Aspirations Revisited Five Years Later

April 7, 2009

The much-awaited first report from the Families and Work Institute’s (FWI) 2008 National Study of the Changing Workforce (NSCW) was released last week.  This unique study is administered every five years to a nationally represented sample of the American workforce.  There are now 30+ years of comparative data that is mined to reveal trends in what employees experience at home and on the job.  Ironically, FWI took over the original study from the Department of Labor in the late 1970’s when the latter agency couldn’t manage to keep it going.  There is a story of David and Goliath proportions here (with overtones of The Little Engine That Could), since FWI is a small non-profit organization with no internal resources to fund such a huge scientific undertaking twice each decade. And the DOL is, well, a major agency of the US Government that is focused on everything related to labor (i.e. the people who work and the organizations that employ them).

Like a snake that swallows an alligator, it takes at least five years between survey administrations for FWI, its partners, allies, and a multitude of other researchers to distill the essence from this vast treasure trove of data.  Ellen Galinsky, who heads the Institute, and the elusive James Bond, who serves as statistician-in-chief, are incredibly generous with this resource, always willing and eager for interested parties to ask new questions, run new analyses and continue parsing the meaning from the numbers.

So it is useful to know that this first report, Times Are Changing: Gender and Generation at Work and at Home, is a mere scratching of the surface, albeit an intriguing beginning.  This opening gambit takes an updated look at a trend discovered for the first time in the 2002 study, which showed that a small minority of college-educated men were less willing to take promotions or advancement than they had been previously.  At that point in time, there was a sizeable difference between the “ambition scores” (my term, not theirs) of men and women, with women markedly more likely to decline advancement than men.  The new study looks at young people (defined as under 29) and shows that for this demographic, young women (whether or not they have children) exhibit as much desire for jobs with more responsibility as their peer group of young men.
There is a lot more meat in this report, including the finding that certain groups of fathers are now experiencing more work-life conflict than mothers.  Be sure to take a look for yourself.

If you would enjoy having Ellen Galinksy explain it all to you directly, please note that she will be delivering a WorldatWork webinar on April 14 on a computer near you.  Learn about these and other critical shifts occurring in the workforce today and the implications you need to know to effectively attract, retain and motivate.

If you are interested in learning about a completely different aspect of the changing workforce, consider attending the workshop Ellen is doing at the WorldatWork Total Rewards conference.  She’s busy right now analyzing an entirely different set of data that will look at the connection between flexible work practices and health outcomes. 

The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of WorldatWork and its affiliate, Alliance for Work-Life Progress (AWLP).