Keeping up in the field

I was asked a question by a graduate last year for ideas on how to keep up in the field of career development once we no longer have access to tertiary libraries to dig into the research. This is a VERY good question! On thinking about this, I decided to put together a quick post with my ideas on how we can stay professionally updated.

Firstly I think we need to join one or two professional organisations. Then we can tap into the updates that they send out to stay current in an incremental way. A list of possibilities that I would suggest are:

• APCDA (Asia Pacific Career Development Association) paid, but very reasonable cost: https://asiapacificcda.org/ (and the hybrid conference in April/May is absolutely worth attending - very reasonably priced and provides about 75 hours of PD) 
• CERIC (Canadian Education and Research in Career Counselling) free: https://ceric.ca/contacts/ (the hybrid conference in January is good value, providing about 150 hours of PD) 
• CDANZ (Career Development Association of NZ) paid: https://cdanz.org.nz/ 
• CATE (Career and Transition Education Association of NZ) paid: https://www.cate.co.nz/ 
• CICA (Career Industry Consortium Australia) some webinars free, some paid: https://cica.org.au/about-us/

Once we have our names on a few membership organisation lists, following some career bloggers can be a good idea, such as:

• Tristram Hooley: https://adventuresincareerdevelopment.wordpress.com/ 
• Tom Staunton: https://runninginaforest.wordpress.com/
• Marc Truyens: https://marcr.net/
• Liz Ryan on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/lizryan/ and https://humanworkplace.com/ 
• And me - Sam Young: https://www.samyoung.co.nz/search

(and please let me know of other career bloggers who are theory-based!)

Next we can register at two repositories - databases - of papers: ResearchGate (https://www.researchgate.net) and Academia (https://www.academia.edu/). This is a large repository of papers, and often papers which are behind a paywall have been lodged and can be freely accessed on one of these two platforms. NB: it is possible that we may need an educational institution email to join, but once we are a member, then we can change our email in our settings. 

Lastly, I think we need to know what journals are open access, and which ones have some regular open access content. For that, check out my series on open access career development journals (new posts will be appearing mid-month through next year): at https://www.samyoung.co.nz/search/label/Career%20Development+freeware

I hope that helps!

Sam