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[The authors were] commissioned by The Careers & Enterprise Company to talk to young people about their future careers and aspirations, the resources they draw upon to make these decisions and the context in which decisions occur. [The authors] undertook fieldwork with young people, teachers and careers guidance professionals. [They] sought to build an understanding of young people's knowledge with respect to careers, and to understand the career decision journey navigated by young people. In addition, [the authors] explored young people's knowledge of career options more broadly and the context of their decisions. From this, [the authors] have several key findings: (1) career information on the internet is dispersed across multiple sites, difficult to evaluate and difficult to contextualise, and this contributes to young people switching off from using the full range of information available to make decisions about their future; (2)young people have varying levels of understanding about their study and career options, however, the breadth of knowledge shown was generally low, with even open and engaged young people demonstrating low awareness of the jobs actually available in the economy; (3) young people say, however, they have access to the information they want, and this is despite the fact that they often demonstrated a lack of knowledge and research about their options or even about their preferred career; (4) further insight was available from what the young people implied, but did not explicitly say, they would want to know - overall, the young people [the authors] spoke to seemed to have essentially based, or were seeking to base, the decision of their overarching career ambition on whether they had an image of themselves doing the job that they found appealing, and this image often came from a variety of sources, including family and friends, personal exposure, and the media - what seemed to vary across young people is the number of different jobs they tried to imagine themselves doing and the number of inputs they sought in order to develop that image; and (5) young people consistently named the social media networks and Google as the most common websites they visited, however, they rarely reported using social media networks beyond socialising and entertainment and were sceptical of receiving careers information, advice and guidance through Facebook in particular.

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This document follows the publication of the Moments of Choice research report by The Careers & Enterprise Company which looked at how young people think about careers. The research found that career decisions present a high 'cognitive burden': many options and few ways to make sensible comparisons between them. As a result many young people disengage from thinking about their future. The research was commissioned to explore how better outcomes data could be used to inform career decisions but it raised broader issues that needed addressing. This document sets out [the author's] response to those issues and seeks comment and input from stakeholders.

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This report draws on two pieces of research into how information is used to make careers decisions and explores ways in which better outcomes data could support informed choice. Longitudinal education outcomes (LEO) data is information about the relationship between people's education and their subsequent employment and earning. It can be used to assess the degree to which different qualifications, educational institutions, or educational routes are associated with higher earnings or higher rates of employment. The Department for Education (DfE) and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) asked [the authors] to explore how such data might be used to develop better outcomes data about education and support informed career choices by young people. The [authors] commissioned two pieces of research which were conducted between January and March 2016 and which are summarised in this document.

The first was research into how young people think about career decisions and how they use information. This research involved a literature review of what is known about career choices; in-depth interviews with 35 young people; round table discussions with teachers, employers and career guidance professionals; and co-design workshops with groups of young people to understand how they would like to approach career choices. The research informs the first main section of this report: 'Young people and career choices'. The second piece of research was a review of the current range of products and services providing information to support careers choices. In addition to desk research, [the authors] conducted interviews with organisations to understand their product development plans and to collect views on the most useful additional information that they would want to provide. The research is summarised in the second part of this report: 'Information available to young people' and in the annex. These pieces of research provided two views of how best to use LEO data which have been synthesised in this report.

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