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Wednesday 9 March 2016

Keeping up with Careers

Like most of us, I have a pretty full life. There is always lots to do, and not enough time to fit everything in.

I was thinking about how I keep up with what is going on in my various professions and passions - management, leadership, careers, business, technology; and realised that what 'currency' I have comes from reading articles, then testing those ideas contained within.

And that's not just any articles, but thoughtful and carefully written articles. It often means articles which have been peer-reviewed, and have been through an editing process; in which case we are talking about articles by thought leaders, by researchers, and those which are published in journals.

How do we know what 'quality' looks like in career thought leadership, research and journals? Largely, I think, through others in our field thinking they are... which is not very scientific.

In fact, it sounds remarkably like it could be an Emperor's New Clothes-type fail.

David Winter from the University of London ran a blog called "Careers - in Theory", containing a list of career-oriented journals. I have copied David's links below - NB: some links may be dated plus I have added some journals, from 25 onwards, which I felt that David had missed:



As there are a myriad of career journals, how do we know which ones are reliable? For my management, leadership and business interests, it is easy, because an awesome academic - Anne-Wil Harzing - compiles a journal rankings list each year. 

But to the best of my knowledge, no one does that for the career development field. It would be really useful if someone did.

However, based on the SCImago journal ranking tables, I have sorted the list above, jimmied some content aims from each journal's outline, and undertaken a rough calculation of the amount of career focus each journal has (5 being mostly career-oriented)

My rough calculation is a simple ranking exercise, having undertaken a database search for all articles from a particular publication up to and including 31 December 2014 (in order to harmonise it with the SCImago list), then, on the same journal, doing a unique article keyword (nK) and title (nT) search for 'career'. I divide the resulting article count (N) by the count for ‘career’, and get an extremely rough count of career content: ie, (nK + nT) /N = %.

Click here to see my roughly-ranked list.

Hopefully you find it useful.

And if you have any error, omission and advice for me on the list, I would love to hear from you! 


Sam
 
References:

2 comments :

  1. I have a master's degree in counseling, and I have been a counselor for over 15 years. I've devoted the last 8 years to career counseling. I've written a book about career development. Yet,every time I see an article like this, I feel as though I have only scratched the surface of my profession. It's both exciting and frightening.

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  2. Thanks Career_Geek: yep, there is SOOO much to keep up with... and like you say, both exciting and sometimes overwhelming!

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