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Career Guidance

Career guidance expert to visit SA

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:08

The traditional concept of a “career” has had a fundamental shakeup - Why Career Development Matters – for individuals, for businesses and for the stability of world economies.

Billions of Rands are spent annually in South Africa on skills development, education and training and yet it is achingly clear that professional career guidance and research into how and why people make the education choices that they do is sorely lacking.

Individuals should make decisions about what they are to learn in a well-informed and well-thought-through way, linked to their interests, their capacities and their aspirations, and informed realistically about the opportunities to which the learning can lead.

Then they are likely to be more successful learners, and the huge sums of public money invested in education and training systems are likely to yield much higher returns.

The traditional concept of a ‘career’ was progression up an ordered hierarchy within an organisation or profession. The notion was that people ‘chose’ a career, which then unfolded in an orderly way. It was an elitist concept: some had a career; many only had a job; some did not even have that.

For some time now this traditional concept has been fragmenting. The pace of change driven by technology and globalisation means that organisations are constantly exposed to change.

They are therefore less willing to make long-term commitments to individuals; where they do, it is in exchange for flexibility about the roles and tasks the individuals will perform.

Increasingly, therefore, security lies not in employment but in employability. Individuals who want to maintain their employability have to be willing to regularly learn new skills.

So careers are now increasingly seen not as being ‘chosen’ but as being constructed, through the series of choices about learning and work that people make throughout their lives. Career development in this sense need not be confined to the few: it can, and must, be made accessible to all.

World authority Prof Tony Watts is visiting South Africa during October 2008 on the invitation of the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) as part of a national tour where he will address key industry captains on the critical importance of career guidance in the Development of the National Qualifications Framework in South Africa.

Issues to be addressed include the lifelong process progression in learning and work and how the quality of this process significantly determines the nature and quality of individuals’ lives.

This impacts on the kind of people they become, the sense of purpose they have, the income at their disposal; why career development matters for public policy, the relationship of career development to lifelong learning, the support individuals need to manage their career development and more.