On Friday I had the privilege of running a workshop for careers leaders in Leicester. The workshop was based on our new edition of The Careers Leader Handbook, but focused in specifically on issues to do with data, evaluation and impact. As ever with these workshops I learnt a lot more than I taught and I was very lucky to be co-teaching with some of the LEP staff from Leicester. Here are the slides that I used in case they are any use to anyone. Careers leader evaluation workshop from Leicester (PowerPoint slides)Download ..read more

The Gatsby Foundation are consulting on the future development of the Gatsby Benchmarks. If you want to find out more about their thinking on this they have published a really useful article on their website called Good Career Guidance: The Next 10 Years. As part of this consultation my colleague and I at the International Centre for Guidance Studies, are working with the Gatsby Foundation to gather the ideas and insights of the broad user community of the Benchmarks. So, if you use the Benchmarks, have an opinion on them and want to influence how they develop, please take the time to fill in ..read more

Last week I went to Leeds to present at the Careers Live event. It was great to be back in a room with so many people who were passionate about careers. This is what I had to say in my keynote… Career guidance after the pandemicDownload I also gave a workshop based on our five signposts model. The five signposts to a socially just career guidanceDownload ..read more

The Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills have just published a series of new reports looking at career guidance in Norwegian schools. This provides a powerful evidence base for the development of the countries career guidance system. New ambitions for career guidance in schools (Holm-Nordhagen et al.) looks at the future development of career guidance in schools in Norway, arguing that the country needs to develop a robust career guidance system to support young people’s choices. Quality in career guidance in schools (Mordal et al.) explores the current quality of career gui ..read more

I was very privileged to be asked to address the first Arab Career Development conference today in Aswan, Egypt today. Sadly, I had to give my address via YouTube, but from looking at the conference social media feeds, it looks like it is going really well. I was there to introduce the International Centre for Career Development and Public Policy and to talk about policy. So this is what I had to say. It is great to see interest in career development growing across the world ..read more

Earlier this week Kier Starmer set out his big vision for a Labour Government in what was trailed as a major speech. Predictably Guardian columnists like Polly Toynbee loved it. Toynbee declared that it revealed ‘a man serious about being prime minister’. Which to be fair has not ever been in doubt. We know that Starmer wants to be PM, what is not clear is what he will actually do with the job once he gets it. The centre of his speech was Labour’s new five missions. These are as follows. Secure the highest sustained growth in the G7 with good jobs and productivity growth in every part of the ..read more

With the strike it has been quite difficult to keep up with posting the content that I’ve created on the days that I haven’t been on strike. However, now we are on a pause, I’m going to try and catch up. A couple of weeks ago I was on the #WeAreCareers YouTube show with Sabiha and Chris and my co-author David Andrews. We were talking about the role of careers leaders in schools and discussing the second edition of The Careers Leaders Handbook. If you haven’t come across #WeAreCareers before it is a brilliant YouTube show aimed at careers professionals and others with an interest in the field ..read more

The picket line at the University of Derby Anyone who has been following my social media or working with me over the last couple of months will probably have noticed that I’ve been taking quite a lot of strike action. This has been personally pretty difficult (not to mention financially challenging), but I’m very persuaded that it is the right decision. The public sector is creaking under creeping austerity and those of us who care about public services have to try and do something. To ignore it is to see the ongoing destruction of the public realm and the continuing de-professionalisation of ..read more

Everyone has probably heard the hype about ChatGPT, the online AI writing software. I asked it to write 600 words on ‘Career guidance policy in England’. Below you will find what it came up with. You will have to judge for yourself whether you think that it is a good piece and more importantly as to whether you think that it renders me obsolete. My take is that it is a good piece of writing on the topic, which is on topic, well structured and which comes up with a few of the key points. However, it is lacking in nuance and understanding of context and doesn’t contain any new ideas. I won’t s ..read more

Last week I reflected on my achievement (or otherwise) of last year’s resolutions. So, this week it is really time to set myself some new New Years resolutions. So, let’s just take it for read that I’ll commit to all of the usual ones. I will eat better, exercise more, drink less, see friends more, work less, say no more, play more guitar, listen to more records, look at my phone less etc etc etc. But, beyond all of those relatively forlorn hopes I will also try and do the following. Undertake the REF hygiene necessary to satisfy my employer. For those of you who are unfamiliar with universi ..read more