Seeing the big picture: a rounded and context-sensitive view of career development work
In this blog, Gill Frigerio discusses the new book that she has just published with Tristram Hooley and Rosie Alexander. The Career Development Handbook sets out everything you need to know about being a careers professional. It is now available at https://trotman.co.uk/products/the-career-development-handbook for £34.99.
I was browsing a newspaper recently and chanced upon three articles that shared a pertinent connection:
- A news item about the development of specialist employment support for people whose poor mental health has kept them out of the job market.
- A consumer finance article advising on the benefits in pension terms of topping up national insurance contributions for people who haven’t paid them in full – usually people with breaks in paid work for caring.
- A column written by an aspiring journalist about how she had found her life’s purpose through voluntary work supporting refugees.
And it struck me, not for the first time, that career development work is everywhere. Career development practitioners help people access work that suits their skills and circumstances, make decisions about how to balance paid work with their other life roles, and learn from their experiences as they craft their own ways to find a fulfilling work life. Careers work is relevant, whether a person is facing very real obstacles to accessing fulfilling and sustainable work or is ploughing ahead to pursue their dreams. It is relevant for individuals when they are both looking to the future and taking account of the past experiences that have brought them to this point. And it’s relevant for our society and economy as we grapple with the skills needed to drive economic growth (see the new Labour government’s first mission for 2024).
Of course, I would say this, given that I have spent my own working life in career development: as a practitioner, a manager of a university career centre and as an educator teaching the practitioners of the future about the role. Since my early days learning the job, I have been fascinated by the differing perspectives on careers that I have encountered from clients, colleagues and other stakeholders. I love exploring how these perspectives are formed and how they inform people’s views of careers work, whether they are using it themselves, funding it or just talking about it.
Dominant in many minds is the one-to-one discussion between a client and a career development specialist, sometimes called a careers adviser or a guidance practitioner or coach. These encounters can be very powerful, as practitioners use their coaching skills to probe, challenge, inform and enable people to take their next steps - all the while prioritising their client’s needs and best interests. But this encounter is far from the whole story of career development work: support for career development needs to be imagined and designed. It needs to be aligned with its context: be this a school, university, business or community centre. It needs to be managed and evaluated. Web resources need publishing, learning experiences need designing, services need promoting. Drawing on the theories that have given rise to our work, we must be able to understand what our target groups need, given where they are, and the particular barriers to career success they might experience, as well as their enablers.
As long ago as 1992* (the year when I told a careers adviser at the University of Sheffield that ‘I wouldn’t mind a job like yours’), the snappily titled Standing Conference of Associations for Guidance in Educational Settings identified a wider set of guidance activities. This included terms that reflect that one-to-one delivery but also underpin the wider set of duties. The activities are listed as informing, advising, assessing, teaching, enabling, advocating, networking, feeding back and managing innovation/systems change. This list has continued to influence national and international debates about the nature of careers work and inform agreements about occupational standards.
Career development training courses cover all these skills, and the knowledge needed to continually refine our practice. We cover theories of career development and how to facilitate career learning, both one to one and in groups, as well as how to make sense of the job market, work within educational and employment systems, and how to continue to hone our craft for the benefit of the people who use our services. We look at how people, in all their complexity and diversity, can be helped, but we also look at the world in which we are helping them, with its uncertainty, inequities and anomalies.
And yet those of us teaching such programmes tend to have to pull together a lot of different resources. There are lots of books looking at coaching skills for one-to-one work, but these are usually distinct from volumes on theory or how to work with groups and resources exploring the labour market. Even more frustratingly, whilst we can read about the job market from a wide range of perspectives and sources, there is not much out there for helping the practitioner consider how to use this in their work. If we simply answered people’s questions about today’s job market we would never broaden anyone’s horizons or help them make effective use of the plethora of other sources out there.
That’s why Tristram Hooley, Rosie Alexander and I decided to put together The Career Development Handbook: to present in one volume an overview of what really makes up career development work. We look at theory and coaching skills, at how to really understand a client and enable them to progress, but we also give space to the contexts (the job markets) and the systems that we work in. We look at how our work is structured and organised and what this means for how the individual career development practitioner gets in and gets on, providing ideas for the reader’s own professional development and career management.
Going back to economic growth and my newspaper reading, we see the role of the career development practitioner as fundamental to determining whether people can access fulfilling and sustainable work. To do this, we need to work at a range of levels: helping individuals whilst also seeing how the big picture is shaping their world, and working effectively at the level in the middle where colleagues, managers, funders and others take an interest in what we do. This is what SCAGES calls advocacy, networking, systems change.
We have covered a lot in the book, but with this expansive view of what career development work involves we cannot possibly include everything in detail. Instead, we have aimed to give a relatively comprehensive overview and encourage a sense of curiosity, so throughout the text we have pointed the way to a whole host of wider resources. We have also sought to show how the material we cover might turn up in practice, so we have included case studies of practitioners Shona, Karl, Aleesha, Claire, Samira, Stuart and Graham and their clients Petr, John, Orla, Tina and Joanna.
Through practitioners skilled in working in this range of ways, career development work will continue to evolve, embracing digital opportunities and responding to social change. We hope that this book contributes to effective practice and the wider recognition of the role we play.
References
*SCAGES (1992), Statement of principles and definitions. In C. Ball (ed.) Guidance matters, London: RSA.
