Detangling your career options

One of the core beliefs I hold about career education is that we can’t expect young people to join the dots themselves.

We don’t expect people to be able to detangle their finances (that’s why we have accountants), diagnose their illnesses (medical professionals do that) or prepare legal contracts (lawyers need to earn an income).

So why do we expect people of any age to work out their career pathway alone?

The argument against this is that we already have career counsellors and advisors, but there are simply not enough of us, and there’s no established practice of seeing a career professional for the vast majority of society; we just muddle along and work it out as we go. In reality, most people think of career practitioners (like myself) in the same way they think of stylists – as a ‘nice to have’, but not a necessity.

So, if we’re going to expect people to work it out for themselves then we need to make it easier for them to do so. We need to join the dots for them, and make visible the links and connectors between skills, jobs, and career paths, so that they can make informed choices without needing to spend countless hours in their own research.

Your career will be just about the most significant factor in how your life turns out – it’s on par with deciding to have children or move countries. Your career will dictate how you spend your days, what kind of tasks and activities you will do, who you will meet, and what your finances look like.

Yet the majority of us choose a career path with very little effort or investigation – even when done well, we expect that a person would have maybe two or three sessions with a career practitioner before they leave school, go on a week’s work experience, and then have the occasional top-up career counselling session when needed.

A few hours of career planning over a lifetime just isn’t enough

We really should be giving people more opportunity to explore their options with the support of someone who can answer their questions and tease out any issues on a regular basis, particularly during key transition points.

The world of work has changed, and there’s no going back. What was already changing pre-covid has been sped up, and our working lives look nothing like they would have done even 10 years ago. And this isn’t a bad thing – secure, stable, promotion-bound jobs that were the preserve of the few lucky ones (mostly white men) have morphed into hybrid, agile, performance-based roles that can shift and flex to fit into the rest of our lives.

But along with more flexibility comes increased uncertainty, and the winners in this job market will be those with a clear focus who can plan ahead to ensure they secure the opportunities they really want, not just the ones that get slung their way.

There are two ways to help people take control of their career pathway

The first is by increasing the amount of support offered to those who need it, so that they can access the advice and guidance they need to develop a career pathway without needing to also develop strong career development skills. The other is to create interventions that help people develop the skills they need to manage their own careers, and include material that ‘joins the dots’ for them.

This two-pronged model can be compared to our dental care system – we have dentists who step in when you need a filling or a root canal, but we also educate people about how they can keep their teeth clean at home through good dental hygiene. We don’t expect people to be able to determine how to keep their teeth clean by themselves, that would require decades of research; instead, we give them the tools, toothpaste, and mouthwash they need and show them how to use them.

We do this because we know that poor oral health can lead to other medical conditions, and, while not perfect, it’s a model that means most of us can get the support we need (although wouldn’t it be nice if they included dental in Medicare…).

We don’t have enough qualified career practitioners to support everyone who is working in Australia. The CDAA (Australia’s peak Career Development Association) has around 1200 members, and there are possibly another 1000 or so practitioners working without membership (ie. in schools), but there are around 13.4M people working in Australia. That means there is one career practitioner for every 6000 people. As a comparison, there is one dentist for every 1700 people in Australia, or over 3 times as many dentists as career practitioners.

Recent changes to qualification standards now mean that many current career practitioners may need to upskill to continue practicing, and the minimum qualification is now at a postgraduate degree level. This could make it tricky to increase the number of career practitioners available, and in any case there are socio-economic barriers (not the least of which is cost) that may limit access for those who are most in need of support, so it would be wise for us to also look at other ways of supporting people with their career management.

Joining the dots can help

The alternative to vastly increasing the number of career practitioners would be to make it easier for people to find and use key information about their career options. Which means we need to do more than just give them the data, we also need to help them make sense of it all.

We need to join the dots.

There is a vast amount of complex and rapidly changing information out there, so even joining the dots is tricky, but I do wonder if there is a better way.

We make it easy for people to learn about and select other things; for example, most of us don’t find it too difficult to find fashion that suits our style, or a holiday we would enjoy. It should be possible for us to make it easier for people to digest and understand their options, so they can quickly self-sort without needing external support to do so.