Reviews of longitudinal datasets show that clear and informed teenage career thinking is strongly associated with better employment prospects in adulthood. Young people do better when they understand the educational requirements likely to be needed to achieve their career goals. OECD PISA studies show however that many students struggle to plan a pathway through their education into employment: across the OECD one in five students plans on working as a professional (e.g. lawyer, doctor or school teacher), but does not expect to secure the tertiary education which is usually a requirement for entry into the profession. Such confusion in career thinking is particularly common for students from low SES backgrounds and for lower academic achievers. One way that young people can be helped to better understand how education and training enable occupational outcomes is to connect students with people in desired employment or post-secondary education who can provide trusted advice and guidance.
Rock your Life! – Germany
Abstract
Rock Your Life! is a mentoring programme that began in Germany. It connects university students with school students in the last two years of lower secondary education. Pairs are expected to meet every two weeks for one to two years. Mentors are expected to support students in dealing with stressful situations at school and at home and to offer them guidance regarding their future careers. Rock Your Life! has become available in growing numbers of countries including the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland.
Empirical studies of mentoring relationships tend not to show strong long-term positive results in terms of career-focused mentoring relationship undertaken within secondary education. However, a randomised control trial which followed 308 students from ten German cities between 2015 and 2018 has found exciting results. With the programme oversubscribed, interested and comparable students were chosen by lottery to enter a mentoring relationship or join a control group. Both groups were split into two further groups based on their level of social disadvantage. The study found that mentored students benefited substantially from their mentoring relationship, improving attainment in mathematics, improving non-cognitive social skills and developing clearer occupational plans. Across the participants, the most substantial improvements were among the most disadvantaged students, many of whom came from migrant families. These students also became much more likely to transition successfully into apprenticeships leading to well-paying skilled employment. Through engagement with university students, it appears that mentored school students gained access to new sources of trusted information that encouraged them to think more pragmatically about their options for post-secondary education and training and so future employment. In keeping with results from studies in the Canada and the United Kingdom, students with the weakest access to informed sources of advice at home can be seen to benefit greatest from the guidance initiative.
Further reading
[2] Resnjanskij, S. et al. (2023), Mentoring erhöht die Ausbildungsbeteiligung benachteiligter Jugendlicher, ifo Institute, pp. 7-10, https://www.ifo.de/en/publications/2023/article-journal/berufseinstieg-als-wachstumsfaktor-kompetenzen.
[1] Resnjanskij, S. et al. (2024), “Can Mentoring Alleviate Family Disadvantage in Adolescence? A Field Experiment to Improve Labor Market Prospects”, Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 132/3, pp. 1013-1062, https://doi.org/10.1086/726905.
[3] Rock Your Life (2024), Rock Your Life, https://rockyourlife.de/.
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