Source: Radio New Zealand
People are less likely to find a job in New Zealand if they are open and agreeable, a study has found. 123rf
An OECD study indicates people are less likely to find a job in New Zealand if they are open and agreeable.
Being extroverted or emotionally stable doesn’t help as much with employability in this country as it does in most others, but being conscientious does.
But none of those traits have as much impact on employability as being literate.
The findings come from the Survey of Adult Skills conducted in 2023 with 160,000 respondents in 31 countries, 29 of which included questions about social and emotional skills.
It measured respondents’ scores in five areas – agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, extraversion, and openness to experience – and compared them with their level of education and employment outcomes.
The report said the results showed adults’ social and emotional skills were linked to their education attainment and “cognitive proficiency”.
“Among the five domains assessed, openness and emotional stability stand out as consistent, albeit moderate, predictors of educational attainment. These skills likely support autonomous learning and independent thinking, which are particularly valuable in post-secondary education,” it said.
“They are also positively related to proficiency in literacy, numeracy and adaptive problem solving, above and beyond their impact on formal education. Individuals with high levels of openness use cognitive skills more frequently and are more likely to participate in adult learning, which may contribute to their higher average cognitive proficiency.”
The study found agreeableness had the least impact on respondents’ likelihood of being employed across the OECD, with a weak positive effect in some countries and a weak negative effect on most others.
But agreeableness had a stronger negative effect on employment in New Zealand than any other nation in the study, especially among people with low literacy.
Openness had a weak effect in most countries and New Zealand was among a handful where it was negatively associated with employment, again with a stronger effect on people with low literacy.
Being conscientious had a stronger positive effect on the likelihood of employment of poorly literate New Zealanders than any of the five traits on any group of workers in any of the OECD countries.
But across all respondents literacy had a bigger average effect on employment and on wages than any of the traits, including in New Zealand.
None of the traits had much effect on people’s wages and in most countries including New Zealand educational attainment had the biggest effect on earnings.
Across the participating nations, teachers and social and religious professions showed the highest levels of agreeableness and mechanics, builders and bus and truck drivers the lowest.
Waiters and bartenders had the lowest levels of conscientiousness and cleaners the lowest levels of emotional stability and extraversion.
Managers had the highest levels of emotional stability and conscientiousness.
New Zealand was one of the few countries where extraversion was not linked to job satisfaction, but in this country emotional stability and literacy were.
Emotional stability was the trait most strongly linked to life satisfaction and also with self-reported health, including in New Zealand.
Older people reported higher levels of conscientious in nearly all countries and especially in countries including Denmark, Hungary, New Zealand, Canada and Czechia.
New Zealand was one of the few countries where there was little to no difference between younger and older people’s reported openness, extraversion and agreeableness.
Men reported lower agreeableness and conscientiousness but higher emotional stability than women across nearly all countries, including New Zealand.
The study found socio-economic background affected social and emotional skills though the effect was smaller in New Zealand than in most other countries on most of the measures.
“Adults with at least one tertiary-educated parent tend to report higher levels of openness and lower conscientiousness than their counterparts with less educated parents,” it said.
Similarly, adults with a tertiary education reported higher levels of openness and, to a lesser extent, emotional stability, extraversion and conscientiousness than those without a higher secondary school education, though in New Zealand the effect was generally smaller.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
