Career Development in Complex Times

Has your career been a simple path from A - to B - to C? Would 16-year-old you be surprised at what you do now? What would they have said if someone gave them a map of the path your career has taken from when you left school to today?

Most people in the profession of career education and guidance accept the core idea that careers are non-linear and uncertainty is the nature of the world.

If this is true, then why is so much of our professional practice still focused on getting clients a clear and simple career 'answer'?

This compelling question was asked by Dr Jim Bright, BECOME's Director of  Research and Impact , in the opening keynote to the CDAA national conference last week in Melbourne, a conference whose theme was Trends, Transition and Transformation: The evolution of career development.

A certain approach

Have we really progressed beyond test and tell?, asked Jim Bright in his keynote.

As a profession, do we have an obsession with certainty? A reluctance to move away from tools that promise to know our clients better than they do and that offer to provide the answers for them -- and of traditional models that assume linear career progression once the initial direction has been set.

Humans are messy, complex, unique beings. Life is uncertain. So shouldn't we be investing our talent and time in teaching our clients how to manage uncertainty? Boosting their capacity and the ways they are ready to respond to uncertainty and move with agency in a world that we know is a constantly-shifting, complex system of opportunities, ideas, networks and connections - with chance events thrown in just to keep it all spicy.

The evidence shows that we benefit our clients most in the short and longer term by teaching them to work inside this complex changing world rather than denying its existence through over-simplification and application of 'solution tools' that fail to consider the complexities of the question.

Three types of response to uncertainty

It's time to appreciate that each human has the capacity to design their own life rather than putting them in a box that reduces them to a label. Time to stop applying simplistic labels and codes to complex people.

Instead, argued Jim, it's high time to bring together theory and practice in contemporary career development that acknowledges the evidence without running back to traditional models of what career guidance looks like.

Time to move from having 'a plan' (any plan) to learning the ins and outs of 'planfulness' as a state of engagement with the moving world, agency over your own career choices, and capacity to experiment and embrace opportunities.

Natural systems are complex and ever-changing. A river doesn't stick to the same course in a straight line - it flows around obstacles and into low areas, which themselves shift  and change shape as the river's currents deposit sediment and create shifting shoals of islands. This satellite photo shows the Geba River on the west coast of Guinea-Bissau, a dynamically shifting delta ecosystem. Satellite image courtesy of  United States Geological Survey.

Theory and practice, based on evidence

Jim Bright set the tone, but many others added their research and evidence-based work as well as practical tools to the theme of careers in a context of complexity at the CDAA conference 2024. Without a proper grounding in theory, research and history - practice is flying blind and risks repeating the same mistakes or failing to acknowledge the ideas of others.

Paul Hartung's keynote took us through progress in the field, reinforcing Jim's points that the evidence for efficacy of interests matching is minimal. He explained that contemporary paradigms recognise the complexity of humans and emphasise the importance of building each individual's capacity to write their own stories and design their own future. 

I had the opportunity to co-present with Justine Whipper on redefining success for elite athletes and sports people. The world of high-performance sport measures success in simple terms - winning vs losing. We presented evidence showing the gains in player performance and wellbeing when athletes are engaged in parallel planning for a post-playing career, as well as tools to support this shift. It's a great example of benefits to be gained from 'planfulness' in action, or learning to plan and replan in a constantly shifting flow.

Michael Healy's session on the role of emotions had me scribbling pages and pages of notes (even though I'd watched the webinar of the same name previously!) Again, when we're working with messy, complex, amazing humans they bring layers of emotions and beliefs with them to their career learning and decisions. How they're feeling has the capacity to completely change their approach and outcome of events. This fits so well with the concepts in Chaos Theory about luck readiness and being open to change and opportunity. Back at home on Sunday night we watched Inside Out 2 again and I think that should be Michael's mandatory follow up activity for making people reflect on this work around emotions.

And back to Jim, with whom I presented the dynamic Wednesday morning Masterclass interlocking theory with practice. We explored the impact of the Chaos Theory of Careers in counselling contexts, and how transformative it is as an approach to career education in schools using BECOME. 

Keeping it alive

All good conferences are invigorating. We gain new ideas and connections, and new inklings of how we might do things better. This inspiration is the best part of getting a group of specialists together. The challenge is the clear (head)space and time to turn that inspiration and new learning into practice.

Here are my two ideas for how I'm going to apply that post-conference energy of being inspired, invigorated and informed into real momentum for the field.

1) Pushing for practice that has real impact

• Within K-12 education we're going to run a series of leadership briefings to step outside the echo chamber of our passionate community of Career Development Practitioners who get all of this. These sessions will help career leaders in schools and systems to advocate for more space and time to do this work properly. Follow us on LinkedIn to get news of these sessions or reach out to liv@become.education if you'd like to book one for your community of school leaders.

2) Changing the broader perception of what we do

It's clear that we have a lot of work still to do in raising awareness about the role and importance of quality career development. We need to continue to work on what success looks like -- i.e. mastery of the process of career development -- not ticking off a single decision and expecting success to follow.

• We're launching exciting new resources for BECOME users for 2025 to build on the great outcomes our partners are already seeing. The resources and BECOME.me web app are getting their annual upgrade but we're also adding exciting new content that will help share evidence and best practice with the broader team so that non-career development specialists understand how powerful and important career development is and are excited to play their valuable role in these conversations. Sign up to our newsletter to be the first to hear details.

Awareness - Aspiration - Agency

BECOME provides evidence-based tools and resources to engage and inspire students in exciting contemporary careers exploration, giving them the confidence and skills to take charge of their life and learning.

Read more about the BECOME program for schools and how it engages students while reimagining careers education or check out our extensive video library of insights from experts in the field.