An interview with Jim McKechnie on child employment

(Jim McKechnie is a professor in the Social Sciences department at the University of the West of Scotland. Following his presentation on child employment at the BPS Annual Conference, he was gracious enough to spare some time to explore the issues further; my questions are in bold. This forms part of this month's focus on younger people in the workforce.)

You've spoken of how jobs can have good and bad effects on young people who take them. What's a good example of that?

Well, take the number of hours worked: our research suggests a complex relationship with educational attainment. Students working excessive hours – more than 15 hours/week - have negative consequences in academic attainment. But those working five to six hours a week do better educationally than students who have never worked. Of course, we have to establish the causality, but it's clear that working isn't necessarily a bad thing for schooling.

Beyond the hours worked, are there types of jobs that are less worthwhile – too menial, perhaps?

We need to be cautious and not look at these jobs through adult eyes. The least demanding jobs are those in delivery: not a lot of contact with individuals, not much decision-making. But at the same time, those jobs tend to be taken by people who've never worked before as a first way in to having a full-time job.

As an early experience, it might be demanding to them, as they've never had to get up early before, they've never had to be reliable. And typically, people who start part-time in delivery work go through a sort of career path of part-time jobs, with an 'arc of demand' increasing as they move forward.

Could you talk about how employers are involved?

Well, they tend to seek child employees on the basis of flexibility, rather than cheapness – wages are typically standard, especially for post-16s. Some recognise “a breath of fresh air” that a young person brings into a workplace. For example, they see them as less pedantic than the adult part-time employees they have.

Employers are very variable in how they treat schoolchildren. One response to this would be to recognise good employers in some way. For instance, training provided is very variable. Those employers who do train see the young people as an investment for the future: “I get a good quality employee for a relatively low cost.”

In this sense, it resembles the impetus for many graduate programs.

Yes – and moreover, when these employees move on typically they introduce their friends as a 'next generation' for the business; a free screening process for the employee.

There is a growing recognition among employers that this young group of people are a valuable support system for their business, but it would pay for employers to pay more attention in some cases. It would be worthwhile for the better, more organised employers to introduce contracts when workers hit 16 to ensure they get time off for exam prep, to restrict hours so it doesn't clash with education; to say 'we acknowledge we get the flexibility, so we give something back'.

I was fascinated by your finding that around 20% of your young sample had some supervisory responsibilities.

One example we have is of an individual entering work in a shoe shop at the age of 14. who gained sufficient expertise in technology and methods that by 16 they were used to deal with and on-board new employees.

Now, we know the value of peer to peer tutoring in education, so why not take that model and apply it to business situations? You could imagine having a young person showing others the ropes may be better than a more managerial approach, and avoids potential culture clash.

How about the young people themselves – how can they get more from these early work experiences?

There's a major challenge for young workers themselves, as they tend to undervalue the experience, and don't see the full scope of what they're doing. In education, we use personal development planning to foster self-reflection on academic work. Should we extend this to work experience too?

There is a tension, however. When you talk to young people, one of the major benefits they see in paid work is a growth in their independence and autonomy – a consistent finding in the evidence base. If you try to educationalise that experience, you may be undermining one of its most valuable benefits! If you have to justify to the teacher what you've learned from work, it becomes just another kind of coursework. So we advise treading cautiously, as an opt-in opportunity for those who wish to try it.

How would you like to see the world of psychology participating in this discussion?

From an Occupational Psychology perspective, to ask whether or not we can look at this age group of workers in terms of well-researched features such as job satisfaction, quality of employment experiences, engagement, even issues like stress. There are an array of tools out there but they've been designed for adult populations. Given that an estimated 1.1-1.7m under-sixteens contribute to the economy through part-time jobs, and given we're talking about our future workforce here, this group needs some time under the spotlight.

The invisible workforce: schoolchildren in paid roles that are complex, rich and often ignored

Schoolchildren in jobs: that just amounts to the odd kid on a paper round, doesn't it? Not according to Jim McKechnie's research team from the University of the West of Scotland, who presented earlier this month at the Annual BPS Conference. McKechnie revealed that part-time paid employment was a majority experience for schoolchildren. From his own survey data – around 10% of those in secondary education in Scotland, 18500 students in all – once students move beyond their last year of compulsory education, more of them are in paid work than not.

It may be common, but does it matter? From one perspective it's a problem: given finite time, any non-school activities supplant time that should be spent on education. For some, it's a blessing, providing opportunities and learning experiences unavailable in the education system. And for those such as McKechnie's group, it's a balance: any adult job has a mixture of positive and negative aspects, and the same is bound to be true for children as well.

The team surveyed the types of roles taken by children to explore the charge that they are generally menial and unstretching,. They found that, rather than paper routes, the sample worked substantive jobs in service industries, including retail, (28%), catering (28%) and delivery (18%), with smaller numbers in other domains such as care work and cleaning. Moreover, participants reported a range of activities within roles, with 70% dealing with customers and surprisingly, over 20% engaged in some kind of supervisory activities.

To look closer at this, each candidate was given a 'demandingness' score based on the activities within their job. Demanding jobs were more likely to be taken by those in higher school years, and by females rather than males, but features such as socio-economic status, academic attainment, and truancy didn't have any influence. As McKechnie puts it, there is “nothing atypical about taking a demanding job”.

McKechnie observed that taking survey data from youngsters may pose additional methodological challenges, a theme picked up by his colleague Amanda Simpson. Her study used multiple methods to gather information from 32 working youngsters, combining observation with interviews and also asking participants to record the activities they were involved in at various points in the day, prompted by mobile phone notifications.

The study suggested that the jobs, even many seemingly basic ones, involved a range of activities and opportunities to gain and develop both soft and technical skills. However, the children often initially showed limited awareness of these, though they gained more insight through the event recording procedure. To some extent, the 'invisible workforce' are only partially visible even to themselves.

In the next post, we spend some time with Jim McKechnie to discuss the significance of this research for the workplace.

Modest, conventional and prepared to lead: Older adults in the workplace

Since 1983, the median age in the UK has increased from thirty-five to forty. The sun is setting on a fixed retirement age. So it's more important than ever for workplaces to understand how personality differs in older adults.

Previous research has reported a range of ways that ageing influences personality, such as declines in the Big Five factors of neuroticism, extraversion and openness.

James Bywater and Mathijs Affourtit of psychometric firm SHL wanted to extend this work using another instrument – their personality questionnaire, the OPQ - and to redress the age sampling bias common in occupational testing, where data on those over sixty is hard to come by.

They dug into a massive sample of 235,407 people who had sat the tool against a managerial/ professional benchmark, and categorised the data into four age brackets: 16-24, 25-44, 45-64, and 65+. It's worth noting that only 158 of the sample were in the oldest bracket, and of these, only thirty-six were women.

Focusing on notable findings rather than previous effects, moving from the younger to the older brackets the study found the following trends:

• A preference for more conventional ways of working
• A stronger desire to take charge of others that levels out over the last two brackets
• Higher levels of modesty
• Lower focus on career progression

For the last two findings, the trend did not hold for women in the 65+ bracket, who were not significantly more modest nor less ambitious than women in the 45-64 bracket; this may be due to the size of that sample.

As is common in this research, this was a cross-sectional study. We're still waiting for the holy grail: a comprehensive longitudinal study that revisits people over time. This would allow us to untangle a person's age from their birth cohort, such as the personality differences of being a baby boomer versus a millennial.

As the authors remind us, these differences are small, and dwarfed by individual differences; we would certainly never use them to inform selection decisions, for instance. However, given that many companies focus heavily on attracting Generation Y employees, it's important that changes to the workplace are in the context of understanding, rather than ostracising, older adults who will be a core part of our future economies.

Bywater, J., & Affourtit, M. (2011). Work personality in later life: An exploratory study. Assessment and Development Matters, 3 (1), 14-17

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