Career practitioners are invisible

Career development in Aotearoa is an “inchoate occupation”: in other words, we lack clarity as a ‘profession’ (Douglas, 2009, 2010, p. 25; Furbish, 2012; O’Reilly, 2018). That is a bit of an ouchy comment. I wonder if this is because career development practice here has been - and continues to be - diversely defined by very diverse practitioners with a huge range of specialisations including, according to the specialisation competencies defined by the Career Development Association of New Zealand:

1. Career education in secondary and tertiary environments
2. career counselling;
3. working with those with disabilities;
4. career development programme design and delivery;
5. research;
6. policy development;
7. professional supervision; and
8. Organisational career development (CDANZ, 2018).

Something Val O’Reilly said in her PhD thesis struck me forcibly: that as a New Zealand teacher and career educator “there was no equivalent professional pathway [for her role], and [she found her] career work was peripheral to the core curriculum” within the school (2018, p. 3) and I am sure that many of us would resonate with that. How could she become a professional when there was not a clear pathway?

Well, education, obviously: we have Capable at Otago Polytechnic, and the under-grad NMIT Career Development programme. Except there are some problems with that.

Firstly, we don't come to career development as a first career. We arrive as a second, third or fourth career, with our Kiwi career practitioners being older people, averaging 51 years (Young, 2025). We already have an under-grad degree. If we want to upskill, we are likely to want to build on our undergrad base and look for post-graduate qualifications.

Secondly, career development practitioners are spread across a number of different organisations. There is CATE (CATE Careers and Transition Education Association NZ Inc) with a membership of just over 1000. CDANZ has around 400 members; some of which are also members of CATE. NZAC – the New Zealand Association of Counsellors – has 2500 members (of whom perhaps 250 might be in the career space). Then there are case managers and rehab professionals, both of whom have their own membership organisations. I think we can safely assume that there will be few double ups, and, …if we add in those who work with MSD, other charitable organisations, and schools where practitioners are not CATE members, perhaps collectively we may have 5000 people working in the career field in New Zealand. And - at a very rough back of the envelope calculation – 60% of career practitioners are probably NOT members of a professional organisation. Which actually means that most of us are invisible.

And what I mean by invisible is that there are roughly 78,000 nurses registered with the Nursing Council in New Zealand, and tertiary institutes provide 18 post-graduate qualifications ranging from level 8 to 10 on the NZQA framework (NCNZ, 2025). If we think about social workers, there are 7520 registered with the NZ Social Workers Registration Board (SWRB, 2025), and a massive 3,000 enrolled in higher education (Bartley et al., 2025). It is easy to see in those two professions, because they belong to one governing body, just what the demand for higher education might be. The number of registered professionals in a field needs to provide enough volume to warrant an investment in Higher Education. It costs.

With only 5000 career practitioners, and fewer than 2000 of us ‘officially’ exist in maybe four or five main membership organisations, across eight specialities, we must come at our field sideways under a social work or an education umbrella or go offshore for HE. Not ideal for our career development.

But is it any wonder that we do not have a taught post-graduate career development in our country? Because, if we are invisible and fragmented, we have not created an incentive for an agency to invest in education to upskill us.

Something to think about.

Sam

References:

Bartley, A., Beddoe, L., Hashemi, L., Rahimi, M.,  & de Fossard, S. (2025). Social work students in Aotearoa New Zealand: the impacts of financial hardship on mental and social wellbeing. Social Work Education, 44(3), 485-505, https://doi.org/10.1080/02615479.2024.2326540

CDANZ. (2018). Career Development Association of New Zealand Competency Framework. Career Development Association of New Zealand. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1p4je3cbcuCk659W116_YlQxWIKQmkJ4v/view

Douglas, F. (2009). Anyone Can Do Guidance...: Losing and finding professional identity in a complex chain of services. In IAEVG International Conference 2013. https://jyx.jyu.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/22908/Douglas.pdf?sequence=1

Douglas, F. (2010). Sustaining the Self: Implications for the Development of Career Practitioners' Professional Identity. Australian Journal of Career Development, 19(3), 24-32. https://doi.org/10.1177/103841621001900305

Furbish, D. S. (2012). An Overview of New Zealand Career Development Services. Australian Journal of Career Development, 21(2), 14-24. https://doi.org/10.1177/103841621202100203

Laurenson-Elder, R. C. (2022). What Works at Work? A comparative study of counselling and coaching in the workplace [Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, University of Auckland].

NCNZ. (2025). Programmes accredited by the Nursing Council as pathways leading to registration as a Nurse Practitioner or Registered Nurse designated prescriber. Nursing Council of New Zealand | Te Kaunihere Tapuhi o Aotearoa.  https://www.nursingcouncil.org.nz/common/Uploaded%20files/Accredited%20programmes%20leading%20to%20registration%20as%20a%20NP%20or%20RN%20designated%20prescriber%202024-08-07.pdf

O'Reilly, V. N. (2018). Professional standards and professional identity: Perspectives of career development practitioners in Australia and New Zealand [Doctoral thesis: University of Queensland]. https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/data/UQ_4c26854/s42789538_final_thesis.pdf?

SWRB. (2025). Home. Social Workers Registration Board New Zealand. https://swrb.govt.nz

Young, S. (2025). A snapshot of Aotearoa NZ career practitioners [Manuscript submitted for publication]. Social Sciences, NMIT.