FREE TELEPHONE CAREER ADVICE…AUSTRALIA-WIDE. A GREAT INITIATIVE FOR GREENING CAREER DEVELOPMENT
Mrs Lucy Harvest
Careers Without Limits
Importance of this initiative…
Carole Brown announced the funding for the FREE National Careers Helpline and its rapid implementation as “breaking new ground for career development in this country and is clearly offering employment and professional development opportunities for its members.
Complexities and Issues…
Initial recruitment of private career practitioners took six weeks. Over 200 applied. Only 25 contracted Australia-wide to work from a “Home Based Office”.
The impact it might have on private practitioners…
At first, there was considerable concern by many practitioners about “loosing business” by a DEEWR free service to the community at large. This was not the case.
The scope of DEEWR initiative…
Piloted for three months and extended a further six. Originally the service was to add “value” to already established Job Services Australia programs and individuals being retrenched as a direct consequence of the Global Financial Crisis.
Approach and/or models considered to setting up a National Telephone Career Service…Currently Canada, Scotland, UK, and New Zealand offer “free” career services to its citizens. In Australia, Career Advisors will utilize a Solution-Focused Approach to assist callers.
Results/outcome since implementation on 12 November 2009…
A great Synergy has resulted amongst the “Virtual Team” of 25 contracted practitioners that has highlighted the importance of recommending to CDAA president to set up a National Support Network where practitioners can “chat about a difficult case” and share suggestions/ideas amongst themselves.
Between learning the new technology, collecting data from client/stakeholder and maintaining a genuine conversation with client/stakeholder before focusing on what the caller wishes to achieve all in the 20, 30 or 60 minutes available, certainly has been challenging for everyone and not for the faint hearted.
Conclusions…
Based on already established FREE career services Globally, there is strong indication that a free National Telephone Career Service in Australia would benefit the community at large and most importantly, educate and promote to the general public about what career development is and the importance of gaining help from a career practitioner at different stages of Life, as CDAA emphasizes the importance of Career Development as a Life Long Process.
RETIREMENT PLANNING AND CAREER TRANSITION: MAKING AGE A BENEFIT NOT BARRIER
Ms Kaye Fallick
Publisher, Your Life magazine
@boutSeniors website
With approximately five million Baby Boomer pre-retirees beginning to consider the dreaded “r” word, they have never been more in need of objective career counselling. Many are keen to work on, but do not properly understand the options they have, and how to best access sound career advice. The recent Global Financial Crisis has seen a strong recognition that most 50+ Australians will need to work longer to supplement their income, but many would like to segue into a time of less full time work and more time to pursue hobbies, volunteering, mentoring and community service. This demographic ‘tide’ presents a strong opportunity for career counsellors who wish to assist such workers – but how do you reach such a diverse demographic segment and what does research tell us about their career planning preferences? This workshop and PowerPoint presentation will offer three main themes:
Presentation of research conducted on, and exclusive to, About Seniors website – including key findings of 50+ demographic on attitudes to work, retirement and staying work relevant
Presentation of latest international research on attitudes to ongoing work and career planning for older workers
Key learnings for counsellors keen to reach such workers and develop an ongoing career transition advice relationship with them.
Attendees will be given workbooks which include slide notes. There will be a 40-minute presentation and a 20-minute Q&A developing the themes of how to add value for a Baby Boomer client and keep them engaged in the career planning process.
GREENING MY CAREER - THE ROLLERCOASTER RIDE FROM PERMANENT PART-TIME EMPLOYMENT TO PRIVATE PRACTITIONER
Sue Travers
Career Counsellor, Victoria
A mature worker facing decisions of a personal and professional nature led to a greener career. As Career Practitioners we are familiar with challenging clients with the ‘important questions’: Who am I? Where do I want to be? What are my values? as well as ethical considerations. But how often do we apply these questions to ourselves? Issues of global warming and commuting 100 km daily to work were integral to Sue’s choice to ‘Green her Career’. The desire to expand work opportunities and challenge the assumption that working as an employee was the only option for mature workers cemented Sue’s decision to resign from secure employment. Sue discusses the road from employee to private practitioner, shares the frustration, excitement and confronting daily challenge of self-promotion and marketing. Discussion will cover creating a business plan, staking a claim on the web, creating a website, marketing and self-promotion, the importance of mentors and surrounding yourself supportive family and friends, as well as fear of success. Experiences will be shared with participants along with strategies to avoid pitfalls and self-doubt.
EMERGENCE, CREATIVITY AND RISK: RECONTEXTUALISING CAREERS FOR CREATIVES
Ms Elwin Hall
The Protean Connection
This workshop provides a strategy for greening career practice by putting the client at the centre of the career development process. It illustrates how physical, emotional and spiritual health is enhanced through connectedness; this provides for economic security through empowerment; and results in social justice through one’s meaningful relationship with others and with their environment. It begins by explaining that a significant group of career changers (which for the purpose of this workshop are called ‘creatives’) are not acknowledged (or are largely unacknowledged) in traditional career development processes. For this group, a successful transition requires interventions that go beyond the simple, straightforward, transactional process that is part of the traditional career change model. This begins with a level of mastery that enables the career practitioner to move beyond his or her own mental models and actively learn, whilst maintaining a flexible attitude and adapt as new information is made available. It’s important the practitioner remains comfortable with the unknown and unexpected outcomes. As work continues the client grows taking appropriate risks and becomes empowered to understand, express his or her own truth creating unique outcomes.
To enable participants in the workshop to understand my method I will explain my action-research / action learning process that is reflective and client-centred. This was development from my thesis in 2002 as part of my Master of Applied Science Innovation & Service Management degree from RMIT. A range of tools and techniques will be presented for discussion including the William Bridges’ transition model, career mindmaps, Johari window and the Ladder of Inference.
Research Strand
MAKING A DIFFERENCE? DEVELOPING CAREER EDUCATION AS A SOCIALLY JUST PRACTICE
Mr Barrie Irving
University Of Otago College Of Education
Career education has a crucial role to play in secondary schooling by providing students with opportunities to gain diverse insights into the multiple ways in which social, political and economic discourses shape and position concepts of ‘self’, ‘career’, ‘opportunity’, and ‘justice’. Hence it has the scope to ‘make a difference’ to how young people construct their ‘careers’ and make sense of their lives. However the current career development focus (in New Zealand and Australia) on skills acquisition, competencies, and ‘self-management’ may be restricting opportunities for wider critical educational learning. Primarily positioning students as autonomous economic actors may deflect attention away from broader social justice considerations.
To date, little attention has been given to issues of social justice in relation to career education either in the international literature, or reviews of practice in New Zealand. In my presentation I provide an overview of my PhD study which is looking at how social justice is understood within career education in New Zealand secondary schools; outline my own understanding of social justice; examine key issues in relation to the intersection(s) of social justice and career education; and finally provide some thoughts on ways in which career education practice might encompass social justice principles.
SUSTAINING THE SELF: THE DELICATE GREEN SHOOTS OF CAREER DEVELOPMENT PRACTITIONERS' PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY
Ms Fiona Douglas
Department of Management, School of Business, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
Establishing and sustaining a career development profession depends on both pull and push factors. In recent years, structured pull factors have increased as drives for professionalisation gather momentum globally. Pull factors include establishing organisations to gain political leverage, professional bodies to consolidate a fragmented occupation, alignment with international influences to develop and embed competencies, and introducing the umbrella term ‘career development practitioner’ for the myriad occupational titles beneath it.
What of the push factors towards professionalisation? In order to attend to their clients’ needs, career development practitioners need to operate within an environment that attends to their own. Their myriad titles may blur a coherent professional identity, but what effect does this performative act of naming have on push factors from practitioners? How do they construct their occupational identity? Whilst acknowledging the importance of the pulls for professionalisation, this paper turns the spotlight inward. Drawing on research from Aotearoa New Zealand, it examines the delicate green shoots practitioners are putting forward to sustain their own sense of professional self, and finds that discomfiting feelings towards occupational identity militate against a coherent push for professionalisation.
WOMEN’S STORIES OF CAREER TRANSITION
Dr Mary McMahon 1, Prof Mark Watson 2, Prof Jenny Bimrose 3
1 The University of Queensland, School of Education, 2 Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Department of Psychology, 3 The University of Warwick, Institute for Employment Research
Career development is a dynamic lifespan process during which individuals make several transitions. Such transitions are subject to intrapersonal, social, environmental and societal influences. The personal, social and economic costs of not making effective career transitions are high and may lead to welfare dependency, lowered self-esteem and disengagement from the community. Research on career transitions of women has focused more on women of child-bearing age than on mature women. This presentation reports on an initial investigation of the career trajectories of older women across three countries, Australia, England and South Africa. Using a structured interview process, women aged between 45 and 65 years were invited to tell stories of their careers with specific emphasis on work and learning transitions. Findings report the women’s perceptions of antecedent events to and the nature of career transitions, including their subjective experiences of these transitions. In addition, the women’s perceptions of their transitions in relation to how they coped, the support they received and what they learned are reported. Implications of this international study for the provision of career support services for older women are discussed.
