Professor Jenny Bimrose was awarded the Rodney Cox Lifetime Achievement Award at the CDI’s ‘UK Career Development Awards’ held on 11 March. The presentation was made by Dave Cordle, the CDI president, on behalf of the CDI’s board of directors.

The award is in recognition of Jenny’s sustained and significant contribution to the careers sector in which she has worked in for over 40 years. Jenny recently retired from IER, but has continued her research in the careers field. The award was sponsored by C&K Careers.

While Jenny was unable to attend the official award ceremony because of self-isolation, she is now holding the CDI Award in her hands.

You can read more on Jenny’s career and her recent publications in this University of Warwick press release.

It is a widely accepted notion that involving parents in careers education and guidance (CEG) is highly desirable. Although parents and carers undoubtedly influence the career development of young people in their care, with a range of consequences, robust evidence of what, when and how parental behaviours constructively support their children’s learning about career progression remains elusive.

Sally-Anne Barnes, with Jenny Bimrose, Alan Brown and John Gough, have been undertaking an international evidence review to understand how parents and carers can be better supported by schools and colleges to feel more informed and confident in how they support education and career choices. This has been undertaken with the support of the Gatsby Foundation and the JP Morgan Chase Foundation. This study has produced a wealth of experiential evidence on the engagement of parents, as well as an overview of what is happening in practice.

The evidence report has now been published. Sign up to find out more or join an upcoming webinar.

The new article written by Professors Tracy Warren and IER’s Clare Lyonette addresses two sizable gaps in knowledge concerning male part‐timers. Are men's part‐time jobs of lower quality than men's full‐time jobs? Are male part‐timers more or less satisfied with their jobs compared to their full‐time peers? For both questions, the article examines whether men's part‐time employment varies by occupational class.

The article is motivated by the large body of work on female part‐timers, even though male part-time work has been increasing in recent years. Its theoretical framework is rooted in one of the most controversial discussions in the sociology of women workers: the “grateful slave” debate that emerged in the 1990s when researchers sought to explain why so many women expressed job satisfaction with low‐quality part‐time jobs. Innovatively, this article draws upon and challenges those contentious ideas to provide new insights into male, rather than female, part‐time employment.

The results provide clear evidence of low‐quality male part‐time employment in the UK, when compared with men's full‐time jobs. Men working part‐time also express deteriorating satisfaction with jobs overall and in several specific dimensions of their jobs. Male part‐timers in lower occupational class positions retain a clear “lead” both in bad job quality and low satisfaction. For more details see here.

Traditional data sources do not have the timeliness or the level of detail that many organisations using labour market information (LMI) need. NESTA is funding a project on novel sources of data that can yield reliable LMI in real time and at a level of detail (granularity) that can satisfy even local area organisations such as Skills Advisory Panels, Local Enterprise Partnerships and learning providers.

Derek Bosworth is leading this work and would like to invite you to identify your data needs by filling in a very short questionnaire, which can be found here.

Sally-Anne Barnes will be delivering the keynote presentation at the upcoming Mutual Learning webinar 'Measuring employability' for the European Network of Public Employment Services.

The event will be held on 27 February and is organised by FGB. Sally-Anne will be drawing up on her recent work on distance travelled models and trends in profiling jobseekers. The presentation entitled 'Measuring the distance travelled and soft outcomes for long-term unemployed people' will discuss evidence on distance travelled models as a way of monitoring and evaluating labour market programme recipients’ outcomes and progression to the labour market.