Organisational and personal aspects in career development
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We are living and working in a dynamic society. A diploma is not a guarantee for a lifetime job anymore and lifelong learning is a necessity for everyone to stay employable. The increasing speed of change in the present network-society emphasises the need for the individual to manage his/her own competences in a sustainable way, thus being able to manage his or her career in work and life. This needs a formal validation of competences and a focus on employability (paid work).
But it also needs a process of informal valuation, networking and an open market space that supports the changing needs in the flexible market, the different contexts, and the social-psychological changes of a human throughout life. Sustainable self-management of competences and careers is important both from economic and societal perspective. The focus is or should be on the individual developing process and organisations that stimulate this and making optimal use of the ever developing individuals. A complicating factor in dealing with this focus is that the formal procedures and instruments in career management - training and testing- addresses and utilise only a limited part of the individual learning potential and competences. Working and developing in a knowledge and/or network society means living in a community in which knowledge is being developed constantly and where the competences have to be connected continuously to all kinds of activity and contexts in society.
Participating in society is a social and cultural phenomenon in which individual activities are contributing to society as a whole. In all contexts (paid work, voluntary work, private, hobby, education) the person manages his/her career and uses and develops many competences. Unconsciously we value, appreciate and use these individual competences, but often find it difficult to connect these directly to the formal and institutionalised principles at work and in education, because they use more informal principles and conditions to value the competences.
The use of the word ‘career’ is often limited to paid work, to employment and formal forms of support like education, training, job counselling. Unesco[1] however defined career in 2002 as:
`Career is the interaction of work roles and other life roles over a person’s lifespan including both paid and unpaid work in an individual’s life. People create career patterns as they make decisions about education, work, family and other life roles.’
The European Commission and the OECD also included the importance of participating in society in their policy. The project Worklife Guidance addresses career management in the work context, which varies from paid work in commercial settings to unpaid work in for instance the voluntary sector. The wider definition has been taken in consideration, as it influences decisions in worklife career management.
It is important for all stakeholders in worklife career management (the individual, the employer, educational/training institute, policy, supporting organisations) to be more aware of the advantages of portfolio models, of independent assessment and guidance, of formal and informal valuation, and of available sources of finance. For planning their worklife career it is most of all important that individuals are aware and can describe the desired effects for themselves, for the contexts in which they work and live. Personal development and opportunity management should be customised for the individual, taking in consideration the needs in organisations/society and creating a win-win situation for all.
The OECD (2004[2]) uses the following definition of Career guidance: “Career guidance refers to services and activities intended to assist individuals, of any age and at any point throughout their lives, to make educational, training and occupational choices and to manage their careers.” This definition of career guidance is limited to the formal environments of education, training and work. From the employment perspective this is justified, but it lacks the perception of the individual. The worklife of an individual is more than only paid work and formal education. The development of competences already starts before school s and takes place also outside schooling. Research has shown that up to 93% (Borghans[3] ea, 2011) of all learning of adults is by informal learning, and it can be expected, due to the Just-In-Time, Just-Enough, in all forms of learning, fitting to the interest of the individual, fitting to the intelligences and learning styles of the individual, etc., that the impact of informal learning on the work and on their development is higher than formal education and training sessions. Also from the individual’s perspective, the competences are used in all aspects of life, whereas certain private activities such as a hobby, can give more benefit to the individual than the results held at school or at work.
In his book “We hebben er weer zin in” Hans van der Loo (2011[4]) describes four conditions for a personified valuation and empowerment of the individual. They are also conditions for lifelong learning:
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being aware (by self-estimation and self-assessment being able to assess your value in relation to other value systems);
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positive connection (natural intelligence, all intelligences, connection with environment and fitting in the context of a network society);
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driven by self-chosen ambitions (versus strict rules in education, in work and in society);
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Active enthusiasm and ambition (have a positive attitude towards your own ambition, take full responsibility and go for what your ambition in live is).
If all these individual conditions are met, it enables a person to plan and manage his or her own career.
Career guidance needs to reposition toward the need of the individual, rather than only to the demand of employment and/or education. It is a balance between the organisations’ perspective / need (top-down) and looking from the individual’s perspective (bottom-up) career guidance further enriches employability. It also enforces further sustainable development of competences of the individual and the participation in society. In this way it is possible to make continuously the link between ‘work career’ and ‘life career’.
Sources:
[1] Handbook on career counselling, Unesco, Paris, 2002 (http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001257/125740e.pdf)
[2] Career Guidance, a handbook for policy makers, OECD, Paris, 2004 (http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/53/53/34060761.pdf)
[3] Borghans L, Een leven lang leren in Nederland, ROA, Maasticht, 2011 (http://www.roa.unimaas.nl/pdf_publications/2011/ROA_R_2011_5.pdf)
[4] Loo, H van der, We hebben er weer zin in! (in Dutch), van Duuren Media, 2011
THE ORGANISATIONAL SETTING
Five Steps Up gives you a practical tool that you can use whenever you need to or want to coach a VPL process or to counsel. Five Steps Up is designed for organizations (incl. companies / institutes) who face HR issues in their work with organisations: what steps to take and how to make sure that you’re not missing important aspects of the process? This review shows you how to get started with.
Five Steps Up.
Five steps up is based on competencies, their values and their development. Competences can be as they are described in qualifications for certain professions, but is also can be the valuation of key competences as described by the European Commission. These competencies also include learning-to-learn, social and civic competences, initiative and sense of entrepreneurship and cultural awareness and expression.
In the review the process of Career guidance / Validating Prior Learning (VPL) is explained and described. Career guidance / VPL is a process of five phases and 10 steps. In this part all the phases and their interlinked steps are explained in terms of actions needed to be taken by an organisation that wants to excel in offering Career guidance and VPL as a tool for access to its learning programs and qualifications on the one hand and tailoring these programs to the individual needs and personal characteristics of the client on the other hand.
The review also offers the ‘five steps up’ for organisation and clients to fill in when developing and applying career guidance / VPL within their context and objectives and for developing and implementing career guidance / VPL within the organisations’ programs. The target group for this program is organisation-staff members that work as HRM/HRD-staff, intake-officers, , managers, counsellors, curriculum-developers, assessors and trainer.
THE REVIEW: K. Schuur & R. Duvekot. 2015. Organisational aspects in career development.
THE PROCESS FROM AN INDIVIDUAL PERSPECTIVE
Developments (such as industrialization, free information, new technology) in Western society in the 20th century have led to an increase in prosperity. Together with democratic movements and the increased speed of change this has led to a more individualistic approach. People claimed certain rights and felt more independent, deciding more and more about their own life.
There are also the individual differences that require a holistic approach at individual level. Examples of those individual differences are: different phases in life and different social-emotional developments, differences in combinations of intelligences and the level of development of each of these intelligences, individual competences, different social contexts, different challenges in employment. And this includes for the total of worklife career and development of all people.
A person has to deal with increased uncertainties in worklife. Large organizations / companies has mainly loyalty to a small core of employees, while a larger group of employees should be more flexible in the balance of keeping their job and finding new ones. In the turmoil of the economy flexibility with employment within small organizations is even more required. Temporary personnel is a must for many small companies , although at the same time they need a certain level of loyalty from their personnel. For individuals this means a change of thinking from loyalty to the firm and job security towards employability and flexibility. Providing top-down career management for such large groups of individuals is virtually impossible. Therefore individuals have to take the responsibility and power of control for their own career and manage this themselves. It is expected that, next to the collective bargaining by labour unions, individuals increasingly have to bargain for their own employability themselves. It demands full consideration of all contexts of worklife. It considers the individual as a whole, including paid work, where decisions are made regarding all aspects of worklife. What is illogically sometimes from an employability point of view might be very logical from the individual’s perspective. Choices by a person are often made based on their social identity, on existing relations, on availability, on lust/pleasure and on overall benefit (Linn, 1998[1]). And this is not always equal to what is demanded for only work career management.
Another issue is that having certain diploma’s is no guarantee for a job anymore. The context of work is changing, the work is more knowledge intensive, the knowledge is outdated, job descriptions are changing, and also the curricula leading to certain diplomas are changing continuously. It is difficult to compare present diplomas with old ones Also it is more difficult to get valued in present society on base of a diploma. Practice also shows that many people get their initial job through the value of their diploma (and the relations build during the practical periods) but later in life more and more through the networks they are participating in. Next to that it is often experienced that the value of the diploma for the individual still has to be ‘proved’ or ‘showed’ in practice. Because often the diploma doesn’t give away a lot about the quality of the knowledge and experience.
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THE REVIEW: K. Schuur R. Duvekot. 2015. Personal aspects in career development.
READ MORE ABOUT THE ORGANISATIONAL AND PERSONAL ASPECTS!
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