People appear to place a high value on full-time work. Fig. 14.5 shows that almost 90 per cent of all the young people interviewed said that they preferred full-time work to part-time work or to no work at all.
Figs 14.6 and 14.7 show some other qualities that young people say they like in work or training. Fig. 14.6 shows that when young people are asked why they want to take up or like certain work they say that it is because it interests them: they like work that they find interesting. This was a major reason for preferring full-time work: it was thought more interesting than part-time work. Young people also said they liked work that kept them busy all the time. In addition, they liked work and training that they thought would help them achieve their long-term goals; and that was getting them somewhere in life. Other qualities that people appear to value in work are some security, reasonable pay, and the opportunity for promotion (see Fig. 14.7). Part-time work is not valued at all highly.
Taking all of these features together it would seem that the ideal job would be interesting, full-time, and reasonably paid; it would afford the chance for some promotion and provide job security. If we compare these features against CDEP employment, we can suggest that it is only the last of these that might apply to it. CDEP work is normally part-time and elsewhere in the survey young people described the work as very boring.
On the other hand, young people found the full-time employment and full-time training that was subsidised by CDEP (shown as one of the outputs in Fig. 14.1) to be extremely enjoyable. Indeed, people aspired to this kind of position. Those that were in this form of
work found it interesting and contrasted it with the part-time CDEP work which they found pointless and boring. Therefore, when young people said that they did not value CDEP and did not think that it would help them with their careers, they were really talking about the normal part-time CDEP work, not about the full-time positions that were facilitated by the scheme.