked 30 short questions, and there's no guarantee that we've gotten it right.
One of our Career Practitioners used the Cluster quiz in a university setting with a group of business and law students, and what they found was that these students were already a significant way down a path that aligns with specific Clusters.
They've paid a lot of money for a degree that prepares them for careers in the Informer and Coordinator Clusters, so if they find out that they're actually better suited to something else that can cause problems.
In this case, it was important that the students were able to choose for themselves where they sit, as they don't really want to be told that they should be looking at something else.
Skills and the Clusters
One of the other things we've done this year is we undertook a significant piece of work to map the Clusters to the Australian Skills Classification . Jobs and Skills Australia created the ASC to provide a common language of skills, and I wanted to see if the Clusters could be mapped to this work.
It turns out that you can - and as a result we now have the Career Cluster Wheel, which shows the key skills and sub-skills that align with each Cluster.
We mapped each of the Specialist Tasks to a Career Cluster, then looked for common themes in those Tasks, then categorised them into groups and sub-groups.
What we found is that this process really helped us define what falls under each Cluster. People tend to do tasks using more than one specialist skill group, but in grouping things this way it's easier to see where and how we spend our time.
This work is also leading into our work on Pathways and Interest Areas, and I'm curious to see where else it will lead.
Have you used the Clusters?
The Clusters are just one tool available in our quest to start positive career conversations, but it's always great to see how they're being used in the real world.
We've now got some schools using the Clusters to structure their entire curriculum, which is something I never even imagined when we first started talking about how else we could talk about careers.
We're now looking at how we can share the Clusters with a wider audience and make it easier for people to access the concept without being affiliated with a school, but, like everything, this is taking time. Over the next few months we'll be looking in depth at the data we've generated so far and publishing some more information about what we've found.
I'm always interested to hear about how others are using the clusters in their work, so if you've used the concept please share your own ideas, and thanks again for joining me for another edition of Pondering Careers.