Career Thinking in Denmark

Dr Barbara Bassot

In early May 2014, Dr Barbara Bassot from the Centre for Career & Personal Development travelled to Svendborg in southern Denmark to a conference for career guidance practitioners.  One hundred people attended and on the first day Barbara presented her latest research on the Career Thinking Session.  She outlined the model, describing its theoretical underpinning and then presented the case of Holly; a young person who was having difficulties deciding her next steps following her course in health and social care.  In the afternoon Barbara ran a workshop where all the participants tried out the model.  Barbara said:  “Watching one hundred practitioners trying out the model was thrilling for me – they didn’t find it easy, but could see how they could use it with some of their clients.  Their feedback was invaluable for my research.”

Statutory Guidance - CCPD response

Last month the document ‘Career Guidance and Inspiration in Schools’ was published by the Dept for Education. The purpose of this we are told is to ensure that all schools are clear about what is expected of them in meeting their statutory duty and to that end it is helpful as a check list for schools. We are also told in the guidance that Ofsted has been giving Career Guidance a ‘high priority’ since its report ‘Going in the Right Direction’ in September 2013. Anecdotally the experience of careers coordinators in schools does not seem to reflect that priority but time will tell.

I would like however to comment on just some of the content of this guidance and the direction of growth in the guidance community more generally.

First of all we should be pleased that Dept. for Education has seen the need for this and therefore the importance of careers work with young people more broadly. Clarification of schools’ statutory duty to provide all pupils ‘with independent (impartial and external to the school) from years 8 to 13’ is helpful. However why a private contractor would be more impartial than someone employed by the school, seems counterintuitive to me. If you want and need your contract with a school to be renewed, you are just as subject to the temptation to be partial as you would if you were employed by the school. Surely the issue should be that if someone is professionally qualified and on the professional register, thereby signed up to the professional code of practice and ethics, it should make little difference what their contract with the school is like. Furthermore we all know that there are many highly competent practitioners who are employed by schools and whose impartiality is  unchallenged by Ofsted. So where is the clarity I wonder?

Secondly the emphasis throughout is on information and engagement by the school with external bodies such as employers and employers’ bodies. This in my view panders to the idea that all young people need is lots and lots of information and inspiration by those already in the labour market. The irony is that this is so soon after Alison Wolf’s recommendation that work experience should no longer be a statutory entitlement for young people  in key stage 4. Rather, says Wolf, they should leave this until post 16, when some key choices have already been made and under-aspiration is unchallenged, gender stereotypic  choices or ill-thought through plans made. Are employers impartial? Will employers present a balanced view of their industry, challenge gender biases or help the young people in front of them to think more broadly? Some of them certainly will. But why encourage engagement with these groups and not with the profession that is trained and experienced in just these issues:careers professionals?

Thirdly and finally there is the reliance on the National Careers Service website and online and telephone services. Again if young people want information this is a useful source. However, like the NHS Direct service for health concerns, they can only deal with what is presented to them. They cannot second guess what is behind the question, what assumptions have been made or read the body language of a young person overwhelmed by their predicament. In short, this service cannot replace the opportunity for a young person to sit one to one with a trained professional who will listen to them and help them to reflect on what they say. Put simply an online service can provide some answers, a one- to- one career discussion with a professional will prompt the questions that they didn’t know they needed to ask.

So this document offers the opportunity to have important discussions with schools, to ensure that at the very least they are fulfilling their statutory duty. But let us hope that the conversation doesn’t end there, but continues into the vital role of the careers professional in preparing young people for the ever more complex world of work. This labour market is changing so fast that no employer, website or enterprise activity can prepare young people for the challenges ahead. It will take all of us working in partnership, with trained professionals at the centre , to do this and our young people deserve nothing less.

Anne Chant, June 2014

CCPD staff present papers in Germany

Otto-von-Guericke-University of Magdeburg

Dr Hazel Reid, Anne Chant, Alison Fielding and Rebecca Corfield Tee from the Centre for Career & Personal Development all presented papers at the recent ESREA Conference of the Life History and Biography Research Network.  This year’s conference was located at the Otto-von-Guericke-University of Magdeburg, East Germany.  The conference theme was “Before, Beside and After (Beyond) the Biographical Narrative” and all papers presented were considering aspects of the process of researching life histories.

Dr Hazel Reid’s paper concerned the role of the researcher in life history; Alison Fielding’s subject was women’s career identity; Anne Chant’s paper was an exploration of the feminist discourse and its voice in narrative research and Rebecca Corfield Tee presented on the unspoken elements of research relationships.

Magdeburg is located in central Germany on the Elbe River south-west of Berlin. Known as early as 805 AD  Magdeburg was severely damaged during World War II. One of the lasting legacies of the Second World War is the Stolpersteine or ‘Stumbling Stones’ in Magdeberg.  Outside every house where a victim or survivor of the Holocaust lived is a Stolperstein, a brass plaque is laid in to the pavement.  There are now over 40,000 of these plaques laid in cities throughout Europe to commemorate victims of the war in this way.
 

European Summit on the Career Workforce of the Future

On September 3rd & 4^th 2014 the European academic network NICE is holding a large event at Canterbury Christ Church University in England.  Key figures from all partner countries will discuss central issues around the education and training of people in the practice of career guidance and counselling.

At a time of economic and political change around Europe and beyond, enabling citizens to engage successfully with the world of work has never been more important for the economies of nation states and for individuals. The education and training of those who will guide individuals and who will advise the process of policy-making is therefore also crucial. Keynote speakers Dr Gideon Arulmani and Professor Stefano Zamagni will open the summit illustrating the challenges that lie ahead of us and pointing to some changes, which might be necessary in the future.  Dr Arulmani, founder of the Promise Foundation in Bangalore, India, will enable delegates to consider issues relating to the migration and mobility of workers across the globe. Professor Zamagni, economist from the University of Bologna, Italy, will examine the impact of globalisation on the individual and in relation to significant economic factors. These speakers will thereby focus delegates on the challenges that careers professionals face in enabling their clients to engage in a complex and rapidly changing labour market, and how their education and training must evolve.

The goal of the summit will be to actively discuss concrete proposals on the future of education and training for the career workforce with key professionals, policy makers, researchers and educators.  Central questions will relate to the competences that different types of career professionals (and people from related professions) need, to the cooperation between practice, policy and academia, and to major research questions which we need to concentrate on in the future.

To ensure a fair representation of different countries and stakeholder groups, the participants of the summit are being invited personally through members of the network. They include key decision makers and representatives of professional bodies, practitioners, academic and research institutions, service users, policy makers and managers of services.

For more information, please contact:

Dr Hazel Reid, Chair of the Summit, Canterbury Christ Church University (hazel.reid@canterbury.ac.uk) 

Johannes Katsarov, Coordinator NICE (Johannes_katsarov@hotmail.de)

Dr Peter Weber, Coordinator NICE (pweber@ibw.uni-heidelberg.de)

Background Information

NICE – the Network for Innovation in Career Guidance and Counselling in Europe – currently includes 45 Higher Education Institutions from 29 countries across Europe. NICE is dedicated to professionalism and academic excellence in Careers work across all sectors and at all levels. It has been working towards the goal of sustaining and strengthening cooperative efforts in Careers research and education since the initial funding from the EU Commission in 2009. The network has already published extensive guidelines on the academic training of career guidance and counselling professionals, which it aims to fine-tune and implement in the future.

From 2012 to 2015, NICE is focusing on setting up sustainable structures for future cooperation of higher education and research institutions dealing with career guidance and counselling. Some of the main goals are to:

·         increase the exchange of researchers and students throughout Europe,

·         build up an online database for the sharing of teaching resources and research outcomes,

·         develop common standards for academic training in career guidance and counselling,

·         test support-structures for the development of new and existing degree programmes in career guidance and counselling, and

·         work out an organizational concept for maintaining European-level cooperation in our academic field.

After 4 years of intensive conceptual work, NICE wants to use the summit in Canterbury to reach out to important stakeholders all around Europe. On the 2 days following the summit, the members of the network will work together intensively to evaluate how the network should develop in the future.

Anne Chant

Network4Careers

Our next event will be a one day seminar on Saturday 19th July at our Medway campus including

• a speaker on using digital media in career guidance and development
• presentations on current research
• change to network and meet with people

Looking forward to seeing you and more details to follow soon.

Barbara Bassot and Alison Fielding

CCPD Launches New Careers Network



March saw the exciting launch of our new Network4Careers.  The Centre for Career & Personal Development (CCPD) hosted 50 people from the careers world in a gathering at our Medway campus to listen to speakers and make contacts with like-minded people in similar roles.

Current and past students from CCPD joined careers teachers, lecturers and employers’ representatives in the first of a programme of events designed to forge new strong links between people working in an increasingly atomised working environment.

Professor Tony Watts

Those attending welcomed the network as a rare forum to meet others in a relaxed and friendly environment and said it was the perfect place to get to know people in careers work in the South East; to find out about current practice, and learn more about the changing world of careers guidance, advice and counselling.

Tea and cakes were served and two presentations were given.  The first was by Tony Watts, CCPD’s Visiting Professor, about his view of the current careers scene and the second was by Rebecca Corfield Tee, freelance careers expert and senior lecturer at CCPD, on her 10 Top Tips for giving successful presentations.

Our guests had many ideas for the future development of the network.  These included:

-          Talks from employers,

-          New theoretical perspectives to update practitioners on the latest thinking,

-          A space to mingle and meet people,

-          Practical ideas for improving professional practice.

To get on our mailing list to hear about future Network events, please email Jacquie Minter on jacquie.minter@canterbury.ac.uk  including “CPD Network” in the subject line.

Posted by Jacquie Minter on 14th May 2014.



National Careers Exhibition 2013

The Centre for Career and Personal Development (CCPD) at Canterbury Christ Church University were exhibitors and presenters at this year’s National Careers Exhibition at Olympia recently.

CCPD Staff Jacquie Minter at our stand at the exhibition

Four members of the centre were kept busy for two days explaining the wide ranges of programmes, courses and professional development on offer.  We also had a steady stream of alumni popping in to say hello and to update us on their own career development and successes.  Some just stopped by to say how much they had enjoyed the two very popular seminars presented by Rebecca Tee and Barbara Bassot and to meet the staff from CCPD.  

CCPD Staff Anne Chant speaking to an interested visitor to the stand

A thoroughly enjoyable and rewarding experience was had by all and we look forward to next year. If you didn’t have the chance to see us in person do drop us a line or check out our programmes and courses on our website: http://www.canterbury.ac.uk/education/ccpd/

Rebecca Tee