Skill acquisition and use across the life course: current trends, future prospects.(Contributed Article)(Report)

Introduction

People experience a series of major transitions during the course of their lives. These usually include the move from school directly to paid work or to postsecondary education, leaving the parental home, partnering and/or marriage, becoming a parent, farewelling dependent children as they set up independent households, and retirement. Life course researchers have confirmed the common sense observation that these transitions frequently happen in a predictable order. There is, so to speak, a 'standardised' pattern of life course transitions. Partnering tends to follow completion of school and any immediate post-secondary education. For men, it also follows entry into full-time paid work. Becoming a parent happens once any post-school training is completed, partnering is secure and, for men, a stable place in the labour market has been established. Other transitions are similarly predictable.

While this standardised model has never described everyone's experience, it has served both researchers and policy makers well. For researchers, it provides a useful basis for understanding the social processes that affect important outcomes. For example, much research has focused on the factors that affect how successfully young people will make the transition from school to work and the kinds of jobs they will achieve (e.g., Lamb and Mackenzie 2001). For policy makers, assumptions (often tacit) about the standardised life course often underlie decisions about how key institutions should be designed. For example, VET institutions and universities might assume that most people complete post-secondary education immediately after school and before they enter the full-time workforce, that they will not have family responsibilities at this time, and so on. Workforce planners might assume that after men complete their post-secondary education, they will make the skills they obtain available to the labour market on a full-time basis until retirement. They might assume that once women are partnered and have children, they will withdraw their skills from the labour market until their children reach a certain age, or leave home.

Stated in these bald terms, examples of the standardised life course model raise immediate questions about the usefulness of the model in the 21st century. Much recent research and experience have emphasised changes in life course patterns that apparently break down the applicability of the standardised model. Many have claimed that, compared to 20 or 30 years ago, fewer young people make linear transitions from school through post-secondary education to fulltime work (e.g., Dwyer and Wyn 2001). Instead, they may delay or take breaks from study, or combine paid work with study, or partner before their study is completed. Similarly, the standardised model tends to assume that children are almost always raised in dual parent households and that women do not undertake paid work while children are young. Neither assumption is plausible in early 21st century Australia.

Life course change may take two forms, both of which are posited in the existing research literature. It may be that standardised life course patterns continue to exist, but have changed substantially over recent years. Where the standardised model used to prescribe that women withdrew entirely from the labour force when children were born, its modernised successor involves women combining paid work, often part-time, with child rearing. Similarly, the expectation that people first live with a partner when they are married, and after men enter full-time jobs, may have been modified to a model where cohabitation precedes marriage and, often, men's first full-time job. On this analysis of life course change, the task of researchers is to understand and describe the new standardised life course model or models. That of policy makers is to adapt the design of institutions to allow for the new standardised life course models, or even to design institutions to modify them where they are seen as undesirable.

In the second form of possible change, the very notion of standardised life course models would break down. Departures from the 20th century standardised life course model would be almost infinitely varied and complex, so that there was no identifiable new model of life course transitions and status combinations. Instead, there would be an increasingly unpredictable ordering to events such as post-school education, full-time employment, partnering or becoming a parent. Each person would construct his/her own path through these statuses, determined by his/her own life strategies and largely unconstrained by social expectations or institutional requirements. For researchers, this form of change would pose the challenge of understanding the logic or logics that underlie people's life course strategies. For policy makers, it would require that institutions develop a new flexibility and adaptability as the life course circumstances become almost infinitely diverse.

The aims of this paper are to assess the extent of life course change amongst Australians over recent decades, to consider likely future patterns of change, and to examine the implications for the VET sector. With the focus on implications for the VET sector, the paper pays particular attention to changes in the place of skill acquisition in the life course and changes in the ways skills are used in the labour market over people's working lives. It begins by briefly reviewing what existing Australian and overseas research has shown about patterns of life course change. It then presents original research, using census data, systematically examining the evidence for change in life course patterns of skill acquisition, living arrangements and participation in paid work. The implications for postsecondary education are then assessed directly by examining the changing life course stage profile of students in Australian TAFE institutions and universities. Finally, the paper examines varying patterns of skill usage through the life course. Throughout, there is a concern with whether we are witnessing the emergence of a small number of new standardised life course patterns or the proliferation of life course pathways. In conclusion, we consider the implications of the changes and patterns uncovered for the VET sector.