NICE HANDBOOK – Academic training of Career ... - Nice-network.eu

(Chapter 8.11.1). Next, Christiane Schiersmann introduces the approach of ‘systems modelling’,a technique for analysing highly complex problems with clients (Chapter 8.11.2). Thiscontribution is followed by Barbara Bassot’s and Hazel Reid’s introduction of the ‘Career ThinkingModel’ which builds on their paper on reflexivity (Chapter 8.11.3). In Chapter 8.12.1 NikosDrosos, Despoina Sidiropoulou-Dimakakou, and Ekaterini Argyropoulou introduce a newpost-graduate programme which they have launched in Athens to help CGC professionals indealing with the particular challenges of the financial crisis and high rates of immigration inGreece. This is followed by a presentation of the DICBDPEC project which is devoted to promotingEuropean training programmes for CGC professionals and is described in Chapter 8.12.2by Laura Gressnerová, Ivan Prelovský and Karin Raková.8.2. Life Design Perspective – Innovation inthe Content of CurriculaJean GuichardTransformation of work activities and pathways induced by technical progress and the subsequentreorganisation of work is a major factor of change in the domain of career guidance andlife designing counselling interventions. The following paragraphs sum up this evolution as itoccurred in western “developed societies” during the last century and the beginning of the currentone. As will be shown, two parallel evolutions may be distinguished. The first one is a shiftfrom ‘giving clients expert advice’ to ‘assisting them in planning their career and in designingtheir lives’. The second evolution is a change in the focus point of these interventions, whichis no longer the relationship between jobs and individual personalities, but has shifted to theprocess of how individuals construct their vocational self concepts and design their lives.During a large part of the 20th century, career interventions were conceived in western societiesin reference to a grand founding model that concentrated on the idea of an essential relationshipbetween occupations (or professions) and individual personalities, both of them beingconsidered as (relatively) stable. In a first period, this concept gave birth to directive advisinginterventions. They were based on the hypothesis according to which certain common dimensionsmight describe objectively, on the one hand, occupations and professions, and, on theother hand, individual personalities. In referring to these dimensions – and more particularlyto aptitudes, work values and interests – vocational advisers were able to give their clientsexpert advice about occupations or professions that matched them.NICE HandbookThis same concept gave birth, during the second part of the 20th century, to career education.Such an approach appeared, on the one hand, more consonant with a societal organizationwhere individuals were seen as fully responsible of what they made of their lives (Elias,1991). It was based, on the other hand, on the observation that technical evolutions (notably:automation) led to different work reorganizations, which resulted in a series of deep transformationsof many occupations or professions. In such a context, the main purpose of careerinterventions couldn’t be any more to tell clients the occupations or professions that matchedthem. Differently, their core goal became to teach them how make all the decisions relevantfor directing their careers from school to retirement. The core concept of these career educationinterventions (that could take the shape of guidance interviews, group workshops or aninfusion within everyday teaching) was to help clients develop the competences they need todirect their life long career. These competences should allow them to go in for such or suchoccupation, profession or work function as it might be, at a given time in the future, because ofprobable technical and organizational evolutions: an occupation, profession or work functionthat would be a further step in these clients’ careers. To sum up, the major purpose of careereducation was to help people develop their career maturity in order to build revisable careerplans.Trends and Developments146 147