Lifetime career development

20 March 2017

Many people who take paths leading to careers end up somewhere else, though often not unhappily so.

Some get a qualification – for teaching, lawyering, engineering and dozens of others – only to practise for a year or three and leave for pastures they had never realised were quite so green before their initial career choice. Others find pastures they had always been drawn to but somehow had never made the necessary connection with.

And aren’t today’s jobs/careers on the way out? AI has suddenly arrived, or is just around the corner, depending on your interests and needs.

Human interests are somewhat predictable, but opportunity to discover and explore them is not. That can occur over a life span.

The thing is, those old careers provide one thing that’s always useful – a discipline which can be applied most places in life. That’s a bunch of competencies – thinking, feeling, behaviour, values … joined in producing certain kinds of outcomes: learning, justice, health, buildings, etc.

So, if you start a course work pathway because Mum and Dad or your culture of origin think compelling, the discipline will be transferable. You can get off the pathway and take the skills with you. What the career paths usually don’t teach is how to change from one to another. That’s why psychologists will have career development work for a lifetime.

Tags

• conflict resolution
• work stress