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 In this post, Careers Consultant Andrea Cox shares her experience of designing and delivering an in-curriculum careers workshop that takes a more critical approach to reading and interpreting job adverts. The exploration of gendered language, and emphasis on discussion and debate align well with the five signposts to socially just career guidance – particularly ‘naming oppression’ and ‘questioning what is normal’. Careers practitioners working in education settings will no doubt be familiar with the constraints of limited time and space in the curriculum, and this is a great example of drawing on the discipline itself to engage students in critical career learning and reflection…

Reading is a significant part of the job exploration and application process. We all need to read job profiles, job descriptions and contracts. When we read we experience a range of embodied feelings and thoughts. Sometimes reading a job description can be a fairly neutral experience but sometimes (and I’d posit, particularly earlier on in one’s career) it can be more charged. Our experience of reading, and the internal monologue and feelings which follow, can mean the decision about whether or not to apply for a job. For some people, reading can reinforce feelings of competence or self-worth and potentially reinforce social inequalities e.g. when people opt out of applying for jobs that they could perhaps do but don’t appear to be ‘for them’ from the job description.

I explored the concept of reading within careers with 2nd year undergraduate Comparative Literature students in a London, research-intensive university. Comparative Literature is a degree, like many humanities degrees, that doesn’t have classic vocational ties, but so much of what is taught in this subject has intrinsic links to careers education (e.g. the embodied experience of reading, self-reflectiveness, cultural intelligence). I wanted to see if careers discussions could be introduced in a different, more authentic way into the curriculum (rather than doing a session on career options or CVs). Furthermore, the group was almost exclusively made up of women, many of them were women of colour and the lecturer talked about some students not having much self-confidence.

Workshop design

The workshop was made up of five parts – see slides (and notes within the slides) for further details:

1. To begin, we discussed the kinds of feelings and embodied experiences which come up when reading job descriptions in general (e.g. excitement, stress, high heart-rate, curiosity etc.)
   
2. Then we looked at two real-life graduate job descriptions. One job was a publishing job (no pay given, obvious link with subject) one was communications and marketing for a healthcare company (great pay, subject provides relevant skills but healthcare less usual choice for Comparative Literature students). Students looked at the job descriptions themselves and wrote down their initial responses and then discussed their responses in small groups.
   
3. Next, we introduced the concept of ‘linguistic gender-coding’. We ran both job descriptions through an online ‘gender decoder’ tool to see whether the ads used masculine/feminine coded language. The tool is based on a 2011 psychology paper by Danielle Gaucher et al. We discussed whether students had been aware of certain kinds of gendered language in the job descriptions and whether they felt that this kind of language might have any influence on their decisions to apply to the job or not.
   
4. The final activity looked at the much-quoted statement from a Hewlett Packard company white paper that ‘women only apply to jobs where they meet 100% of the job criteria whereas men apply to jobs where they meet 60% of the job criteria.’ Turning to students’ critical thinking skills I asked them to think about their response to this statistic – had they heard this before? What questions do they want to ask about it?
   
5. We summarised by asking students to reflect on what they had learned from the experience of the sessions and whether the experience had been different from the types of reading they had been doing on their course.  

Learning points

1. Students seemed to make very quick decisions about whether or not a job was relevant to them and whether or not they would apply (they self-reported that this was in about 10 seconds).
   
2. There was value in slowing down the reading process and reading through the job ads as a group. It had the power of dispelling some (though I’m sure not all) questions and concerns about the job descriptions. There was also a nuanced discussion about the concepts of ‘having interest’ in particular topics and the transferability of students’ skills (something that an academic and I had been developing with this cohort through co-creating an online tool). This felt like a powerful method of doing careers (with a group who already know one another), there seemed to be a sense of community and mutual encouragement in how they approached the task.
   
3. Sharing the ongoing debate about gender and confidence levels in applying for jobs was really interesting – students took it in a variety of ways: some understood that there were ‘rules of the game’ in the job market which they could choose to play by or not (playing it might bring material benefits). Some also felt a sense of empowerment that some women might not waste time on applying for things they don’t feel they really want to do (a sense of authenticity?)
   
4. It would be interesting to broaden out the discussion into a more intersectional approach to the question of when we apply for jobs and why, and invite students to share their experiences more holistically than just from a gender point of view.
   
5. The following week we continued with the theme of ‘being read’ by flipping the topic into how we ourselves are ‘read’ through our CVs and cover letters – both by humans and AIs. This was helpful to have students have a chance to synthesise their learning and see how the tendency to jump to conclusions about a job description also applies to recruiters jumping to conclusions about us as people and how that relates to social justice and how we strategically write or lay out applications.

If you would like to try some or all of this session in your own context, you can download the slides with notes here. We would love to hear about how you adapt this for different groups or contexts in the comments below.

Andrea Cox is a former teacher turned careers advisor working at Kings College London. Andrea specializes in careers with impact, helping students and researchers explore careers with demonstrable social and environmental benefits. She’s co-founder and chair of the University of London careers education for social justice community of expertise which has a current focus on curriculum design for critical pedagogy and inclusion.

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