café career magazine
in touch
Career-learning home page
Magazine - articles and activities Underpinning - basic ideas for the work
Memory - key articles archive Moving on

understanding career as a story

 

TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED
seeing and believing in careers work

It is unreasonable to expect ideas - first developed in the early twentieth-century - to map our course into the twenty-first. Connexions, in particular, demands serious new thinking - new ways of understanding contemporary career, its obstacles and its possibilities.

This article suggests that we are not seeing what is important, because we have been led not to expect to see it.

If that really is happening, there will be no short route to correcting the problem. But, the author suggests, looking again at our client’s stories, will help a lot.


‘Seeing’, they say, ‘is believing’. Sounds like hard-headed common sense... you might think? But any thoughtful driver knows that we all have this amazing ability - not to see what we don’t expect to see. And you can go on not seeing it - until you crash into it. Insurance claim forms have been known to contain remarks along the lines - ‘but those milk crates were not supposed to be there!’ - not believing is not seeing. It’s why we need vehicle insurance.

Careers work could also be on a crash course. Careers workers can have a clear and precise idea of what to expect on the career-management road. They have learned to look for people...

... finding information, on self and work;
... making decisions which carry abilities and interests into their work;
... getting themselves through search-and-application procedure.

It seems like enough to pay attention to. What more could there be?

listening in

Well....! What do you notice here?


‘So what’s it to be then Sarah? Retail management training - that’s the stuff you’ve been looking at, right?’

"Yes.’

‘And you’ve got the application forms?’

‘Yes - and I can deal with them.’

‘The college will start short-listing soon. You’d better get on with it.’

‘I will... I will.’

‘Look Sarah, we’ve been over this pretty thoroughly haven’t we? You picked out "retail-management training" from the computer print-out. You’ve agreed it suits your skills and qualifications...’

He’s right of course. All her career lessons and interviews and library work and work experience and progress-file work - all have pointed her this way. She knows she’s in with a pretty good chance. She can learn this job - her mum did. She may even enjoy it - it’s certainly better than working in a call centre, like her nerd-of-a-brother.

Reminding her that he’s still there. ‘...So? Sarah'.

"Its just that... Oh! it’s nothing. You’re right.’
Sarah retreats into her thoughts. It’s just what? Is it that most of her friends will go on to some college course or other? That her boyfriend makes her feel bad about going away to university? - they both know she’ll meet somebody else. That her mum’s partner thinks academic learning is a waste of her time - and his money?
On the other hand, is that that her geeky teachers think she’s ‘ill advised’ to give up on a decent university place? That her mum once let slip that she woke up on the morning of her own twenty-eighth birthday, wondering whatever made her think that high-street shop manager was such a good idea? That her Dad - a qualified engineering technician - was declared redundant, and lost his marriage to the stress? He always told mum he was worth more - saying he’ll get an engineering degree. But, as mum often says, ‘he was all talk!’.
No point in hoping for too much, and being defeated - like Dad. And, anyway, she has never ever met a woman communication-technology engineer. What can they be like? And where did she get the idea anyway? Was it some Keanu Reeves film? Poor old dad.
And then there’s her linked-arm-and-laughing friend, always saying ‘For crying-out-loud kid! If it’s what you want - just do it!

Her interviewer has finished checking that he’s done a good job. (A realistic decision has been made on the basis of accurate, objective, up-to-date and stereotype-free information. What more could there be?)

Sarah is happy for him - ‘no, really’ she muses, ‘somebody should be getting what they need from this interview’. She has nothing more to say to him; and he has stopped asking. And, anyway, she’s not sure she would know what to say. So, she tells herself, ‘Nobody has done anything wrong Sarah. Everything is fine. Just sign the stupid form - and stop worrying about it!’.

why stories?

Sarah’s not academically brilliant, but if she wants to learn something there’s not much that can stop her. Its not ‘how do I do it?’ that’s bugging her, it’s ’why would I?’.

But we can sympathise with her interviewer. He needs to know that he’s done all he can. And he probably has. Sarah has applications forms coming out of her ears. She could paper her walls with worksheets and computer prints-outs. Her progress file describes a perfect match for retail management: alert, cooperative, looks good. And it took him a long time to get that dress-shop placement.

But suppose - after all that - he were to ask an open question...


‘...can you remember what made you pick out retail management from the computer’s list...?’
or
‘...before you saw the list, what ideas of your own did you have...?’
or
‘...you seem troubled, Sarah...?’


There's no cut-and-dried response to any of this: no list of ‘pros-and-cons’, no checking-off of ‘strengths-and weaknesses’, no audit of ‘learning outcomes’ will express it. It calls up feelings,... points of view,... relationships,... allegiances! All that Sarah might do is lay out the fragments - encounters,... remarks,... images,... beliefs,... fears! The only order anyone can find for stuff like this is narrative order - career is best understood as a story.

Why? Because only a story gives a person a useful ‘take’ on....

... who influences me, and why I allow it:
... fears, hopes and intuitions I seem unable to ignore;
... what I must hold on to, and what I can let go.

But, to ask about any of this is to invite the unexpected. Which, of course, upsets apple carts: sidelining much of occupational information; invalidating a good many computer print-outs; transforming the work-experience agenda; and bringing new pages of disclosure to progress files. If we were to start expecting to hear what Sarah can only barely express, we would transform what we call ‘careers education and guidance’.

And if we can’t do that to help Sarah; we certainly can’t help the young men and women who can see fewer possibilities and more obstructions than she. Connexions demands that we rethink what we expect to deal with in careers work.

Nobody is saying that an opening-up processes is not happening; it would be hard to know. But what we can say is this: while practice remains information-dominated, skills-driven and social-context-free, then it will move in the wrong direction for all of its clients - and, most of all, for those who need it most.

The test of progress? There are at least two (1) a careers worker who finds it appropriate to work with people in such exploratory, personal and feeling-laden terms; and (2) a client who has learned to agree with him about that.

But for both Sarah and her interviewer working with such a story is 'not expected'. And we all know what that means.

why now?

I don’t know what Sarah should do, and neither do you. The point is that much of the current apparatus of careers education and guidance - useful though it is for more routine situations - cannot help her to know what she should do.

But things change. Until recently there has been a good chance that any government publication on careers work would have ‘choice’ on the front page: ‘Better Choices’, ‘Skills for Choice’, ‘Choice and Careers’ - all with lots of references to ‘reliable information’, ‘opportunities’, ‘individual decision-making', and ‘skills’.

Now we have a new word: ‘connections'. And career does make connections - in some obvious senses, and in some that are not so obvious. Work is done with, for and in response to other people. The experience of work therefore connects us - or fails to connect us - to each other, to society, and to the good and bad feelings that such links always call up.

And the feelings can be pretty bad. The past no longer gives us so much of a clue to the future, and ‘moving on' is - therefore - fraught with uncertainty and stress. Connections is - initially anyway - directed at people for whom career is - in one sense or another - a sharp pain. And, for every one in pain, there are many others - like Sarah (and her mother) - for whom career is a dull ache.

Connexions is staffed to offer a wider range of community links, offering help at varying depths. And that means being ready to work with pain, ambiguity - and the unexpected.

This debate is, then, not some intellectual wrangle among self-promoting academics. It is about people’s lives. If we don’t look for a wider and deeper understanding contemporary career, we won’t find it. And we risk collision with the people we should be looking out for.


You are in the magazine section of the The Career Learning Café - www.hihohiho.com

WHERE NOW?
> look at how stories express what is important in real lives
> check out current ideas on the value of narrative
> look at practical implications

> see how this thinking suggests a deeper diagnosis of learning needs
> examine implications for programme management
> catch up with a short account of where careers work is going

back to café career magazine - in touch articles
­
"we all have this amazing ability - not to see what we don’t expect to see"
"Careers work could also be on a crash course."
"A realistic decision has been made on the basis of accurate, objective, up-to-date and stereotype-free information. What more could there be?"
"Its not ‘how do I do it?’, it’s ’why would I?'"
"The only order anyone can find for stuff like this is narrative order."
"While practice remains information-dominated, skills-driven and social-context-free, then it will move in the wrong direction for all of its clients - and, most of all, for those who need it most."
"Connections is - initially anyway - directed at people for whom career is - in one sense or another - a sharp pain. And, for every one in pain, there are many others for whom career is a dull ache."
­
Return to the top
Career-learning home page Magazine - articles and activities Underpinning - basic ideas for the work Memory - key articles archive Moving on