Facilitated by: Professor Tracy Scurry, Dr Fiona Christie, Dr Daria Luchinskaya and Dr Ciaran Burke who are the convenors of the Employability, Enterprise and Work-based Learning Network. For more details about the network and its activities, please click here.

Student employment – or ‘earning while learning’ (hereafter EwL) - has become increasingly commonplace in the UK and globally. This increase is not only a result of labour market fragmentation and increased demand for part-time labour, but also in response to the rising cost of education, especially within Higher Education, and the cost-of-living crisis.  Employability imperatives and agendas also serve as a backdrop here, with students incited to increase their work readiness and ‘employability’ through engagement with work experience and other CV-enhancing extracurricular activities. Recent surveys show that round two thirds of full-time HE students in England do paid work (APPG for students 2023; NatCen and IES 2023). Not only are more university students working, but they are working longer hours. Significantly, earnings from paid work comprise over a quarter (27%) of average full-time student income for university students (NatCen and IES 2023).

Debates about EwL within media and policy typically fall into a binary of good/bad work.  On one hand, EwL is viewed positively for developing students’ ‘employability’; on the other, it is seen as hindering ‘proper’ engagement in education. Whereas the former focuses on internships and work placements, the latter emphasises students’ paid work as instrumental, temporary or detrimental to transitions into ‘graduate careers’.  We argue that this binary view of EwL glosses over the content and nature of student work and neglects the extent to which experiences may be shaped by, and productive of, wider inequalities in young people’s working biographies. 

In this seminar we will present emerging findings from a major ESRC-funded mixed-methods study of young women’s earliest experiences of work (http://www.ywworking.co.uk), drawing on national surveys (including the Labour Force Survey) and 16 focus groups with 84 young women students (aged 14-23) in schools, colleges and universities across England.   We will discuss the reasons for working among young women students as well as the value and meaning they place on this work and the challenges they encounter, including navigating the dual demands of paid work and study. We will also examine their actual experiences of this work. In doing so, we will argue that, rather than operating as a constraint or accelerator for future career transitions, these early labour force experiences of EwL shape students' understandings of work in ways that may prefigure later forms of occupational gendering.  As such, the research has significance for policy and practice related to employability for HE students and graduates.

Speaker bios

Dr Kim Allen is an Associate Professor in Social Inequalities at the University of Leeds. A sociologist of youth with expertise in young people’s transitions, inequalities of gender and class, and austerity cultures, Kim has worked on a range of research projects in these areas including: ‘Celebrity Culture and Young People’s Classed and Gendered Aspirations’ (ESRC); Young women’s transitions in austerity (British Academy); and ‘Living Gender in Diverse Times’(ESRC).  She is a member of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies (CIGS) and Centre for Research on Families, Lifecourse and Generation (FLaG) at the University of Leeds.

Dr Kirsty Finn is a Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Manchester. Kirsty is a sociologist of Higher Education whose interests include educational mobilities, youth transitions, gender and personal life, and graduate transitions.