A Holland Perspective on the U.S. Workforce from 1960 to 1990

Abstract

Some career theorists and researchers view the occupational world as increasingly unstable and unpredictable.Indeed, they view the concept of job or occupation as less than useful in thinking about work and career guidance.Such a view appears to call into question the appropriateness of an approach to career guidance that seeks to link personal characteristics to jobs in a time of rapid labor market changes.Holland's typological theory (Holland, 1997) specifies a connection between vocational personalities and work environments that makes it possible to use the same RIASEC classification system for both persons and jobs.Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, a small group of researchers began to examine the labor market using Holland's typological system.Altogether, these studies examined a variety of variables with respect to Holland codes, including percentage of men and women in occupations, ethnicity of workers in occupations, salaries earned by occupational incumbents during the preceding year, educational and training levels associated with occupations, and complexity ratings for occupational activities.The present study examined trends in labor market characteristics using census data from 1960 to 1990.We found stability in the census data for the use of occupational constructs for six kinds of work from 1960-1990, e.g., the Realistic area includes many more named occupations in the census than the other five areas, averaging between 46% and 50% of all occupations included over the 40 year period.Regarding levels of cognitive complexity associated with occupations, we found Investigative and Artistic areas were associated with the highest Cx ratings, and Conventional was associated with the lowest ratings.We found that employment trends did not support claims of a major shift in employment across the six kinds of work.While employment declined by 18% in the Realistic area relative to other Holland types, it remained the largest area of employment through 1990 and actually increased in real numbers.Only 1% of employment was in the Artistic area.There were marked differences in employment between men and women across the six areas from 1960-1990, e.g., between 79% and 85% of male workers were in the Realistic and Enterprising areas and only 15% to 21% of men were employed in the other four areas, while women were employed in more varied kinds of work, including Conventional, Realistic, Social, and more recently, Enterprising areas.Regarding cognitive complexity and kinds of work, we found employment in the Investigative area occurred only at the highest two levels.The other four areas, Realistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional, showed employment in all six levels of Cx ratings.We found that employment was related to the level of cognitive complexity of work, and that employment was also unevenly distributed across the six areas of work in relation to gender.Finally, we examined income and gender by kinds of work and found the average income profile for six kinds of work ranging from lowest to highest was CRASEI.The discrepancy across the six areas was very large, with the average Investigative income more than two times larger than the average Conventional income.Our study suggested that there was considerable stability in the nature of occupations used to report employment in the census with respect to Holland codes.The often discussed dramatic shift in the nature of work, and by implication the occupations that encompass work, was not apparent in these data, although there was considerable variability in the numbers of occupations across the RIASEC areas.Our findings did not indicate a dramatic shift in employment across the six areas of work.Although employment in the Investigative area doubled over the 40 year period of our study, it remained only 6% of employment in 1990.Career guidance programs could use census information to show the relationships between kinds of work, cognitive skill development, gender, and financial income.

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