Workplace Career Guidance And Mentorship: Education And Gender Matter

Closing education and gender gaps in the workplace begins in K-12 schools.

Work is not only about the economic exchange that comes from earning a living. Work also involves social exchange. It is a place where we earn a living and make connections with other people. These connections nurture social capital, the relationships we need to work, live life, and reach our potential.

The American Perspectives Survey of over 5,000 U.S. adults conducted by the Survey Center on American Life is filled with insights into workplace social capital. It includes a discussion of the workplace career guidance and mentorship workers receive. It also describes the different workplace experiences and social relationships that exist between those with and without college degrees and between males and females.

Understanding education and gender differences in developing workplace social capital is important because it helps us understand social wealth and social poverty in the workplace and beyond. This awareness also should lead us to ensure that K-12 students receive career education and mentorship experiences before they graduate from high school. These K-12 experiences prepare students to take advantage of the job opportunities they will have for career guidance and mentorships that nurture workplace social capital.

Social Wealth And Social Poverty In The Workplace

Many workers report they do not receive regular career guidance from their supervisors. Roughly half of the workers (53%) with an immediate supervisor or boss report discussing career goals and opportunities with that person often (19%) or occasionally (34%). About half (46%) say they seldom or never discuss these topics.

A significant educational divide exists with those who receive career guidance and mentoring. More than six in 10 (62%) college graduates report that they check in with their boss or supervisor about their career trajectory at least occasionally. On the other hand, less than half (44%) of workers without any college education say they discuss these topics with their boss or supervisor at least occasionally.

College graduates are also far more likely to have a workplace mentor, defined as “someone in your field of work or industry who gave you advice and helped guide you in your job or career.” A majority (57%) of degree holders report having had a mentor at some point. Only 43% of workers overall, and less than one-third (31%) of those with a high school education, report having a mentor at some point in their working years.

Men and women with college degrees are about equally likely to report having a mentor (56% compared to 57%). However, a significant gender divide exists among workers without a four-year degree. Working men without college degrees are 10 percentage points more likely to have a mentor than women with similar levels of education (36% compared to 26%).

Career Education Fosters Social Capital In Schools

K-12 schools are places for developing knowledge and social capital that comes from good career education. K–12 students often don’t receive information from schools on practical pathways to careers and opportunity. Less than half of Gen Z high schoolers report that they had enough information to decide the best career or education pathway after high school. Two-thirds of high schoolers and graduates said they would have benefited from more career exploration in middle or high school. This gap between the career preparation students want and what schools provide leaves students struggling to transition from school to work with lower wages when they enter the workforce.

K-12 schools are solving this career education problem by creating education and training frameworks and career navigation services, including partnerships with community colleges, four-year colleges, employers, and other community organizations. For example, Colorado’s K-12 work-based learning framework includes three categories: learning about work through events like career fairs with industry speakers, learning through work through activities like internships, and learning at work through hands-on experiences like apprenticeships with mentors.

Maryland’s K-12 approach is based on career awareness, career exploration, career preparation, and career seeking and advancement. Texas Education Agency’s Work Based Learning Continuum includes descriptions of the roles of providers, K-12 schools, colleges, workforce boards, and other community organizations.

According to the Harvard University Project on Workforce, career navigation includes three elements:

1. Acquiring knowledge about one’s skills and goals, including career training pathways.
2. Making informed career plans and charting a pathway to that career.
3. Keeping informed of changing industry standards and taking steps to continue career advancement.

These elements involve support services like coaching and mentoring. They include assessment tools that help individuals evaluate programs and courses and their progress through them. Finally, they involve structures and organizations like career centers that offer advice and personal support.

Mentorship Fosters Social Capital in Schools

K-12 schools are also places for developing social capital through effective mentorships. Analysts with the National Bureau of Economic Research used different statistical methods to examine school-based mentoring using a nationally representative sample of over 20,000 middle and high school students from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health.

They conclude that schools are “incubators of natural mentoring relationships…where mentors step outside of the boundaries of their primary roles to develop a unique and sustained relationship with individual youth.” These K-12 natural mentors are teachers, counselors, and coaches who serve as advisors and advocates and help young people develop connections with adults and build social capital.

Natural mentors serve two different roles. They play a complementary role that adds to the opportunities that advantaged students have. They also play a compensatory role as a resource for less advantaged students. In both cases, young people benefit from these mentoring relationships in at least three ways. They develop new perspectives and ways of thinking (cognitive benefit), learn social-emotional skills that produce positive relationships (affective benefit), and acquire an identity that embraces a range of aspirations and the ability to achieve them (behavioral benefit).

Additional academic benefits are associated with having mentors, including lower rates of course failures, increased grade point averages, and higher levels of college readiness, especially for lower-income students. Mentors also are associated with an increase in students’ annual workforce earnings by between $1,780 and $5,337.

Not all young people benefit to the same extent. For example, students from more affluent families report higher rates of having an in-school mentor than students from less affluent families. Higher education and workforce analyst Ben Wildavsky writes, “Breaking into new networks remains challenging, especially for low-income students with modest inherited networks. For them to build successful careers, education and skills are necessary but not sufficient. They need social capital, too.”

Building Social Wealth

Career education and mentorships nurture the development of social wealth in young people. The late psychologist and senior Gallup scientist Shane Lopez, in his book Making Hope Happen, describes how this occurs. He identified three strategies that young people should develop to prepare themselves for life in general and the workforce in particular.

The first is future casting or goals thinking, which helps them define and set achievable future outcomes. The second is triggering action or pathways thinking, which creates a specific route to those actions. The third is agency thinking, which produces the mental energy and self-reliance needed to pursue goals along defined pathways. Pathways and agency thinking work together to foster the pursuit of goals. This framework clarifies that mastering a discipline conveys more than the utility of acquiring a marketable skill. It also shapes our thinking in ways that allow us to set and achieve goals.

The 18th-century Scottish economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith suggests in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that work is akin to a family in commercial form: “Colleagues in office, partners in trade, call one another brother; and frequently feel towards one another as if they really were so.” Work is an important place where we nurture social wealth.

K-12 career education and mentoring programs better prepare young people for the social capital that is developed in the workplace. This social wealth is based on an opportunity equation that includes what individuals know and the people they come to know as they create an identity that includes an occupation. In short: Knowledge + Relationships + Identity = Opportunity. What you know, those you know, and who you are all work together to create your pathway to opportunity.