Career Mentoring for Secondary Students in France
As young teenagers in both developed and developing countries, students must make important choices about whether to go onto higher education, vocational training or enter the workforce, and these decisions can have important impacts on a student’s future career paths. It is believed that social networks and relationships can be major assets in giving students the information they need to make these decisions, but these assumptions are as of yet, untested.
French high schools have an orientation advisor who helps students choose between different paths of education, but these advisors are often unaware of the intricacies of job market fluctuations. Thus, if students lack a strong social network to obtain the information they need, they often have only a poor knowledge of the job market. Among the students in this study, most had parents who were employed by someone else or worked in manual labor, and more than one-third of these students spoke French as a second language. Students’ knowledge about the job market was also weak; only 60% of students knew the type of job they wanted to do and only 20% of those students knew which diploma was required for that occupation. They also could not give a description of the activities or skills related for their career choice. The French Education Ministry grants subsidies to schools in disadvantaged areas, and these funds are often used to disseminate information about job opportunities and career paths.
Some schools with these grants now offer mentoring programs to expand students’ knowledge about the job market and employment. "Mentoring Assistance and Orientation" is one such program, provided by a non-profit volunteer organization called Actenses. Established in 2006, the program hopes to provide guidance through contact with professionals in various fields. Each student has mentor assigned to them in accordance with their interests. These mentors are professionals in various fields, and volunteer to mentor students over a three-year period. The mentor helps the mentee determine his or her professional path by sharing information about the professional field of interest, job-market opportunities, and requirements for professional success. The exchange between the mentor and the mentee is designed to be complementary to the career information that is already given by the orientation adviser in the school.
Researchers are examining the impact of "Mentoring Assistance and Orientation" on job market knowledge and career related goals for 1,700 students in 22 high schools. These schools will be phased into the program over a two year period. Schools were randomly assigned to either a treatment or a comparison group. All treatment schools will have one treated class and one comparison classes the first year of the experimentation and two comparison classes the second year. Symmetrically, every comparison school will have two comparison classes the first year of the experimentation and one treatment class and one comparison class the second year.
All the students in the treatment class were offered their appropriate mentor. Actenses organized four mentor/mentee meetings over the school year. The mentors could communicate by phone or mail with their mentees if they wished. Four individual surveys were administrated to students, two in the first year, and one each of the subsequent years, testing job knowledge. Data was also collected from administrative records on grades, absence and pupil behavior. Researchers measured the impacts of the mentoring program on five principle outcomes in the long term and the short term: general knowledge about the professional world (types of jobs and the requirements to enter the respective fields), construction and evolution of the student's professional plans, the academic track they have chosen at the end of their first year, and academic performance.
Results forthcoming.