Working and ageing - Cedefop - Europa

CHAPTER 10
Career development in later working life: implications for career guidance with older workers 197
approach, prioritising cooperation over competition (De Lange et al., 2010).
In womenʼs careers, ʻcareer satisfaction, achievement and success, and their
desires positively to impact othersʼ (women aged 24-35) shifts to a focus ʻon
contributing to their organisations, their families and their communitiesʼ
(women aged 46-60) (OʼNeil and Bilimoria, 2005, p. 182-184).
Careers advisers need to understand the potential for generativity to
increase motivation to work and enjoyment of work. They need to be able to
discuss the various forms it may take, and frame ʻgiving backʼ in terms that
resonate with the particular client. Further research is also needed to explore
types of generativity, and development of generativity over the decades from
mature adulthood to the final stages of working life.
A further pressing need is for research to examine possible differences
between men and women in both regards. Flynn and McNair (2004) noted
distinct gender distributions of their ʻchoosers, survivors and jugglersʼ (Box 10.1).
Are Flynn and McNairʼs (2004) ʻjugglersʼ (predominantly married female)
located in OʼNeil and Bilimoriaʼs (2005) ʻpragmatic endurance phaseʼ,
identified as a typical middle phase in their study of womenʼs working lives?
If so, will some or all of them progress to OʼNeil and Bilimoraʼs third stage of
ʻreinventive contributionʼ? What are the factors that contribute to such
development, and is the notion of ʻreinventive contributionʼ a different
expression of the same notion as generativity?
10.3. Implications for career guidance
and counselling
Career guidance has become an embattled profession in England, although
an understanding of career guidance as an expansive professional role exists
in some European countries. The reflections offered here on the professional
role of careers advisers can only sit uneasily where authoritarian policy and
management dictates constraint on the ways of performing the work role and
narrow measurement of outcome ʻtargetsʼ. An expansive view of
professionalism, in career guidance as elsewhere, places value on reflective
and reflexive practice. Careers advisers then can develop questioning of both
their own and their employing organisationʼs skill and knowledge base.
Such reflection may address who offers career guidance as well as how
they offer it.
Is guidance better provided by careers advisers who are themselves of an
age to experience changes in time perspective and work motivation? Or can