Diverting rangatahi from NEET

A worrying 13.2% of our rangatahi in the 15-24 age group are unemployed (Statistics New Zealand, 2025b). These young people are classified a...

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Five career theory exploration tips

When we are new to career development, how do we meaningfully explore the career development field? Are there some useful primers to help us...

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The Victorian ideal of rational recreation

There is apparently a ideal of self-improvement called "rational recreation" (Beaven, 2005; Harrison, 2022), which looks like it a...

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Job Therapy

I read Job Therapy (West, 2024) as a six hour audiobook, which begins with an assessment to find out what 'type' of worker we are: w...

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Costing women's work

As Lucassen says, "women’s work is often overlooked compared to men’s" (2021, p. 1): I have written about this before (here), but ...

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Retiring retirement

Sir Dick Seddon, then PM, proposed a compulsory retirement age of 65 years in 1898 when the average life expectancy for a New Zealander was ...

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Why are Apprenticeships the 'poor relation'?

How did Apprenticeships become the poor relation of the qualifications field?  Am I right in saying that they are? I think so: apprenticeshi...

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Why are there not more apprentices?

Apparently in the 1980s 15% of secondary school leavers went to University; today, including polytechnic degrees, it is around 40% (Cox, 202...

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Four years to the 2030 SDGs

In 2015, the United Nation established the Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs; a set of seventeen ambitious, interwoven goals which were ...

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Employee versus contractor

While in 2024 220,000 New Zealanders were working multiple jobs, today - driven by the rising gig economy and cost-of-living pressures - nea...

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VET in Aotearoa

Since the RoVE process started in February 2019 (Chan & Huntingdon, 2022; read more here ), Aotearoa has seen a LOT of disruption in the...

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Who holds the power?

I was thinking about societal power, and how companies fit into that power structure... or, at times, dominate it. Why? Because we created i...

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Projected international population change

If you have not yet watched the documentary by Shaw (2025), Birthgap , I strongly recommend it. I felt it connected many disparate elements ...

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