|
briefing on careerswork
WHAT IS CAREERS WORK
and where is it going?
Careers
work is today’s term for what has been called 'careers education
and guidance'. Things change; this article explains why and how.
It also describes what a person should be able to find in a reasonable
careers-work service. And it suggests that further changes are now
needed.
Career management is important. It is about how people manage working
life: how the well-connected use their contacts, how movers-and-shakers
get things the way they want them, and how most of us hang in there
- making a living the best way we can. Everybody has an interest
- because career affects us all, and our loved ones.
But there is more: how we manage a career raises broader questions
concerning who gets to do what in the working world: why it is that
women still tend to get ‘women’s work’; why the poor
- however able - seem to get less than a fair crack of the whip;
and why so many black people get less access to the most sought-after
opportunities. Career management calls up big issues for social
fairness, as well as for individual fulfilment and economic well-being.
We all need all of our people to get the help that they need.
As things change, the words used to refer to that help change. What
was once called 'vocational guidance' become 'careers advice' or
‘careers guidance’. In another way of thinking, 'vocational
counselling,' became 'career counselling' or - quite recently ‘personal
advisory work’. All of this is done person-to-person - often
in a consulting room. But that is also changing, personal advisory
work is now much more commonly available in ‘outreach’
settings - you can choose to meet today's personal adviser in McDonald’s.
Much of the person-to-person help now available is provided by newly
set up Connexions Services - expanded from what used to be called
Careers Services.
In schools and colleges this person-to-person help runs alongside
'careers education'. This is a classroom programme to help people
learn how the working world takes on people and what to do about
it. But that provision has also diversified, making links with other
aspects of school and college learning, with work-experience programmes,
with expert computer systems, and with schemes for recording learning
as a basis for action. These schemes are variously known as 'recording
achievement', 'action planning' and progress-files work - known
as 'profiling'.
The term ‘careers work’ refers to all of these person-to-person
and classroom-based forms of help.
who
helps... and why?
Helpers have various job-titles: 'careers advisers', 'careers teachers',
'personal advisers', 'careers coordinators' and 'counsellors' -
it depends on where they work, and how broadly they conceive the
help they offer.
But careers work is different from what 'head-hunters' and employment
agents do. Like estate agents, or lonely-hearts advisers, employment
agencies must try to satisfy both sides of the contract. But a careers
worker is focussed on the working-person's side of the contract.
In particular, careers workers want to help people move on
in their careers.
Their aim is to enable people develop a career which is both sustaining
and sustainable. That means helping them to get to find work which...
> offers a chance to grow and develop,
> brings meaning and purpose to their lives,
> provides for themselves and their own.
Government has an interest - careers work is usually government
funded. And, of course, the commercial world is interested. But
everybody who is interested in how we build a fair and stable society
will have an interest in careers work.
That interest is growing. Career is one of the big issues of the
twenty-first century - world wide. Until quite late in the last
century ‘career’ meant - for a good many people - little
more than following in family-and-neighbourhood footsteps. But economic
crises, financial ‘big bangs’, explosions in information
technology, and the spread of a global labour market has changed
everything - for everybody. And they will continue to do so. Contemporary
career is more complicated and more fraught, for more people. ‘Today’s’
choice can put you on the streets in a none-too-distant ‘tomorrow’.
What happens in
careers work?
The 'careers-work story' had its beginning on the eastern seaboard
of the US, where - in the early twentieth century - the huddled
and hopeful masses needed help finding a niche in the New World.
From the beginning, careers workers have sought to help people to...
> get enough to go on - about both what they are can do and
what is available;
> use that information to come to a rational basis for action;
> carry that plan through.
But, over something-like a century of professional development,
careers workers have found that more can - and should - be done.
A person needs to appreciate what goes on in the working world,
and how it is changing; to understand what can make a person’s
career go well or badly, and to see what can be done to improve
one’s own chances of making it go well; to focus on ideas and
values which are their particular starting point and to find
out about aspects of the working world they may never have realised
are there; to get the information and to grasp where the
major causes and effects are; to do all of this both for an understanding
of the working world and of their own lives. Career requires
as demanding a programme of learning as anything that people need
to learn.
So, in a good -enough careers-work programme you should be able
to find...
> access to useful information - in a centre, with both printed
material and computer terminals linking you to databases and a
system for reviewing your own readiness for work;
> a group-work programme taking you systematically through
the background knowledge - what is happening in work, what is
entailed in making a career decision, how to search for work and
how to do yourself justice in an application-and-selection process;
> links with people in the working world - through visits,
work experience or work shadowing, so that you broaden your horizons
- by meeting people that you wouldn’t get a chance to meet
in any other way;
> a chance to set down what you find in your own developing
record of what you learn about work and self - something that
you can talk over with people who know you and care about you,
and something you can use to set down what you mean to do;
> a chance to talk all of this through, with somebody - an
adviser or counsellor - who appreciates what is involved in working
on the dilemmas and problems of career management.
If you can’t find this in a school or college important to
you, ask why it is not there.
In an English school or college a decent-enough version of such
a programme might get, on average, around an hour a week on some
combination of these activities. It might start at age 11 years;
and we are beginning, now, to understand that there are some basic
ideas about career which people need help to develop while they
are still at primary school.
how
does career work?
But, before we march off on a campaign for more careers work, we’d
better ask whether any of this is useful,... and why,... and how
it can be made more useful,... and whether anything more is now
necessary.
That
means understanding what goes on in a contemporary career. The first
and easiest assumption is that career management links person to
job. It needs a matching process: people are thought of as having
qualities and interests; jobs are thought of as having demands and
rewards; career management is thought of as fitting a particular
person to particular work.
Matching relies on lists - of abilities and interests, of work requirements
and rewards, and of possibilities. This is the ‘lonely hearts’
theory of career management - somewhere, out there, there is just-the-job
for you. And so, quite a lot of what happens in matching work is
accompanied by worksheets, checklists, records, psychological tests
and computer programmes - each of them listing what can be known
about a person, a job and the options.
Careers do work like this - a bit. So matching techniques do work
for some people. They work best for articulate people, confident
about what they say and relaxed about what that might suggest. Where
that comfortable process works well, a rewarding career may result.
And a lot of people feel good about it: working people and their
communities are satisfied; employers and their profits benefit;
careers workers have their work validated. Nobody expects 100% success,
but - if matching works for much of the time - why worry about it?
And there are other advantages. Where government is putting money
into careers work it is reasonably easy to hold a matching process
to account. Its lists fit easily into descriptions of what is required
and how careers work can be assessed. List-based material is relatively
easy to design and does not require much of the careers workers
who work with it. Indeed, it can often be programmed into computers
which make the links quickly, precisely and cheaply.
All of this would be fine, if matching were the only thing that
happens in managing a career. But it is not. Indeed, it is not the
most important thing, and it is certainly not the most basic thing.
It should not be the only thing that is done, and it most certainly
should not be the first thing. Because careers-work matching works
least well for people who most need careers-work help.
we
can do better than ‘more of the same'
Careers work, concerned as it is with 'moving on', must itself move
on.
Firstly, the contemporary working world is in a perpetual
state change - ‘re-labelling and ‘re-bundling’
the working world. Many of the terms for ‘jobs’, have
gone. Our lists - whether for work or self - are out-of-date as
soon as they are assembled. Lists don't work well with change;
they don't represent its dynamics, and they convey little sense
of what change means for people.
Secondly - and more importantly - career management does
not occur in a social or cultural vacuum. When people look at
themselves and work they are not just assessing clear and precise
facts, they are struggling with doubts and hopes, pressures and
expectations, stereotypes and assumptions. That is why people
with potential wind-up low in the pecking order - because they
have gathered a way of seeing how things work from a culture that
cannot help them in this way. Careers work needs to understand
more about how people come to see possibilities for themselves,
and how they can be helped to see more. That work will be less
about helping people make choices,it will be more about helping
them to see that choice is a possibility.
Thirdly, the most important thing to learn is ‘how
to learn’. Young men and women get help in school and college
until they are 19. Yet cultural, social, economic and technological
forces will continue to impact their lives at 29, 39, 49 and for
any future. In order to help them deal with this, careers work
must help people to deal with change for themselves. That
means not just findings things out, it means knowing how
to find things out. It is the basis for dealing with any changing
system for yourself. Some cultures are less good at this than
others. So are some careers-work programmes.
Careers management is as complex, as set in cultural context, as
riven with conflicting points of view and as emotionally layered
as any aspect of a person’s life. Such depth breadth and dynamism
cannot be checklisted or simply measured. It is a story, and its
depth, breadth and dynamics must be represented in narrative form
- with a story’s search for meaning.
But
perhaps the most important immediate challenge to contemporary careers
work is that has become much more difficult to manage well.
|
back to café career magazine
- in touch articles |
|
