| Abstract: |
Understanding student's knowledge and attitudes towards particular careers, as well as the behaviours that they engage in towards those careers, is important to determine career support or training needs, and also to better understand the careers landscape of young people. While scales to measure general careers knowledge exist, there is a paucity of validated scales specifically measuring tech careers knowledge, attitudes and behaviours. The Hg Foundation commissioned the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) to develop and validate the Tech Career Scale: a self-report measure designed to assess young people's knowledge, attitudes and behaviours relating to careers in tech, alongside perceived barriers. The scale was developed to support impact measurement for programmes such as Futures For All's IntoTech Programme, which aims to improve students' knowledge of and attitudes towards tech careers. A two-phase study with Year 10 pupils in schools in England was used to develop and test the instrument. In Phase 1 (474 pupils across 14 schools), exploratory factor analysis was used to refine items and identify the underlying structure. In Phase 2 (2,011 pupils across 29 schools), confirmatory factor analysis tested the model in an independent sample. Findings supported a four-factor structure comprising Knowledge, Attitudes, Behaviours and Barriers. Reliability was acceptable to excellent for Knowledge (α = 0.92), Attitudes (α = 0.86), Behaviours (α = 0.94), and the overall scale (α = 0.94), with Barriers showing lower but still acceptable reliability (α ≈ 0.69). Three subscales (Knowledge, Attitudes, Behaviours) showed meaningful positive associations with a short validation scale on intended A Level subject choices (maths, science, technology), while Barriers showed little association, suggesting it is best treated as an optional standalone subscale rather than included in the overall score. The survey is practical for school-based delivery and pre/post evaluation designs, with a median completion time of around eight minutes and guidance (including percentile-band interpretation) to help translate results into accessible stakeholder-facing reporting. The final version of the Tech Career Scale and item level descriptive statistics are included in the appendices of this report. |