1. The role of career guidance in managing and addressing change
Tristram Hooley

4. Unforgiving of frailty
The character of this changing world is indifferent to tradition. Unforgiving of frailty. No respecter of past reputations. It has no custom and practice. It is replete with opportunities, but they only go to those swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change. Tony Blair (quoted by Harris, 2016)

5. The changing organisation of career
These changes require workers to develop skills and competences that differ substantially from the knowledge and abilities required by 20th century occupations. Insecure workers in the information age must become lifelong learners who can use sophisticated technologies, embrace flexibility rather than stability, maintain employability, and create their own opportunities. These new conceptions of work life recognize that career belongs to the person not the organization. Taken together, the concomitants of the new social arrangement of work have created a crisis for those who would hold to modern theories of occupational choice and career development. Mark Savickas et al. (2009)

6. Key features of this story of change
Globalisation
Mass migration and the loss of power by national states
Technological change
Automation, the internet, communications technology and big data
The triumph of free market liberalism
Collapse of communism and the co-option of social democracy
Decline of the importance of institutions
Declining trade unions and the loss of the ‘psychological contract’

7. For individuals this means…
Responsibilisation (the need for individuals to maximise their competitiveness through developing their human capital and entrepreneurial behaviour).
Precarity (less security, lower wages and worsening conditions)
Increased competitiveness within the labour market – often with decreased solidarity.

9. Responses by career theory
The Boundaryless career
The Protean career
The focus on ‘career adaptability’
The shift from ‘career choice’ to ‘career management skills’
The shift from ‘employment’ to ‘employability skills’

10. There are problems with both this story and the responses to it.
But…
There are problems with both this story and the responses to it.

11. Is change really getting faster?

12. Are We changing jobs more?
In the UK…
Job mobility has fallen across the board, and fallen particularly fast for younger cohorts.
Millennials so far have been about 30% less likely to move jobs in their 20s than generation X before them.
Just 1-in-25 people born in the mid-1980s moved jobs from year-to-year when they were in their mid-20s – half the rate for those who were born a decade before them.

13. Self-employment rates in Europe

14. Reports of career stability in the twentieth century have been GREATLY exaggerated
Depictions of the ‘normal’ or ‘traditional’ hierarchical career are usually based on
Middle class men working for large organisations
Between
In the West
This is not a good basis on which to describe the way that most people experienced their careers in the past.
We have a duty not to build theory and practice on labour market myths.

15. Continuity is also important
Livelihood
Work
Repetition
Daily cycles
Hierachy
Power

16. Is this inevitable?
Changes to the labour market, to employment rights and so on are political.
Even the development, use and ownership, of new technologies is bound up with politics?
Because of this they are contestable.

18. Framing uberisation

20. So… Change is everywhere. We need to understand it and respond to it.
But, change is not new
And it may not be desirable
We also need to remember that, continuity is at least as powerful as change (probably more so) as a force acting on our career.
And that we have choices at both an individual and collective/political level about how we respond to change.
This is where guidance comes in.

21. Tony Watts on the role of guidance
Perhaps we now need models of guidance which pay more attention to the social context, to its changing nature, to the individual’s dynamic relationship with that changing context… Giddens has pointed out that one of the distinctive features of the late modern age is that the self now has to be constructed as a reflexive process of connecting personal and social change. Personal decisions are also political decisions. This is particularly true of decisions relating to work… Perhaps guidance should pay more attention to helping individuals explore the political nature of their personal choices, and to addressing the way in which they can be agents of –rather than victims of – social change.

22. Career guidance for social justice

23. Watts’ Socio-political ideologies of guidance
Radical (social change)
Progressive (individual change)
Conservative (social control)
Liberal (non-directive)
Watts’ Socio-political ideologies of guidance

24. References
Arthur, M.B. & Rousseau, D.M. (1996). The Boundaryless Career. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gardiner, L. and Gregg, P. (2017). Study, Work, Progress, Repeat? London: Resolution Foundation.
Hall, D.T. (1996). Protean careers in the 21st century. Academy of Management Executives, 10 (4) 8– 16.
Harris, J. (2016). Does the left have a future? The Guardian. Retrieved from left-have-a-future.
Hatfield, I. (2015). Self-Employment in Europe. London: IPPR.
Hooley, T. and Barham, L. (Eds.). (2015). Career Development Policy and Practice: The Tony Watts Reader. Stafford: Highflyers.
Hooley, T., Sultana, R.G. and Thomsen, R. (Eds.) Career Guidance for Social Justice: Contesting Neoliberalism. London: Routledge.
Savickas, M. et al. (2009). Life designing: A paradigm for career construction in the 21st century. Journal of Vocational Behaviour, 75,

25. Contact details Tristram Hooley
Director of Research, The Careers & Enterprise Company
Professor of Career Education, University of Derby
Professor II, Inland Norway University of Applied Science
Also at
@pigironjoe 

26. Symposium Ronald Sultana Maria Eduarda Duarte Kopecky, Martin
Ingela Bergmo Prvulovic