A TAXONOMY OF TECHNICALLY BASED CAREERS*
LOTTE BAILYN and EDGAR H. SCHEIN
November, 1974
WP 754-74
*From L. Bailyn and E. H. Schein, Work Involvement
in Technically Based Careers: A Study of M.I.T
Alumni at Mid-Career, (in progress, 1974).
_1_^____(__1_____1___11^_11_____1_1
Chapter 2
A Taxonomy of Technically Based Careers
When we speak of technically based careers, we are referring to a number
of general characteristics of the men in the sample.
First, all are graduates
of a technological institute in which a core of mathematics and science courses
was an absolute undergraduate requirement, even among those who majored in
"non-technical" fields.
And though some respondents now have jobs seemingly
unrelated to their undergraduate major (e.g. a physicist now doing photography),
the bulk of the careers under study directly reflect this initial technical
training.
Second, the decision to come to M.I.T. presumably reflects a particular
pattern of talents, motives, and values already present in high school.
The
desire to be educated in science and technology implies, on the part of a
high school graduate, an already existing commitment to a particular range
of fields.
People who are attracted to the fields of science and engineering
have certain personality traits and needs that distinguish them from those who
enter the field of humanities.
Those in science and engineering show, at an early
age, an inclination toward scientific, mechanical, quantitative activities
rather than aesthetic ones (Sternberg, 1955; Hudson, 1967).
Compared to those
in humanities, they are less people-oriented and more thing-oriented--they
would rather deal with objects than people (Roe, 1957; Rosenberg, 1957; Perrucci
and Gerstl, 1969).
Scientists and engineers have a high need for achievement
(Dipboye and Anderson, 1961; Izard, 1960) as well as a high need for selfexpression (Rosenberg, 1957; Perrucci and Gerstl, 1969).
They are concerned with
order and stability (Moore and Levy, 1951; Steiner, 1953; Izard, 1960; Roe, 1961;
Perrucci and Gerstl, 1969) and are less flexible than those in humanities.
They
also differ in their cognitive styles, having been found to be more convergent
than divergent (Hudson, 1967; Kolb and Goldman, 1973).
____1_111^·^1_111_·--1111_11__
.11__..
III
-2-
Though there is no direct evidence of the personality, cognitive style, and
values of the respondents when they first entered M.I.T., they most likely fit
the scientific pattern, a pattern that would have been further reinforced by
their undergraduate curriculum.
homogeneous group:
staff positions
As graduates, therefore, they were a relatively
over half (51%) entered the world of work in engineering
And though, subsequently, their careers followed a variety of
paths, it is important to keep this common base in mind in analyzing their
current occupational roles.
Occupational Categories--The External Career
The process of finding a taxonomy of objectively defined careers went
through several stages.
The first step was to code the respondents' present
occupation into a valid and meaningful set of occupational categories that
would reflect the technical bias of the.sample.
This meant, for instance,
that engineers and scientists were not combined, as is often done in occupational classifications, and that technical managers were kept separate from
other functional managers, even though such groups are often combined in
surveys of managers.
The final set of categories chosen is shown in Table 1.
Before looking at the frequencies, it is necessary to explain the meaning
of some of these categories, particularly in the area of "management."
We
wanted to differentiate unambiguously those respondents who were clearly
entrepreneurial in their orientation, those who were clearly oriented toward
general management per se, and those who were oriented toward a particular
business or technical function.
We did not want to confuse any of these
categories with that of the manager whose job reflects involvement in a
family concern, where it would be difficult to judge how much of his
1
A further 12% combine, in their first jobs, engineering with other duties.
The figures given are based on the 87% of the respondents for whom information on first jobs is available.
-3-
performance was the result of his own achievement and how much reflected
the initial family position.
Nor did we want to confuse first level
supervision with management.
Given these initial concerns the managerial
categories were defined in the following way:
1.
Entrepreneurs are those managers who in one way or another are involved
in the founding of their own company, regardless of their present rank.
That is, some of these men are now presidents, others are technical managers,
others are vice-presidents.
What is distinctive about them, as evidenced also
in other analyses (Roberts and Wainer, 1971; Schein, 1972, 1974) is not
their present rank but the fact that they have been involved in entrepreneurial
activity.
2.
General Managers are men who clearly occupy a position above functional
management.
These individuals attained their positions through promotion rather
than by founding their own company or joining a family business.
Sample job
titles are president, executive vice-president, general manager, managing
director, division president, group-vice-president.
3.
one.
Functional Managers head a function
other than a purely technical
For example, vice presidents of finance or personnel directors are
functional managers.
Some company titles such as secretary, chief counsel,
and treasurer were found to be ambiguous--did they belong in the functional
or general manager category?
In those cases we looked at the entire question-
naire and attempted to make a judgment as to which group the man belonged in.
Similar analyses were made of a few ambiguous jobs such as vice-president of
planning or director of corporate development.
4.
Technical Managers are those men who are clearly in charge of a
technical function such as basic research
or technical sales support.
*XS
iS0geN
research and development, engineering
Excluded from this category are first-line technical
III
-4supervisors, group heads, or team leaders, who described themselves essentially
as senior technical people.
The individual had to be at least two levels above
the working technical level and had to list managerial responsibilities as part
of his job.
A further subclassification of this category concerned the
technical areas involved:
engineering, computer applications, and science.
Decisions of field were made mainly on the basis of self-description,
corroborated, where necessary, by checking back on the undergraduate majors
of the respondents.
Once the managerial roles were properly defined, the rest ification was simpler.
the class-
Non-management or staff designations were given to
those employees of companies or laboratories who did'not fit the management
criteria, and included, therefore, first-level supervisors, team leaders,
and project leaders.
This group was divided into Technologists, which were
further differentiated by technical field, and Business Staff.
The latter
category includes salesmen, financial analysts, and other functional specialists who are neither in management nor in a purely technical role.
The classification of respondents into the Educational and Other categories posed no special problems inasmuch as those categories were straight2
forward and unambiguous.
2
Coding into occupational categories was done by the two authors in conjunction
with Dany Siler, research assistant to the project at that time. We used, where
necessary, all the items in the questionnaire touching on'the alumni's current
occupations, but concentrated mainly on job title and brief description of
function. Error was minimized by having at least two of us independently code
each questionnaire. In about 95% of the cases (based on a check of one fourth
of the questionnaires) the first two coders agreed on their classification,
which then became final. If disagreement remained after discussion between
the two initial coders, the questionnaire was given to the third person and
final classification was based on the consensus of all three researchers.
- 5With these definitions in mind let us look at the occupational distribu3
tion presented in Table 1. Initially this information is given separately
for each of the three classes in an attempt to identify the differences in
distribution of the three age groups.
It should be clear, of course, that any
such differences that exist may not only be dependent on the different career
stages the three groups are in, but may also reflect differences in the tenor
of the times in which they were educated.
Both of these possible sources of
differences must be kept in mind in interpreting the data.
In the oldest class, those almost twenty years beyond graduation, the table
shows that over 50 per-cent are in some form of management, almost equally divided
between technical managers and those in non-technical areas.
Another 30 per
cent are staff employees of organizations, primarily performing technical functions.
Only 6 per cent are in education, and the remainder are in the other
professions shown.
It is a distribution not unexpected from a group of M.I.T.
alumni, and the class four years younger shows a very similar profile, though
here the number in education has risen somewhat.
In the youngest class, however, (just over ten years after graduation),
more differences emerge.
In this group there are even more people in education,
more technical employees, and more in "other professions,"
The most obvious
difference, the smaller number of managers, is undoubtedly due to age and
level of career development.
One would expect that over the next eight years
many of these alumni who are presently in staff or technical positions would
be promoted into management, thus approximating the distribution of managers
found in the older groups.
The jump in the number of professors and in "other
professions," on the other hand, probably reflects a real change in initial
career choices based on changing national priorities and social values.
3
The reader must be cautioned that even though the sample represents more than
60 per cent of the total population surveyed, this distribution may not reflect
exactly the actual proportion of alumni in the different occupations, since we
have no way of knowing whether non-response is correlated systematically with
occupation. In particular, previous experience with response rates to a mail
questionnaire of technology and chemistry alumni (Shuttleworth, 1940), indicate
that the number unemployed as well as those employed outside the field of their
training are likely to be underrepresented.
-------- ·-----
lm
5a
TABLE 1
Basic Occupations of Alumni of the Classes of 1951, 1955, and 1959
111
Occupational Category
N
%
2za --- 52---
MANAGEMENT
Entrepreneurs
General Managers
Functional Managers
Technical Managers
Science
Engineering
Computer Applications
Other Fields
Other Managers
Family Business
Other, not classifiable
NON-MANAGEMENT, EMPLOYED IN COMPANY
OR LABORATORY
TECHNOLOGIST
Science
Engineering
Computer Applications
Other, not classifiable
BUSINESS STAFF
_ I
1 --. 5
N
%
1951
1959
N
___
....
A__ __13Q___28_
40
26
75
8
5
14
27
15
50
7
4
14
15
9
32
11
84
15
2
16
3
5
63
7
1
17
2
4
1
45
18
10
4
2
*
_
2
*
17
3
3
1
8
2
2
1
4
1
*k
164
30
104
27
173
39
2
108
6
4
20
1
14
'60
9
4
16
2
1
*
1
*
29
5
20
5
26
100
23
3
21
6
22
5
1
5
EDUCATION
_
Consultant
Engineering and Computer
Applications
Management and Other
Architect/Planner
Lawyer
Doctor
Other (minister, writer, artist, etc
UNEMPLOYED
. ._ ·~
2
17
5
39
9
16
3
3
1
2
*
16
3
2
4
1
1
30.
3
3
7
1
1
1~__...
45___12__
15
6
20
4
4
8
3
1
4
1
1
1
9
8
13
4
5
6
2
2
4
1
1
2
7
15
10
8
12
8
2
3'
2
2
3
2
6
1
7
2
8
2
534
TOTAL RESPONDENTS
1
13
52 ---
OTHER PROFESSIONS
3
2
7
.__25 -___18
_____.8___11__
University or College Professor:
Science
Engineering & Computer
Applications**
Other Fields
Junior College, High School, & Other
%
100%
371
100%
446
101%
~ ~ ~ ~
*Less than 1/2%
**Professors in computer applications:
- --__- -________'______ 1----
1---,,-
.-
I
-...---.
-
.....----
.--.-._.. `-. --.
-.
-II
1951-0; 1955-2; 1959-9.
__-...--,---...-..
-I-- --
.
I
-6-
In the subsequent decade such changes led to a decided broadening of the
opportunities for other kinds of careers within M.I.T.
But in the sample of
graduates from the 'fifties, these trends are still minimal.
more is the degree of similarity across the three classes.
What strikes one
Here are a group
of people who are fairly well established in a set of primarily managerial and
technical careers.
They are people who chose a particular occupational direction
early in their lives and are now in the process of stabilizing it (Super, et al.,
1963).
The education they received, the time in which they received it, and the
assumptions on which their initial career choices were made, are all reflected
in the occupational roles they are now playing.
The occupational distribution of Table 1 includes data on all respondents
in the survey.
analysis.
Its level of detail, however, precludes its use for subsequent
We were, therefore, faced with the problem of recombining categories
in such a way as to retain the crucial distinctions, but, at the same time, to
yield few enoughgtopings with a sufficient number of people in them to permit
an investigation of occupational differences.
Both the nature of the sample
and the numbers involved guided the decisions.
As a first step in this direction the three classes were combined into a
single group, since the similarities between them seemed to outweigh the small
differences that existed.
Secondly, some categories were eliminated altogether.
Law and medicine, for instance, though obviously important professions and
increasingly chosen by M.I.T. graduates, represent too few people in the sample
to allow meaningful analysis.
For the same reason, we also ignored managers in
family businesses, teachers below the college level, and the handful of respondents in other fields or not currently employed.
Finally, certain categories
4
Thts is another trend that has accelerated in the ensuing time. Fully 11% of
the Class of 1973 entered medical school, and 4% entered law school, in the
fall following their M.I.T. graduation.
5
The 140 people eliminated in this way are included in those analyses that do
not deal with occupational distinctions.
_IX·_FYIIZ___I_---^--
.I LIP-I·O·I-I.·--I1·s(^-1·14(------
... -----
- 7-
were combined:
computer applications were included as part of engineering and
the distinction between engineering and management consultants was dropped.
This process resulted in twelve occupational categories.
They are given,
together with their distribution, in Table 2, rearranged to reflect more
accurately the degree to which they have, at the present time, a technical or
scientific core.
As can be seen, the entrepreneurs, general managers, functional
managers, and business staff are listed together because these occupations have
in common
n abandonment of the primarily technical emphasis in favor of a
business o- managerial emphasis.
The technical managers, t
working engineers
and scientists, and the professors of engineering and science are grouped
together because these occupations are still clearly based on a technical core.
They represent the predominant part of the sample.
The consultants and
architects are more difficult to classify on this dimension and hence are kept
separate.
Career Patterns
The question now arises as to whether these twelve occupational groups can
be combined into a few more basic patterns.
It is evident from Table 3, which
gives the undergraduate major, undergraduate performance, graduate school
attendance, and initial jobs of these groups, that such a patterning exists.
As a matter of fact, the table indicates three groups more or less homogeneous
with respect to early career events.
Since the goal of the study is to investi-.
gate work involvement, its origins and its correlates, in careers that can be
presumed to be structurally and psychologically similar to each other, the
identification of these patterns represents a first step in this process.
Pattern E.
Pattern E represents the predominant part of the sample.
It is characterized by the following modal tendencies:
1) graduation from
the School of Engineering; 2) grades below the honors level; 3) termination
of education below the doctoral level; and 4) career entry through an initial
·1__·
__I_ __________r_______l_
_II____·_____(__·__1 1-I1lrl-_-·1
7a
TABLE 2
Final Occupational Classification
N
BUSINESS:
NO TECHNICAL CORE
359
30%
Entrepreneur
82
7%
General Manager
50
4%
157
13%
70
6%
749
62%
Functional Manager
Business Staff
OCCUPATIONS WITH A TECHNICAL CORE
Technical Manager:
Science
Engineering
20
232
2%
19%
Staff Technologist
Science
Engineering
60
306
.5,
25%
Professor:
Science
Engineering
69
62
6%
5%
103
9%
Consultant
60
5%
Architect
43
4%
OTHER OCCUPATIONS
*These percentages are based on the 1211 people whose occupations fall into
these categories.
I
III
- 8-
job in an engineering staff position.
The occupations in which the respondents in
this pattern end up comprise all of the management groups except science
managers, plus business staff, consultants, and staff engineers.
This is the
Engineering Based Career--the various roles in which an engineer may find himself
some ten to twenty years after his engineering training.
The bulk of the group
is still performing a clearly technical job as staff engineer or engineering
manager, but for more than a third of them there has been a movement into a more
business oriented career as consultant, manager, or entrepreneur.
It is obvious
that the business occupations in this group--and, therefore, in the sample as a
whole--represent a particular type of business career, primarily that of technically trained engineers in business6
Pattern SP.
The SP Pattern, representing a much smaller group, is more
professionally oriented:
1) their undergraduate degrees were primarily in
science (with the exception of the engineering faculty who, naturally, graduated
from the School of Engineering); 2) their undergraduate grades were relatively
high; 3) they tend to have doctorates; and 4) their first jobs were not characteristically in engineering staff positions.
The occupations represented in this
group are professors of engineering, professors of science, working scientists
in industry or non-profit laboratories, and a few science managers.
Though the
numbers are small, it is important to point out that among technical managers.,
those who are science managers apparently represent a different career pattern
from those who are engineering managers.
The science managers seem to be a
more fully professionalized group than the engineering managers.
6It must be remembered that because of the curriculum requirements of M.I.T. in
the'fifties, even those with undergraduate degrees in management have had
technical training.
60
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III
- 9 -
The most interesting aspect of this pattern, however, is the fact that it
includes the engineering professors.
What this seems to imply is that in
engineering the academic role represents quite a different path from the staff
or managerial one, a distinction not found in science.
This is corroborated by
the differences in undergraduate cumulative grade point averages shown in
Table 3.
Though all the academics tend to have had higher grades than those who
are now technologists or technical managers, this difference is considerably
greater for engineers than for scientists.
As a matter of fact, engineering
professors have the highest grades of any occupational group in the sample.
Undergraduate grades most likely acted as a powerful selective force for the
engineering majors in our sample:
if they were good, their recipients tended
to go to graduate school for their doctorates which then propelled them into
academic rather than industrial careers.
7
The occupations and educational backgrounds of the respondents in this
pattern indicate that it can be thought of as the Scientific Professionally
it presumes a doctorate, an orientation toward science, and
Based Career:
an orientation toward research and teaching.
Pattern P.
The alumni in Pattern P represent a small group of architects
and planners trained specifically for their current positions while at M.I.T.
They are the only group of any magnitude in the sample from what is often
referred to as the "free" professions--the only representatives of the more
usual Professional Career.
Because of the homogeneity in career origins
of the sample already described, the major "free" professions--law, medicine,
theology--are almost entirely missing.
7
There is much more movement into universities from companies or labs among
scientists than among engineers. If we look at all people whose first jobs
were in engineering staff positions (no matter what career pattern they now
fall in) only 5% are now teaching. If, in contrast, we take all those whose
first jobs were in science staff positions, almost one third (29%) are now
teaching in some capacity.
-
10 -
Preliminary Occupational Differences
Some of the values and work-related attitudes and feelings associated with
these patterns are discussed in future chapters.
present some background to these future findings.
Here, however, we want to
Table 4 indicates some
differences that exist among the occupations in their background, and in some
of their occupational and family characteristics.
The first part of the table shows the occupational status of the respondents'
fathers. None of the differences are very large, but a number of things are
worth noting.
Looking first at the career patterns as a whole, one notes that
the engineering based alumni are somewhat less likely to have had professional
fathers and more likely to have had businessmen fathers, though they do not
differ from the other groups at the lower end of the occupational distribution.
Scientific professional alumni and architect/planners are more likely to have had
professional fathers.
As other occupational research has shown (Osipow, 1973),
father's occupation is in general somewhat correlated with son's occupation.
Within each career pattern one notes further that among the alumni who are
presently entrepreneurs, there is a disproportionate number of small businessmen
fathers, whereas among those who are now general managers we see a disproportionate
number of fathers in major business enterprises.
come from blue collar homes.
Very few of the general managers
Staff engineers and engineering managers are less
likely to have had fathers in major businesses and more likely to have had fathers
with blue collar occupations.
This latter finding corroborates the idea that
engineering is one of the major avenues for upward social mobility in our society.
Engineering professors do not differ markedly from the staff engineers and
engineering managers in fathers' background, which further supports the assertion
that their different career evolution was a function of their higher grades
stimulating them toward graduate school, rather than initially different career
_____
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aspirations.
11 -
Science professors, in contrast, have a higher proportion of fathers
in the top professions as well as a higher proportion in blue collar occupations.
Perhaps the academic career in science tends to draw those people whose talents
are so inclined even if their socio-economic background is to some extent incongruent
with it.
The second part of Table 4 deals with certain current occupational characteristics.
It shows, first, the sector of the economy within which the alumni are
presently working--private or profit making, non-profit organizations, and national
As might be expected, almost all of the Pattern E alumni
or local government.
work in the private sector.
likely to work there.
In contrast, the Pattern SP alumni are much less
In the case of the professors this finding is trivial since
they work in a non-profit institution by definition.
But in the case of the staff
scientists and science managers it represents a real difference:
there is a
greater tendency for them to work in non-profit or government laboratories,
relative to engineering staff and managers.
This part of the table also shows the income distribution of the career
patterns.
Looking first at Pattern E, one notes both very high incomes--the
entrepreneurs, general managers, and consultants--and very low incomes--business
staff and engineering staff.
Alumni in Pattern SP have generally lower incomes
than the Pattern E alumni, which is primarily a reflection of lower academic
salaries, especially among professors of science.
Engineering professors have
higher salaries than science professors, but still only come even with engineering
staff or managers.
Staff scientists like staff engineers have very low salaries,
relative to the other groups, in spite of the fact that they have a higher proportion of doctorates.
Some of these differences could be due to age and career
stage, but elsewhere (Bailyn and Schein, 1972) we have shown that they persist even
when one controls for age.
- 12 -
Finally, the third part of Table 4 presents data on some current family
characteristics of the alumni:
1) the stage at which their family is; 2) their
wife's professional status (based mainly on level of education); and 3) their
wife's working status at the time of the survey.
Not surprisingly, the
managerial groups are farther along in their family cycle than most other groups
and professors are less far along, a reflection of the relative ages of these
8
groups.
Among those who are married, the Pattern E alumni are more likely to have
non-professional wives than the Pattern SP alumni, with the exception of the
science managers who closely resemble the other managerial groups.
The most
extreme case of this is found in the general managers, among whom 88% have
non-professional wives.
Professors and staff scientists, in contrast, are most
likely to have professional wives.
The data with respect to whether or not wives
are currently working show similar results.
Most of the Pattern E alumni have
non-working wives, with the general managers again showing this in its most
extreme form; Pattern SP alumni are more likely to have working wives except for
the science managers; architects tend to fall in between the other patterns
except that they have the highest proportion of wives who work part time.
It is obvious, therefore, that though the patterns differ from each other
in terms of the occupational backgrounds of fathers, which sector of the economy
they tend to work in, their income, and their present family situation, there
are also clear and understandable differences on these variables among the
occupations within a given pattern.
Still, it is evident from the analysis pre-
sented here, that some degree of patterning does exist in people's careers.
On
the basis of undergraduate major, undergraduate performance, graduate degree,
8It should be remembered that the trend to go into academic careers was stronger
in the more recent group of graduates (Class of 1959). This class also had
fewer managers, so professors are more likely to be younger than managers.
I
I
II
loarars
-
- 13 -
first job, and present job we were able to identifyr three career patterns:
Pattern E or an engineering based career, which branches into staff engineering,
consulting, business staff, and management (including entrepreneurs); Pattern SP
or a scientific professionally based career, which branches into being a professor,
a staff scientist, or a science manager; and, finally, Pattern P, a purely professional career defined in this sample by a small number of architects and
planners, which results primarily in performing in the specific profession for
which one was trained.
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Doing?" Technology Review, 74, 3-11.
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Izard, C.E., 1960. "Personality Characteristics of Engineers as Measured by the
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Kolb, D., and M. Goldman, 1973. Toward a Typology of Learning Styles and Learning
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Osipow, S.H., 1973.
Crofts.
"Artful Contriver:
A Study of Engineers,"
Appleton-Century-
Theories of Career Development, New York:
Perrucci, R., and J. Gerstl, 1969. Profession Without Community:
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Roberts. E.B., and H.A. Wainer, 1971. "Some Characteristics of
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Roe, A., 1957. "Early Determinants of Vocational Choice," Journal
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"The Psychology of the Scientist," Science, 134, 456-459.
Rosenberg, M., 1957.
Occupations and Values, Glencoe, Illinois:
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Schein, .E.H., 1972. The General Manager: A Profile, Distinguished Management
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The
Sternberg, C., 1955. "Personality Trait Patterns of College Students Majoring
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New York: CEEB Research Monograph #4.
"--s-
A Self-Concept Theory,
`-----