Telling tales

I would like to thank Lorna Dargan from Newcastle University for contributing this guest posting. — David.

Whats the story behind this match?

Now that it’s April and work has tipped in favour of “thinking” on the doing/thinking axis, I thought I would get back to my interest in words.

I’ve been reading Reid and West’s (2011) article on narrative in career guidance, and their argument that narrative is underused as a guidance tool.

The short version of this blog post is: I disagree. Isn’t career decision-making simply the hunt for a theme in the complex narrative of the client’s life?

Now for the long version.

Keep it simple.

I would like to thank Vinny Potter from Queen Mary, University of London for contributing this post — David

What could be simpler?

This is a response to Katie Dallison’s post about metatheories. As has been said before in this blog, Metatheories can be very useful in careers advice, but generally only after the session. For me, that is all very well and good, but sometimes it’s nice to have a theory to hold onto during the session.

Unfortunately for me, a lot of theories are quite cerebral. They encompass a lot of abstract ideas and they can therefore be more difficult for me to remember.

Most people can only hold a few things in their head at any time. During Guidance you already have a lot to do. You need to listen intently to the client, analyse what they are saying, what they are not saying and their body language etc, then conjure up a response based on your interpretations of all of this, whilst sometimes reaching into your brain for other nuggets of pertinent information which could help the client.

This leaves little room for holding complex theories (particularly a metatheory!).

So I have come up with a new and simpler career theory.

Social mobility needs more than paid internships

It's not just about providing the right footholds...

The UK Government recently released Opening Doors, Breaking Barriers: A Strategy for Social Mobility.

The report quotes some depressing statistics about social mobility in the UK.

• Only one in five young people from the poorest families achieve five good GCSEs, including English and maths, compared with three quarters from the richest families.
• 25% of children from poor backgrounds fail to meet the expected attainment level at the end of primary school, compared to 3% from affluent backgrounds.
• Almost one in five children receive free school meals, yet this group accounts for fewer than one in a hundred Oxbridge students.
• Only a quarter of boys from working-class backgrounds get middle-class (professional or managerial) jobs.
• Just one in nine of those with parents from low income backgrounds reach the top income quartile, whereas almost half of those with parents in the top income quartile stay there.
• Only 7% of the population attend independent schools, but the privately educated account for more than half of the top level of most professions, including 70% of high court judges, 54% of top journalists and 54% of chief executive officers of FTSE 100 companies.
• The influence of parental income on the income of children in Britain is among the strongest in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. Parental income has over one and a half times the impact on male incomes in Britain compared with Canada, Germany and Sweden.

What does success mean to you?

You will be successful in everything - ooops!

In this post, I’m doggedly continuing my pursuit to explore the idea of career success.

We started with a simple binary distinction: objective success versus subjective success. We realised that this was somewhat crude and that a bit more subtlety might be useful.

In the previous post, we added an extra dimension about how you might measure success (self-referent versus other-referent comparison).

Now it’s time to take things multidimensional!