Finding a High-Quality Job in the Caring Industry: HPOG Participants’ Occupational Choices

This is the second brief in the HPOG 2.0 Participant Perspectives series, funded by the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE). Many studies of career pathways programs are ongoing, but firsthand accounts of participants’ experiences are limited. This brief shares insights from such firsthand accounts and thereby adds to our understanding of participant experiences in career pathways programs.

The findings in this brief describe that when making occupational choices, participants:

• Chose healthcare because they are interested in caring for other people.
• Considered both financial—wages and costs of participating in training—and other job quality factors when choosing from within the variety of healthcare occupations.
• Defined job quality broadly. Policymakers and practitioners typically define and measure job quality using factors such as schedules, benefit packages, and opportunities for advancement. The participants we interviewed understood job quality to comprise these features along with autonomy, respect, opportunities for career growth and enhancement, and physical considerations such as lifting and offensive sensory experiences.
• Viewed occupational choice as an ongoing process, what we call “career crafting,” that evolved with new work experience and life needs.

This brief reports themes from in-depth, in-person interviews conducted between October 2019 and January 2020. The sample includes 153 program participants across 14 local HPOG 2.0 programs.

Participation in the interviews was voluntary. Interviews were semi-structured and usually lasted between 60 and 90 minutes. The conversational interviews covered a common set of topics: career pathways; employment and education histories; experience of the HPOG 2.0 training; managing work, family, and training; and finances. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed using qualitative software.

For this brief we supplemented the interview data with information collected for the implementation study associated with the broader HPOG 2.0 National Evaluation.

Thomas, Hannah and Jacqueline Mendez. 2022. Finding a High-Quality Job in the Caring Industry: HPOG Participants’ Occupational Choices, OPRE Report 2022-57. Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.