The CPI Papers

WHICH WAY IS FORWARD?
finding new starting points for learning

There are no guarantees that careers work is wholly or always a good thing. It does some things well, some of what it does is less useful. At times, aspects of the work need to be discarded, and new directions found. It’s why our work needs its critical friends.

‘Twas ever so; but, Bill argues, this time is different: today’s turning point is suggested more by cultural than economic indicators. They have to do with attitudes to authority. The information-supply professions – and that includes us - are increasingly distrusted. Information is power; and a new kind of struggle is going on.

Appreciating the changing cultural landscape that our learners inhabit means taking a peek outside our own wagon. We won’t want to applaud everything we find. But the way in which people approach life's issues is changing - especially when it comes to who and what can be trusted. And when that starting-point for learning changes, it must make a difference to how we try to help.

We have strayed off-course and lost momentum. And a better way is? (1) more of a steer towards real-time and useful learning; (2) sharing maps and compasses with people on a closely-parallel route; and (3) welcoming on board other-than-professional help - like mentors.

Bumpy ride? Well, it’s a course which has not had a whole lot of recent support from inside our wagon. There is going to be – so to speak – some ‘discussion’.

the land of the neo-cons

The groundwork which has shaped much of our recent work was laid down in another time. It steered us towards privatisation, market forces and performance indicators. All were in the service of individual decision-making. And all were power-managed in pursuit of national competitiveness. With strong business support, a policy discourse supplanted a professional vocabulary with a more business-like one. Its terms evoked the concepts with which we felt we most needed to get to grips.

key concepts for careers work – 1995
important now?

accountability
assessment
choice
cooperation
empowerment
employability
enterprise
entitlement
individual
flexibility
freedom
feminism
management
markets
momentum
performance
quality
anti-racism
rationality
skills
standards
step-change
survival
technology
world-class

Most of us would still tick some of it. Though, it’s not the ticking that’s important it’s the thinking: not just ‘what is important?", but ‘why?’.

And the neo-con list has its attractions: it is optimistic, at times evangelical (the words ‘vision’ and ‘mission’ also cropped up a lot). This was a marriage between business and belief. They called themselves 'neo-liberals'; a later generation are called 'neo-conservatives'. They gave us the terms in which we learned to speak of ourselves. Its vocabulary was an inventory of the structure and an explanation of the dynamics of our work - for more than a decade.
.
Some will still tick a lot of it. Ask around.

changing landscape

Some of that vocabulary is still useful: careers work should be accountable to the people, families and communities it serves. And some of the professional vocabulary it supplanted was fair game: we spoke of ‘unconditional positive regard’, and ‘idiographic phenomenology’, and ‘anticipatory socialisation’. (Actually, I made-up one of these. Those of a certain age will know which.) But this neo-con success was not (as theologically suggested at the time) ‘the end of history’. We moved on. And nobody with any grasp of today’s realities seeks a way back.

But moving on brings new hopes and fears into focus. You’ll notice those changing preoccupations as much in media headlines as in economics texts, policy docs or even in our professional literature. People find much of what they believe and trust expressed in the media buzz. Red-top-headlines, product-jingles, political-slogans and soap-opera-plots compact acute observations of what people most value - and most deride.

Our interest in media buzz may be different; but we need also to be able to work with those feelings - in the way we ask questions, reflect replies and understand how to help.

a buzz of contemporary culture
is any of it affecting career development?

/ …’addiction’… / …‘Africa’ … / …’animals’… / ...’’beggars’... / …’belief’… / ...’binge’... / …’blog’… / …’brand’… / …’bully’… / …’charity’… / …’celebrity’… / ...‘citizens’... / …’control’… / …’corporate’… / … ‘countryside’ … / …’crap-detector’… / ...’crime’... / …’cult’… / …’customise’… / …’debt’… / …’demo’… / ...’dope’... / …’environment’… / ...’Europe’... / ...’family’... / …’fed-up’… / …’friends’… / … ‘fun’… / ...’global’... / …’graffiti’… / ...’health’... / …‘home’… / ...’housing’... / …’image’… / …’internet’… / … ‘intuition’… / …’just-do-it’… / …’logo’… / …’loser’… / …’lucky’… / …’make-over’… / ...’migrants’... / …’move-on’… / …’must-have’… / …’neighbour’… / ...'ordinary'... / … ‘parents’… / ...’pension’... / ...’pollute’... / …’politics’… / …’popular’… / …’poverty’… / ...’privatise’... / …’respect’… / …’rights’… / …’risk’… / ...’royalty’... / ...’schools-&-hospitals’... / …‘security’… / ...’science’... / …’shit-work’… / …‘shopping’… / …’soap’ … / ...'street'... / …’stress’… / …’survivor’… /…’suspicion’… / …’time’… / ...'tough'... / ... ‘third-world’... /…’threat’… / …’tolerance’… / …’unfair’… / ...’US’... / ...’victim’... / …’virtual’… / …’volunteer’… / …’work-life-balance’… /

Some of this has been inherited from the neo-cons, but a lot is new. And more is emerging – all the time. Transient? Often. Dynamic? Always. That’s why smart media people are interested. So why would it be surprising to find that you can link it to the way your learners think about working life? And to why they don’t?

You could get their version of this from your learners. Ask them to cut-and-paste a better version for you. And to say why it’s better.

And would it matter whether that was part of citizenship, media-studies or careers? Those differences are more important to teachers than they are to learners. More important is getting to know them a bit better - part of our listening. And, if talk like this speaks of career at least as well as talk of ‘skills’ and ‘interests’, then we could all be at new starting point for enabling ‘self-awareness’.

new starting points for learning

Cultural change is always encountered first as a muddled and disjointed rumble. But there is one unmistakable seismic shift. It reveals a growing disdain for conventional authority. People are less-and-less likely to look to politicians, journalists, and other élites to show them what’s going on - or to suggest what they might do about it. Scientists are suspect. Teachers must compete for attention with advertising. The helping professions are getting a bad press.

Much of what people most trust they find informally on the grape-vine, through mobiles and on web-sites. And they use these same gateways to organise what they do about what they find. It means learning to pick their own way through the spin and the spam. So they increasingly see themselves, with their mates, as their own arbiters of truth.

This is all in the area of what we professionals call ‘social-and-emotional’ influences. We do right to pay attention. And to do so is to notice that trust has become a pervasive issue. Suspicion is an increasingly prevalent starting point for learning. That kind of change requires that we change.

The end of deference is not bad news; it is a sign of a growing-up culture. But there is a downside. Arbitrary defiance is no more useful to learners than servile deference. And, soft-and-cuddly as it can be, the social-and-emotional can also deceive: prejudice postures as fact; indifference gets camouflaged as tolerance; ‘it’s my choice’ defends the indefensible. Enabling learners to get their own grip on such damaging processes of learning is where we helping professionals can help most of all.

Distrust is most intense among those low in the pecking-order. Their doubts spring from a sense that we can’t really offer them much that is worth having. It makes them averse to our kind of learning. We know less than we need to know about the roots of such aversion. But there is this: learning itself becomes part of the problem when learners cannot see what they can usefully do about it. There is good reason to suppose that this bad reaction to futile learning is genetically built into the way we are. It is a species thing: we are set up to learn for action.

In learning terms, the avoidance of futility is relevance – finding a point to learning. Following some framework or pursuing some assessment is not enough of a point in the minds of sceptical learners: targets and tests are other people’s hoops. Even the claim that this learning is relevant to career is not a sure-fire answer to the question ‘why?’. There may be prior questions about other life roles – partner, parent, citizen. And other reasons for looking for a point in learning. But, in all, not finding out what is going on, and not figuring out what I can do about it, is a dismal experience of learning. A major tenet for finding new starting points for learning will be not to cause that kind of depression. In our society now that matter is getting quite urgent.

Claiming impartiality is unlikely to cut much ice. Helping learners to develop their own crap detectors is more promising. We professionals call it ‘learning to learn’. It equips people to deal with spin, deception and distrust. And, one of the things that learners learn is that, when it comes to action that other people have an interest in, there is not much help that is entirely impartial.

from ‘hippie’, to ‘neo-con’, to ‘cool’

New cultural terrain needs new concepts for careers work. So, despite the fact that the neo-cons never expected to be upstaged, we are finding new ways of figuring out what to do about careers.

key concepts for careers work – 2005
important now?

citizen
community
consumer
culture
e-communication
enabling
equality
ethnicity
feelings
identity
informality
integration
learning-to-learn
locality
motivation
narrative
personal
point-of-view
quality-of-life
rights
relevance
social attachment
scepticism
stakeholder
uncertainty

Same procedure: don’t just tick; think, ask, imagine and create.

This is a less commercial list than its predecessor. It contains more of a helping professional’s vocabulary – the kind of things that advisers, teachers, social workers and youth workers most naturally speak of. It speaks of learners who are unimpressed by official sources, and making room for informal ones. They value what is local above what is distant. They find narrative more engaging than analysis. They favour feeling as much as rationality. They rank usefulness over qualification.

Loss of deference also breeds blame, resentment and disengagement – even fatalism. There is collateral damage from the gung-ho years - disenchantment about the past, anxiety in the present, fear for the future. (You're not alone.)

But it also reveals another face to that big cultural shift: away from a preoccupation with how well people perform, and towards a valuing of motivation. It is less interested in the career question ‘will I be permitted to do this?’, more inclined to wonder ‘why would I bother?’. We can work with that.

The ‘hippie’, the ‘neo-con’ and the ‘cool’ often-enough turn out to be the same person, getting on in a changing landscape. In some ways it is not so great a distance to travel. But two lists can’t show how its phases shade into each other. That needs a narrative. One version of the story gets its start from some time back – in The Enlightenment. This was before even John Lennon's imagining. But that song has its roots in an enlightenment challenge to arbitrary authority. And at that earlier time authority was crown and mitre. But it was never going to stop there, all élites become suspect. The cultural shift may be jumbled, but it is not disconnected. Sooner or later it was bound to reach us.

The issue is power. The neo-cons invited us to put ‘empowering’ centre stage, with that power to be realised through skills. But the drive for employability, flexibility and cooperation is as much about fitting learners to other people’s requirements as it is about conceding any real leverage to learners. And they know it.

where now?

We professionals have known for a long time that people learn for career from their upbringing and their neighbourhood. And that what they learn informally can be more influential than what they get from experts. It has all persuaded careers workers to link into a network which includes, family, friends and local culture. Voluntary helpers, like mentors, are important in this strategy. At their best these helpers-other-than-professionals offer much-needed credibility and accessibility to our work. They also help learners to look wider: at work-life balance, at work other-than-employment and at activity other-than-work. A re-emerging term for these kinds of linking-up is ‘integration’.

Another peek outside the wagon might persuade us that we have yet farther to go. Even policy is picking up on the need. On information advice and guidance, there is policy support for ‘integrated and coherent services. On learning-recovery, Connexions rests on an appreciation of how local and informal networks of voluntary-help reach deeper into people’s lives. And, on 14-19 education, the Tomlinson Report argues that learners need a greater sense of the usefulness of learning, and more links between academic learning and life-relevance.

A map for these new directions for careers work is set out in ‘The CPI Papers’. The general title is ‘what are we going to do about careers?’. The papers refer to contemporary cultural buzz. And they give a lot of space to social-and-emotional influences. But they also explain why new concepts for careers work are now needed.

It all starts from a well-known majority-analysis of careers education and guidance - called ‘DOTS’. But it moves on from the majority, the usual and the obvious. Any move into a new terrain is like that. It needs leadership. And that means answering the question ‘where now?’. Especially when the answer is not completely obvious to the already-on-board majority.

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The Career-learning Café
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WHERE NOW?

more on stakeholders for careers work
more on mentoring
more on the CPI papers
a review of Richard Sennett’s The Corrosion of Character: Personal Consequences of Work in The New Capitalism, an account of the undermining effects on line workers of current commercial middle-management.


OTHER USEFUL BOOKS

You’ll find an authoritative critique of current commercial attitudes in J K Galbraith’s The Economics of Innocent Fraud. London, Allen Lane, 2004.

For a well-documented argument against the privatisation of the public services take a look at David Marquand’s Decline of the Public. London: Polity, 2004).

For a revealing account of people’s experience of contemporary working life see Madeleine Bunting’s Willing Slaves. London Harper-Collins, 2004>.

Nick Barham’s commentary on some of our most wayward young men and women is optimistic. But you will be challenged by the rejection of conventional authority in the first-person stories. Find it all in Disconnected: Why Our Kids Are Turning Their Back on Everything We Thought We Knew. London: Random House, 2004.

Francis Wheen’s book How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World (London: Fourth Estate) is a well-informed and engaging reflection on the unravelling of The Enlightenment in the modern world.

And, though you might not agree with all of it (I don’t!) you’ll find a stimulating account of more pervasive trends in contemporary attitudes in Frank Furedi’s Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? London: Continuum, 2004

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