Starting with career model and context

We humans have always worked for our survival. Well, perhaps work has been our survival..? Anyway, doing work has given us skill and experience as we age. Facing the varied dynamic environments and situations we have all faced has also given us skills and experience. 

Today, we might describe such a life course as a 'career', but this usage of 'career', to refer to a path of work and employment is not that common. We only started using it from around the mid-twentieth century (Moore, Gunz, & Hall, 2007). Perhaps it arose in the post-war time as a need for stability: perhaps - as we had now had the second war to end all wars - it was a shift in focus to what we needed individually, instead of what our nations required of us. Hard to tell (and sounds like a great PhD topic!).

Since we adopted 'career' and applied it to the world of work, many models and theories that have been developed to help us understand the nature of what we do, and how to best shape what we consider to be positive and meaningful work. This range of models means that career practitioners need to have a diverse theoretical knowledge, and familiarity in applying them. Prominent career researchers think that diversity is "One of the greatest strengths and liabilities of the career field" (Lee, Yelps & Baruch, 2014, p. 339).  If we begin practice with a model, it will give us a framework to help us make our later decisions.

While understanding the multiplicity of lenses we can use to view, sort and categorise the world of work, we also need to understand the social context of career, how society views it, and how that affects us. We - and our clients - need to continually pursue "our career as a process; and this process of [creating] our career" is enacted by "making decisions; of trying things; of exploring ideas; of finding out what's possible, is actually something that's part of a complex social system" (Hooley, 2020, 1:18). 

We have to explore a lot to finally be able to make decisions about where we want to really put our effort. To throw a lot of mud at the wall, and to see what sticks. It is only once we have determined our model and context that can we move on to making sound decisions, either for ourselves or for clients. It is easy to forget - or to brush aside the need to focus on - these foundational first steps. But if these issues are not dealt with, we often have to go back to the start anyway.

Begin at the beginning. There is a good reason that this is called a process (Hooley, 2020). 

Sam

References:

Hooley, T. (28 August 2020). The context for career [video]. https://youtu.be/H_l1mMIE6oM

Lee, C. I. S. G., Felps, W., & Baruch, Y. (2014). Toward a taxonomy of career studies through bibliometric visualization. Journal of Vocational Behaviour, 85(3): 339-351. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2014.08.008

Moore, C., Gunz, H., & Hall, D. T. (2007). Chapter 2: Tracing the historical roots of career theory in management and organisation studies. In H. Gunz & M. Peiperl (Eds.) Handbook of Career Studies (pp 13-38). SAGE Publications, Inc.