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Direct care workers provide much of the hands-on, long-term care received by older adults and people with disabilities in the U.S. Despite being a lifeline for the people they serve and their families, direct care workers are among the lowest paid workers in the country. They often work with minimal benefits, little access to training, and few opportunities for advancement. Improving the job quality for the professionals in this field should be a goal of all policymakers seeking to strengthen economic opportunities for the working poor. State governments are uniquely positioned to tackle this issue and promote such policies. This new report examines opportunities and levers for states to enhance the wages, benefits, and other conditions affecting jobs in the direct care workforce. These policies can benefit direct care workers and their families, as well as enhance the quality of care provided older adults and people with disabilities across the country.

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A major question for governments is how to reshape the teaching profession and make teaching an attractive career choice for today's youth. A close examination of the organization and management of teacher careers can provide useful insights into how to make teaching more appealing as a career. A number of countries have reformed their teacher career structures over the past decades, and others foresee introducing changes in the near future. To benefit from their experience, between 2016 and 2018 IIEP looked into the organization and management of teacher careers in Colombia, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Lithuania, Mexico, New York City, Peru, Scotland, South Africa, and Thailand. The research findings aim to provide policy-makers and governments with a variety of options with regard to the design of teacher careers, highlighting management implications as well as perceived effects of teacher career reforms on teacher motivation, attraction, and retention. This brief is part of a series of four. It analyses the main drivers behind teacher career reforms and presents emerging models of career organization.

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This paper reports on the analysis of three years research of undergraduate cooperative work term postings and employer and employee evaluations. The objective of the analysis was to determine the factors affecting student and employer success and satisfaction with the work-integrated learning experience. It was found that students performed better and found co-op placements with an increasing emphasis on leadership in their senior years; however, students rated their first employer the highest. Furthermore, senior students were more successful than junior students in work placements abroad, and extended work terms at the same employer did not increase student satisfaction.

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This paper operationalises the OECD Guidelines for Measuring the Quality of the Working Environment (OECD, 2017) to describe job characteristics among European countries, the United States and Korea in 2010 and 2015. The analysis extends the range of aspects of quality of the working environment beyond those featuring in the Job Strain index presented by (Cazes, 2015), which is used to monitor implementation of the OECD Job Strategy, but at the cost of a more limited country coverage. While the two indices of job strain are largely consistent both across countries and over time, all of the job characteristics included in the 'extended' index turns out to matter for workers' well-being. The framework uses the job demands-resources model (Demerouti, 2001) that stresses the importance of balancing the demands of the job and the resources that are available to workers to meet those demands. Workers are classified as (heavily) strained when the number of job demands they face (largely) exceeds the number of job resources they benefit from, and conversely, they are classified as (very) well-resourced when their job resources (largely) exceed their job demands.

On average among 28 OECD countries, about one third of employees are (moderately or heavily) strained at work, while one half are well-resourced. The share of employees that are heavily strained is close to 10 per cent. Job strain is relatively more frequent among employees with low education and low occupational skills, and it is relatively less frequent in the service sector and in the public sector. Due to composition effects, women hold on average slightly less strained jobs than men. The share of strained workers has slightly declined on average over the 2010-2015 period, falling in a majority of countries. The improvement in working conditions is related to better prospects of career advancement, higher take-up of training, stronger social support and organisational participation at work, higher flexibility of working time, as well as lower exposure to physical risk factors, hard physical demands and unsocial work schedule. On the other hand, perceptions of job insecurity, intimidation and discrimination, as well as work intensity have been on the rise. Finally, quality of the working environment is strongly associated with workers' well-being as measured by mental and physical health, days of sickness, job satisfaction as well as job motivation, and the associated effects are potentially large. For most outcomes, perceived intimidation and discrimination at work is one of the most powerful predictor of workers' well-being.

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While there has been a proliferation of interest and research into work-family studies we know little about how employees who study while working manage their multiple and sometimes conflicting roles. This research focuses on non-traditional students (NTS), whose representation in the general student population has increased, and explores how they attempt to balance their work and school responsibilities. The question of what factors potentially impact NTS's academic and job satisfaction remains mostly unanswered and is the question this article attempts to address. Data were collected from over 200 non-traditional students studying across different regional campuses of a US university, testing several hypotheses including relevant demographic and non-demographic variables. Results revealed academic satisfaction was impacted by job-related factors while job satisfaction tended to be influenced mostly by factors in the general work domain. Demographic factors did not appear to predict job satisfaction and nor did they significantly predict academic satisfaction. The paper outlines some future opportunities for research to better understand the work-school dynamic in the lives of non-traditional students.

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The purpose of this research was to examine the career engagement of Canadian career development practitioners (CDPs), a group of professionals tasked with helping Canadians with career and employment-related concerns. Previous studies with this participant sample have not focused on engagement, which is considered to be an important metric for worker satisfaction and productivity. As a result, this study established an important foundation for ongoing work. A mixed-method approach, using the newly developed quantitative measure of career engagement supported by some qualitative questions, was used for the study.

Findings indicate that, overall, Canadian CDPs are engaged with their careers; however, the sector's youngest and newest as well as oldest and most senior workers are least likely to be engaged. Although this study produced meaningful results, more research is needed. A larger sample size, with better geographical representation would help confirm workers most at risk for lower engagement. In addition, it is likely important to identify whether CDPs with lower engagement levels are at risk of providing a poorer quality of service to clients and, perhaps, subsequently impacting a client's ability to be successful.

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Limited research has been conducted to explore the racial trauma experience of East Asian American women, especially in the workplace. We sought to understand (a) how racial trauma has influenced this population's work and non-work life and (b) how they have coped with this traumatic stress in career development and mental health aspects. Twelve participants working in the United States participated in semi-structured interviews about the impact of workplace racial trauma on their mental health, work, relationships, and coping strategies. Five domains were developed using conventional content analysis: (a) racial trauma at work is expressed with microaggression, (b) racial trauma causes a loss of psychological safety, (c) racial trauma creates relationship dilemmas, (d) racial trauma creates challenges in participants' career development paths, and (e) career and mental health coping strategies are used to manage racial traumatic stress. Implications for theoretical advances and counseling and organizational practice are also discussed.

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This study is an analysis of 24 variables associated with employee attitudes, behaviors and outcomes. A total of 140 college graduates participated in the study. Utilizing exploratory factor analysis (EFA) techniques, the research examined relationships among the following variables: perceived fit, job satisfaction, cognitive ability, vocational personality, academic achievement and gender. Components were extracted using Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and orthogonally rotated resulting in three component solution. A simple, interpretable structure was revealed, demonstrating a strong but differentially related association among three forms of perceived fit and facet level job satisfaction. The person-trait variables in the study were minimally related to perceived fit and satisfaction.

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Technology support call centres are becoming an increasingly important part of the American economy. However, there are many scholarly reports of problems associated among these endeavours. Research into mitigating these problems has tended to focus on structural alignment, or forms of team participation, leading to conflicting outcomes. HRD [human resource development] researchers are left with an unclear picture of the outcomes, and HRD practitioners have been left with the question of which of these interventions to implement. This study concurrently investigated the effects on job satisfaction from structural-alignment, high-involvement, autonomous-team interventions compared to a control group. The analysis indicated job satisfaction improvements in the alignment and high-involvement groups, with the high-involvement groups suggesting the most significant improvements. As a result, recommendations are made for HRD practitioners and future HRD research. Show less

The [Coronavirus Disease 2019] COVID-19 pandemic has caused nothing short of a revolution in the world of work in the 21st century. Never in most people's living memory has there been a global phenomenon that has reshaped the employment landscape so dramatically in a multitude of countries, dominating economic activity and altering the outlook of the workforce, perhaps forever. This upheaval is still underway but it's clear that things will never be the same again. This year's People at Work study captures these fascinating and unique developments in detail. It highlights just how widespread and globally consistent some of the emerging and escalating trends are, while underscoring how nuanced and complex the situation is at local levels.

Key findings are: (1) Workers want change: re-evaluating the importance of job security and business ethics; (2) Job satisfaction and outlook: employees have high expectations; (3) Pay and benefits: salary is a priority, but it's not all that matters; (4) Mental health: stress is increasing and work is suffering; and (5) Remote work and living arrangements: people poised to make a move.

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