100 Jobs of the Future: Research Engagement and Impact

In this contract research, Ford Australia originally negotiated for the team to construct a report about future work, and future jobs, that would be relevant to youth in thinking about preparing their future. However, the project was reconstructed to focus on 100 Jobs of the Future and later a Jobs Explorer Tool. In this shift towards a more populist construction of the research, we considered whether and in what ways we could deliver the project with academic integrity. There were three key features of the research that we needed to negotiate: 1. Constructing the research in a way that maintained academic integrity, was innovative, and satisfied the need for the research output to be engaging for the general public and young people; 2. Constructing 100 jobs in a rigorous but imaginative way that would ground the ideas around future work; and 3. Crafting a Jobs Explorer Tool that engaged people in thinking about their own skills and career preferences as a precursor to further exploring work futures. In this chapter we consider how this negotiation is central to notions of engagement and impact of research, and what lessons it contains for academic work more generally.