Vocational Progression and a Decent Career: Sectors, Locality and Early Adult Job Opportunities

The career achieved in early adulthood remains one of the most powerful indicators of future life chances. English higher-level vocational qualification reforms aim to improve vocational ‘middle’ pathways to higher-skilled work. There is extensive social science interest in the reproduction of inequalities from education into the labour market, but little attention on early adult career pathways within employment, most especially in the ‘missing middle’ of the mid-skills space, with significant gaps in evidence on how employers and local labour markets shape early adult career pathways.
My thesis examines ‘middle’, higher-level vocational progression to higher-skilled work in early adulthood, employing a mixed method, three-sector comparison of construction, textiles manufacturing and digital, in Northern Region in England, to explore diverse skills profiles through a locality, sector, and institutional lens in complex education and labour market intersections. New secondary quantitative analyses reveal that ‘middle skill’ space is a more complex and important opportunity structure than policy suggests, providing new definitions of mid-skill equilibria. Mapping the distinct sector qualification patterns in early adulthood challenges the normative policy representation of vocational higher-level qualifications as ‘one-size’, instead arguing these are intrinsically situated by sector.
Careers sequencing through qualitative enquiry, drawing from twenty-nine in-depth stakeholder interviews, identifies the importance of situated vocational worker identities, and industry traditions and norms in the processes of early adult vocational progression, in imaginaries of ‘becoming the high-skill vocational worker’. Place-based findings illuminate how local employer-education partnerships create informal opportunity structures or ‘fields’, normalising progression to higher-skilled work in communities with a limited history of professional work, contingent on multiple informal, employer-educator processes which are typically unrecognised. My study pivots the focus of ‘youth transition’ to early careers, arguing ‘decent careers’ into higher-skilled work are bound by ‘horizons of possibility’ through the locality, the sector, and its institutions in early adulthood.