I’ve just finished a wonderful few days visit to the University of South-Eastern Norway (USN) in Drammen. I was invited to give some guest lectures to their students and to present a paper to their research group on career guidance. I’ve had a great time talking career guidance and research with all of the team and come away thoroughly inspired. I presented new versions of the work that I’ve been involved in on career guidance and social justice (these slides are largely in Norwegian) and then developed a new presentation that looked at the value of international research in career guidance ..read more

I’ve just been involved in a new OECD paper entitled Challenging social inequality through career guidance: Insights from international data and practice. In it we look at the evidence that suggests that class, gender and ethnic and migrant status inequality structures peoples’ careers and examine how career guidance can be used to challenge these kinds of inqualities. This report focuses on school-level career guidance systems and examines how they can more effectively respond to social inequalities. It draws on new analysis of PISA and PIAAC data and builds on the OECD Career Readiness Indi ..read more

On Friday it was Employee Appreciation Day so I teamed up with my colleague Professor Frances Maratos  from the University of Derby to discuss resilience. In a blog post published on the University’s website it we noted that resilience is increasingly seen as something the education system should foster and employers should encourage and develop, but is resilience just telling people to get good at putting up with a bad situation? And so, we asked whether we should move away from resilience and towards compassion. The world is full of stories of people who have had knock-backs but t ..read more

On Saturday I was teaching on the University of Derby’s Masters in Career Guidance and Development. We’ve recently deepened our discussion of career guidance policy and so I reworked the session that I’ve done in the past to focus on some of the big themes that have guided career guidance policy over the years. In particularly I focused on education, employment/economic and social themes. As well as discussing some of the key rationales for engaging with these from the perspectives of policy makers I also tried to show the challenges that policy focused interventions create for practice. This ..read more

Yesterday I was invited to go to Nottingham Business School and talk about the future of career to the Future of Work conference (#fowconferencenbs2024). In the talk I tried to take on some of the big shifts that are happening in work (the growth of automation and AI and the climate in particular) and to argue that they should take a more critical look at some of the futures that they are presented with. The Future of Work conference is a brilliant curricular focused careers intervention, which asks students to participate in a conference where they hear from employers, careers professionals ..read more

It was late morning when K. arrived. The entrance to the organisation lay under deep snow. There was no sign of a reception desk and concrete, glass and steel created a barrier that it was impossible to see through. K. stood a long time on the gravel road that led towards the organisation, gazing upward into the seeming emptiness. Right, he thought, here goes, and started walking up to the structure. After a while he located double doors, camouflaged to look like the rest of the glassy façade. He walked up to them expecting them to open, but they stayed resolute and impenetrable. He halted hi ..read more

On Monday I was invited to speak at the Norwegian National Forum for Career Guidance in Oslo. This is the annual meeting between the government’s Higher Education and Skills Directorate (HK-Dir) and key stakeholders including employers, trade unions, regional leaders in career guidance and the professional association. I presented on the importance of investing in career guidance and drew on a number of papers that I’ve written including Effective policy frameworks for the organisation of career guidance services, Investing in careers, and Lessons for career guidance from return-on-investment ..read more

Photo by Tranmautritam on Pexels.com I spent a few days last week talking about and teaching integrated guidance to students at Lillehammer. Essentially this is about how we can incorporate technologies into guidance and careers education in a purposeful way using ideas of instructional design. I’ll hopefully have a new article coming out on this topic soon, but in the meantime, the chapter that I wrote with Ingrid Bakke is probably the most complete articulation of my thinking on this subject. Bakke, I.B., & Hooley, T. (2023). Neither online, nor face-to-face, but integrated career g ..read more

Photo by Merlin Lightpainting on Pexels.com I spend a lot of last week teaching career theory in Lillehammer with my colleague Sikin Jynge. As anyone who has ever taught a career theory course will know, it can be a challenging thing to teach. Career theory is supposed to help people to make the complexity of career simpler. Careers are endlessly complex and yet we have to make sense of them every day. Theory tells us that there are some rules behind this mess of experience and that we can use these rules to help us to make sense of it and more importantly to build actions that will help us to ..read more

For those people who aren’t in UK higher education, this post might be a little strange, please feel free to skip. I’m writing about this here because it is the platform that I have to try and influence something that is important in my life and in the life of other workers in the industry that I’m in. The pursuit of collective action and an engagement in democracy is central to my beliefs about what effective career development is and what should be included in careers education, so view this post as an attempt for me to walk the walk. Even for those who are in UKHE the fact that there is an ..read more