Generation Lateralization
by Rachel Jin, Emma Tkach, Mackenzie Cameron, Micah Solis
In the employment market today, Canadian youth are often referred to as “Generation Jobless.” With an unemployment rate of almost 15%, and an even scarier underemployment rate (the rate of graduate students in low-skilled jobs often unrelated to their degree), this social problem is becoming crippling to our economy and society. Burdened with debt, working in minimum wage jobs, and caught in a time of rapid globalization and technological advancement, it is often overwhelming to consider the transition from university to the seemingly bleak work world.
In an interview about this transition and her career, Ava gives us insight into her rather maze-like journey through various institutions, interests, and jobs throughout her career and her perspective on building skills laterally and the role of university in people’s lives.
Instead of going straight into university after high school, Ava originally attended a smaller college, which she acknowledges largely helped her in building maturity and transitioning from a young, confused high schooler to her adult self, discovering her independence and passions. Her time in college, as Durkheim would argue, helped socialize her for “life in broader society,” and upon entering university, she was prepared for the transition. At UBC, while she considered several disciplines including sociology and law, she decided to complete a Bachelor of Arts combined major in Political Science and History, which gave her a strong foundation for pursuing her Bachelor of Education, and later, a Master’s in Clinical Counselling. Ava’s journey, however, was far from straight-forward or linear. From pursuing acting jobs during her studies to volunteering with at-risk youth in the Downtown Eastside to working as an online therapist through Zoom Therapy, Ava was exposed to a variety of people of different cultures, socioeconomic backgrounds, and psychological conditions. What is perhaps most remarkable about Ava is not simply that her lateralization of experiences has allowed her to gain expertise in many fields, making herself more employable, but rather the fact that her creative and business minds have fused to find a chain of opportunities within this lateralization that seamlessly inform each other. Ava admits, for example, that working with high-risk youth in a program called TREK 2000 left no room for insecurity, and she was forced to be completely authentic. She also has a successful career in acting, and as any good actor knows, creating engaging characters requires the ability to empathize with various struggles, desires, and actions in order to motivate their behaviour with a personal authenticity and vulnerability. Interacting with diverse individuals and portraying diverse characters has helped Ava develop a deeper understanding of personal emotion and the human condition, later giving her a more compassionate and empathetic interpretation of her patients when she became a clinical counsellor.
Analyzing Ava’s story using the sociological imagination, her personal journey can be translated into looking at the wider postgraduate student population. Like the young Ava, many young people today are faced with insecurity and indecision about their futures and struggle with the question of how to combine their interests, passions, and skills into one hybrid career. When asked for advice to university students, Ava suggested that contrary to popular belief, a more traditional, linear educational path is perhaps less valuable given the demands of the modern work world. Perhaps the key to career fulfillment is not to focus on the normative career path of education to degree completion to stable long-term job. The reality is, the large majority of today’s youth will switch companies, positions, and even careers a number of times throughout their lives. Having a varied skill set to pull from is now far more attractive to employers than a straightforward degree with little life experience. In addition, it is important nowadays to build one’s skill-set in a more “lateral” sense, gaining experience and forming networking connections in a variety of areas and disciplines. As a result, even if one career path does not work out, there is no risk of losing one’s personal identity as a diverse skillet enables the pursuit of multiple different paths.
This relatively new approach to education and career pursuit demonstrated in Ava’s story is a drastic change from the traditional role of education as an institution. Traditionally, the narrowly generalized core functions of the education system are Socialization, Selection, and Legitimation. From this perspective, the role of the university would be to give students knowledge of skills and norms to integrate into society, select students for designated careers, and assign official credentials to legitimize achievement. This system, however, is being both deinstitutionalized and expanded. In terms of the deinstitutionalization of the traditional career path, there are important changes occurring surrounding the norms of education and the employment market. Instead of a university degree guaranteeing students a stable job as it may have done for our parents or grandparents, education today is only a piece of the puzzle. While the role of an undergraduate degree, whether in Arts or elsewhere, still provides us with a bureaucratized sense of legitimacy and is an important stepping stone towards our career goals, life experiences and involvement in both our local and global communities shape our values and skills to properly prepare us for integration into the work world. Thus, the role of the education system is being expanded in this essential way, perhaps adding a new Hidden Curriculum to the role of the university: diverse experience and human interactions.
Although formal university degrees were necessary certifications, the diverse opportunities that Ava pursued such as acting, volunteering with at-risk youth, and online therapy work were what made her a unique and valuable candidate to employers and opened doors for her to pursue her passions and interests. From a sociological perspective, Ava’s experience can be seen as an example of young people in the modern employment market, where the ability to combine a varied skill-set is essential to integration into the work world.