Connexions - The Challenge to Managing

Today’s world needs new and better ways of understanding how people must deal with working life. The new thinking is deeper, wider and more dynamic than some careers worker have been used to.

The government's Connexions programme is important because it increasingly faces up to the realities of contemporary career development. This is why so much reorganisation has been necessary: a wider range of formal and informal resources must be harnessed to ever more-demanding work.

But, most of all, all of this is a challenge to the local managing of careers-work programmes.

Contemporary changes in working life mean that people need a lot of help. Careers workers, personal advisers, social workers, youth workers, welfare officers, voluntary workers, teachers and lecturers are increasingly working together. This is the most demanding challenge for the future of this work:

how is such a diverse range of people to be helped
to know who is in the best position
to offer what help?

And how can all that diversity of resource be usefully managed?

The answer will always be local - something that will work for a particular catchment area, a neighbourhood, a town or a rural area. It raises questions that big-wheel board members and senior executives are in no position to answer. The way the dynamics of career work, is very different in different areas. Some of those areas only yards apart.

The dynamics in the locality

Deeper wider and more dynamic understanding of career? Certainly: the more that is going on in working life the more we must think about how to help; the more pressure there is the more carefully that help must be constructed; the faster the rate of change the more flexible we must be.

How people deal with these processes can, of course, be hindered by lack of information. But you don’t need much imagination to appreciate how knowledge of opportunity - and of self - is infused with feelings. And, if things are to go well, a person must understand and manage these feelings.

But feelings themselves often have to do with relationships in family, peer group and neighbourhood. And these attachments can both help and hinder progress. Moreover, each community has group-life of its own, celebrating its own values, beliefs and icons. And we need to understand how these cultures help a person forward in some ways, and holds a person back in other ways.

All of this starts in childhood - people start learning for career in the toddler years. And - so - deeply-laid perceptions, feelings, beliefs and assumptions give action its own momentum. For some people changes of direction do not come easily.

And, for anybody, learning and work may be for survival, or for fulfilment or for commitment. If what careers work offers seems not to meet these purposes, people turn away. They may turn away from their school or collage, from formal sources of help, even from their own families. If we mean to help we are going to have to be trusted and accessible - as well as expert.

And, if we mean to be expert, that expertise must understand how the dynamics work in the locality.

Where managing becomes critical

Diagnosing needs, and developing policy frameworks, must translate into bases for action. It is here - where practice and policy touch needs - that management becomes critical.

Institutional and departmental managers must be concerned with performance, survival and communication. But, in the new context, programme coordinators have a yet more-demanding role. In Connexions, for example, the programme-coordination role is to support and enable a diverse, adapting, and often informal network of help.

The challenges are these: ‘how can all these different people, differently located, best be helped to work together?’ and ‘how can they be enabled to do that fruitfully and with mutual understanding?’. It means that coordinators must:

> understand policy, but also understand people's career-development needs;
> establish new working links, working across institutional and departmental boundaries;
> find new ways to engage helping energy, experience and skill;
> help people to achieve new roles, as well as using ready-made structures;
> bring about useful change, without ignoring needed stability;
> manage - not just bureaucratically - but creatively.

We can assume that, right now, appropriate styles of managing careers work are evolving. That will happen in the day-on-day contacts between people working together. We may well find that they will be ‘networking’ styles. That, at any rate, is a useful working hypothesis.

Moving On

The Career-Learning Café is currently involved in a series of linked projects which can help in moving on these developments:

> working with the Centre for Career and Personal Development, Canterbury Christ Church University College - a series of enquiries into emerging managing styles, useful to Connexions;
> working with Careers Essex - the development of a programme-coordination tool-kit for personal advisers and coordinators;
> working with New College Nottingham - developing material examining the importance of managing careers work, in colleges working with Connexions.

You are in the underpinning section of The Careers learning Cafe - www.hihohiho.com

Where Now?

Case studies with the deepest challenges for Connexions:
Terence - a black legal worker, threatened by a drug conflict
Joey - 'one of the lads', defiant, cocksure... and very bright
Karen - a 14 year-old user, with a family to feed

An account of
diagnoses of needs
that Connexions must meet

Underpinning
thinking to support Connexions

An account of
network management
based on earlier research

Handouts to
help programme managers