22 June 2012Crossborder seminar Today’s career management skills Its roots and evolution Valerija Čuček, BPs Kadis.

22 June 2012 Crossborder seminar

Today’s career management skillsIts roots and evolution

Valerija Čuček, BPsKadis

22 June 2012 Valerija Čuček

Today’s career management skills



‘’People don’t succeed by migrating to a ‘hot’ industry. They thrive by focusing on who they really are – and connecting to or creating work that they truly love (and, by doing so, unleashing a productive and creative power that they never imagined). Companies win when they engage the hearts and minds of individuals who are dedicated to answering their life question.’’

Po Bronson



Talk from practice = qualitative talk


Your Topic Goes Here

• Ida, 46 years old

Ida was 46 and has worked her whole life in a clothing shop as a shop assistant. She lost the job a year ago when the shop was closed down because of bad business results. She was originally from a small place about 40 km outside Ljubljana. She commented her choice of the school (and profession) with quoting her mother who said ‘you’ll always have a job as a shop assistant.’

She described her health as weak, she often suffered from stress, also at her previous workplace. She also admitted she was sometimes depressed.

Her job searching was slow paced and not very active. She was heavily relying on referrals that would come from the Employment service.

When a possibility of a job in a supermarket of the largest retail chain in Slovenia showed up, that caused a lot of anxiety because she was used to a different type of work. She was selling clothes before, she was afraid that she won’t do well with food items and different tasks that this brings.


Your Topic Goes Here

• Ida, 46 years old

She was afraid of the quick pace and particularly the employer’s expectations about the amount of time she would have to spend at the checkout working with cash register. She had no experience in this and she was afraid she will not be able to learn. She started the probation period, but she wanted to refuse the employment possibility more than once.

Her husband was saying she doesn’t need this kind of stress and wanted to call the employer in her name after the first day of probation work to tell them she’s not coming back. He was saying that even if she’s without work for a while longer, it’s not a problem.

When certain other group member commented that this particular employer is well known for not treating their employees well, she wanted to quit again.

Despite all this, she was saying they were friendly in the shop, they showed her how to work with the register, but they were not able to tell her how much time exactly she would have to work there (and how much with the goods, among the shelves).


Career management skills

A. Personal management1. Build and maintain positive self-image

2. Interact positively and effectively with others

3. Change and grow throughout your life

A. Learning and work exploration4. Participate in lifelong learning supportive of life/work goals

5. Locate and effectively use life/work information

6. Understand the relationship between work and society/economy

A. Life/Work building7. Secure or create and maintain work

8. Make life/work enhancing decisions

9. Maintain balanced life and work roles

10. Understand the changing nature of life and work roles

11. Understand, engage in and manage one’s own life/work building process

Blueprint for Life/Work Designs, Canada



• FEAR



FEAR

• Reluctance to step out of their comfort zone • Linked to low self-confidence • Particularly an issue of older individuals who

have been involved in one job only for a long time (‘I’m too old for change’).

CHANGE (sometimes very minor) induces FEAR.



• EMOTIONAL PROBLEMS / COPING



EMOTIONAL PROBLEMS / COPING

• Often linked to general dissatisfaction with life (partner) and/or work

(What is cause and what is effect?)

• Lead to health problems (headaches/migraine, blood pressure, …)



Literature / research in EMOTIONAL PROBLEMS / COPING

• Proactive coping skills strongly negatively

correlated with depression in women.• Positive emotional states are linked to good

social relationships. • 17% adults experienced so much stress they

considered suicide, main causes were work (43%) and finances (39%) (Ipsos-Reid survey in Canada)

• Depressed workers cost employers 44 billion USD annually in lost productive time



• TAKING RESPONSIBILITY



• TAKING RESPONSIBILITY

• Common with older workers • Hardly any career interventions when our

parents’ generation chose secondary schools

• Vocational choice was supposedly made once and for all, not recurrently



• Research / literature on TAKING RESPONSIBILITY

• Previously there was lifetime employment system, designed to take care of the worker’s whole family – hard to adapt to new reality

• Lifetime employment is/was not present only in a socialist system, with some variations it was a norm in many Western countries and elsewhere

• Now becoming a thing of the past • … BUT conflicting evidence!



• CAREER PLANNING vs. CHANCE



• CAREER PLANNING vs. CHANCE

• Very few adult people planned their career –’it happened to them’

• STILL: major difference between those who had an idea about what they want or those who had none at all

• At least half of the people work in a different area than they were in school for

• Many discover late in their lives what they want to do (often induced by external factor)



• Research / literature on CAREER PLANNING vs. CHANCE

• 5x as many people entered the workforce by chance rather than choice influenced by career guidance practitioner (Gallup survey in US)



• Marko, 30 years old

Marko was 30, he finished high school with difficulties, according to him, mainly because he was chronically ill. He completed the secondary school for food technology. The only work experience was a month’s practice work, which was more than 5 years ago. Despite having no work experience he was aiming for management positions because he felt he has what it takes.

He moved and talked slowly, he spoke quietly. Before speaking, he always took some time to think.

He was unclear about his illness, he mentioned there were more things, but the main issue were chronic stomach problems for which he was hospitalised more than once.

His father was a successful academic and Marko wanted to become ‘somebody’ as well. He talked about his father a lot, showing clear admiration and respect for him and his achievements.



• FAMILY INFLUENCE



FAMILY INFLUENCE

• Parents with higher SES - high expectations• All means are used to enable the child to finish higher

education, not always to the child’s benefit • Parents with lower SES - often not expecting enough• Parents know very few professions and very few

school programmes (also the highly educated parents), but often have strong viewpoints about them



Research / literature on FAMILY INFLUENCE:

• The family is the single most important influence of vocational behavior that is known (Brown)

• Family opposition might be the most frequent obstacle to career choice (Savickas)

• Psychoanalytic theory even suggests many successful managers follow this path to compensate for their father’s absence during their childhood (de Vries)

• Most theories of vocational development talk about family influence, but very few have applied it to the career counselling process.



• Marjana, 43 years old

Marjana was over 40 and in a dilemma about whether she should even look for a job – in her 3 years of unemployment her family members got used to her helping them, e.g. her mother in law to be taken to hospital and to the doctors at any time, her son to be accompanied to the seaside training camp for a week …

She worried how they would get used to her being absent during the day – ‘They rely on me so much’, she said.

In the years of unemployment she was helping her husband a bit with accounting and administration in his firm, but it didn’t bring her a lot of satisfaction. It was not very demanding and she had done it before in the afternoons, when she was still regularly employed too.

















• WORK/LIFE BALANCE



ROLE CONFLICT

• Typically a female issue, but also men are not immune• In male population the dilemma is mainly visible when

building a managerial career

Literature / research on ROLE CONFLICT:

• 49% of UK workers report issues with balancing work and family (JP Morgan Fleming, 2003)

• In USA about 40% men report having a work-life balance problems

• Growing number of people identifies lifestyle anchor as their primary career anchor, as many as 50% (Schein)



• Janez, 29 years old

Janez finished a study of economics. He had 1,5 years of experience as a project assistant in a technical company. His attitude was extremely self-confident. He was looking for almost any kind of job – he felt he can do many things and even if not, he can learn fast. Any suggestions from the group members was accepted with ethusiasm, so his employment goal changed every 2 days.

He had a negative attitude to employers – they only hire students, they don’t give people a fair chance to prove themselves, they never even send an answer and he wasn’t reluctant to tell this to anybody who would listen, including employers at an interview.

He usually wanted to know why he was rejected. In few instances when the employers told him, he was far from satisfied with the answer. One employer even told him they thought he would be difficult to work with, but he dismissed this as completely unfounded.

At one time he was calling for potential employment and the conversation was after a single minute transformed in him education the secretary how she should greet him on the phone.

















• DECISION INABILITY

• Low awareness of links between education and work

• A myriad of options and professions is mostly confusing

• Giving information is far from enough



• Research / literature on DECISION INABILITY

• Indicative of inadequate parent/child separation (failed tasks of identitiy formation and psychological separation) (Lopez and Andrews)



• AGGRESSIVE COMMUNICATION

• Mistaking active communication and/or assertiveness for aggressive communication

• Also uncritically using job search tips from another culture

22 June 2012 Crossborder seminar

What do we do?


Why is all this important?

• Most career interventions still focus on helping students choose career goals rather than acquiring career management skills

• Lack of career management skills – lower quality of life

• Help them learn how to fish, not assist them choose a fish



• People present a wide range of life and work concerns – career and personal counselling are inseparable

• People need help to make sense of their thoughts and concerns

• Other factors often hinder job searching or the ability to keep a job – the classical intervention is sure to fail!

• People do not live in vacuum, so we shouldn’t treat/process them like they do.

CONTEXT MATTERS!



• There is no proof that interest inventories and their interpretation benefit the counselees.


What do we do?

• A wide range of qualitative career assessment tools available to see the person holistically

• Based in constructivism

… to be used with CAUTION!

Such approaches might not be suitable for all clients.


What do we do?

EMPOWERMENT

PERSONAL BRANDING

QUALITATIVE CAREER

ASSESSMENT

CONSTRUCTIVISM

LIFE CAREER THEMES

HOLISTIC INTEGRATIVE APPROACH


What do we do?

• Practice the new career management paradigm

"You can give lifetime employability by training people, by making them adaptable, making them mobile to go other places to do other things. But you can't guarantee lifetime employment.’’

Jack Welch


Thank you for your attention!

[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

22 June 2012Crossborder seminar Today’s career management skills Its roots and evolution Valerija Čuček, BPs Kadis.

Documents

valerija uekyour topic

work exploration4

bpskadisvalerija uek22

shop assistant

different type of work

day of probation work

clothing shop

qualitative talkvalerija