My colleagues at the Inland Norway University have just released a new book called Ikke bare god å snakke med [Not just good to talk to]. It covers all aspects of professional career guidance in Norway and includes two chapters co-written by me. The book argues that career guidance addresses a range of big and small questions related to life, learning and work. In career guidance, professionals work to develop their students’ or client’s competence to handle the challenges and choices that various career transitions bring with them. By the way, in Norwegian they have the word ‘veisøker’ which ..read more

I have been very pleased to collaborate on a new article with my colleagues Rie Thomsen and Manwel Debono on a new article exploring the legacy of Ronald Sultana. The article is called A legacy of solidaric critique and hope for a better world: A meditation on the scholarly contribution of Ronald Sultana and appears in the latest issue of the NICEC journal. In the article, we reflect on Ronald’s legacy. We argue that he was a major figure in the development of career guidance theory and practice of the late 20th and early 21st century. The article begins by reflecting on and summarising his c ..read more

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