When contemplating career choices, students commonly seek counsel from acquaintances, family members, and colleagues engaged in their desired professions. This advice-seeking endeavor encompasses a broad spectrum of insights, ranging from potential job openings, anticipated remuneration, and career trajectories to hiring protocols, among other pertinent aspects.

Ultimately, the information gleaned from these sources can either ignite a sense of inspiration and enthusiasm or, conversely, dissuade students from pursuing a particular vocation altogether. Research from Rensselaer explores how peers can influence the choices students make in terms of their careers.

“Analyzing students at a leading business school in India, we find that having peers who have worked in IT reduces the likelihood of receiving and accepting an offer in the IT industry,” the researchers explain. “If a student has no IT experience, however, IT peers ameliorate this effect to a certain degree.”

Finding talent

The researchers believe their findings are significant as talent attraction and retention is an ongoing problem for the IT industry. They highlight how IT managers are often crucial in terms of areas such as marketing, strategy, and project management.

“We usually expect that peers with experience in a certain industry would encourage business school students to enter that industry, but instead, our research points to the opposite effect,” they explain. “So, managers who want to use peer-to-peer learning to train workers should be aware that negative messages could be transmitted along with positive ones.”

Conversely, the researchers observed that female individuals lacking prior experience in the IT domain were more inclined to receive favorable encouragement, leading them to pursue careers in the field of Information Technology.

“If tech companies are listening, they should note that the spillover effect of equitable policies may reap more diverse managers because women listen to other women’s experiences,” they conclude.