Edition 33 - Pathways vs. Jobs

Edition 33 - Pathways vs. Jobs

Welcome back to another edition of Pondering Careers where I get to share my ideas (or rant) about careers, pathways and the world of work, and hopefully in return you valuable people in our community also share some of your own thoughts, rants, and ideas.

This week is the second edition for 2024, and I'm frankly horrified how far we already are into the new year. My kids go back to school next Monday, and I'm in that phase where I'm juggling being back at work with still wanting to spend some time with the kids while also trying to convince them it's a good idea to start waking up earlier this week to make next week less painful.

In case you're curious, it's not working, and I'm going to need a fog horn to wake them up next Monday.

One of the things we've already been working away on this year is the Pathways Explorer and associated resources, and I've had a few questions from people about the difference between pathways and the usual 'jobs' that tend to get talked about a lot.

For that reason, I thought that this week in Pondering Careers I'd explain why I want to talk more about Pathways and less about Jobs going forward.

As always, the conversation becomes richer when more people speak up, so please share your own experiences with talking about careers, jobs, and pathways, especially if you've found a term that works well for you.


Here's why I want to talk more about Pathways and less about Jobs

Let's face it, the language we use matters.

It shapes how we think about and talk about our careers and the choices we make, and we use language to 'make meaning' of our careers.

I often refer to Mark Savickas' concept of an individual as an actor, agent, and author in constructing their career, and particularly that last of the trio - the author.

As authors of our careers, we choose the language and stories we use to describe the work we do now, as well as the work we have done in the past and the work we'd like to do in the future (this is feeling very much like the 'Ghost of Christmas Past/Present/Future). This means that we are limited by the language we use, and we can only use that which we know to author our career stories.

If the career language we use is limiting, biased, or outdated, then that will colour the stories we tell.

There's a great myfuture Insights Paper on the power of career conversations to manage uncertainty and anxiety which I often refer to when talking about language, as they link career uncertainty with an inability to author a career story:

“Career uncertainty has been defined as the inability, as a teenager, to articulate a career ambition or occupational expectation for adult life”

In other words, it's not enough to just have an ambition or expectation about our career, we need to be able to use language to articulate it.

I'm not the only one talking about this

Earlier this week, Ed Hidalgo shared his reflections on the impact dialogic interventions can have within a school setting, and it's well worth a read. He also drew from the OECD’s paper on Career Conversations which is another great resource; they found that career conversations with peers, family, and teachers led to better employment outcomes and richer career exploration.

They found that dialogue did more than just provide information (although that is also useful) as when we express our ideas about our careers we are also forced to articulate the possibilities and challenge our thinking.

But this can work both ways - if the language we use to hold these conversations is positive and strengths-based more possibilities open up, but not all language is like this.

I remember a conversation I had recently with a local Career Practitioner who had been studying the language used in her school to discuss career choices for a grant application, as she found that some of her teachers were using negative language and sharing outdated opinions. Her aim was to change the language used to refer to students who left school early.

They found that overwhelmingly teaching staff referred to these students as having ‘dropped out’, which negatively impacted on the way students perceived the decision to leave school, even if they were leaving to work or start an apprenticeship or traineeship.

"They found that overwhelmingly teaching staff referred to these students as having ‘dropped out’, which negatively impacted on the way students perceived the decision to leave school..."

My friend is now working on changing the language used in her school to tackle this head on - once again, it's come back to language...

Here's another example - two career legends from the UK, Bella Doswell CCDP, RCDP and Katherine Jennick RCDP started a global movement this time last year with their mantra that Career Development is about #SoMuchMoreThanTalkingAboutJobs. We're coming up to the anniversary of their first campaign, which aimed to revolutionise the language we use to talk about the work we do as Career Practitioners.

Another example of the vital importance of language is the ongoing (seemingly never-ending) debate around soft/core/human/transferable skills. Not only can we not agree as an industry on what to call them, we also can't agree on which terms to use for the individual skills.

Skills Builder Partnership have done some great work in bringing uniformity to the space, but, as Chris Webb most excellently pointed out in his most recent #theweekincareers newsletter, we still have a long way to go to find consensus:

“…it's important for us to think about how we talk about Skills as a profession, so that we are speaking a similar language to the stakeholders we might be trying to influence…”

In other words, language matters, and we all need to get onto the same page.


The four key reasons why I'm pro pathways

I'm not into change for the sake of it, but sometimes when things aren't working we need to look at what we can do differently. There are four key reasons why I've been using the concept of pathways recently:

  1. Pathways are more inclusive,
  2. Pathways are dynamic, jobs are static,
  3. Pathways focus on the journey, not the destination, and
  4. We don't actually need to talk about specific jobs with teenagers.

There have been some other benefits, for example we can combine jobs at different career stages into one pathway, which makes the whole process less overwhelming, but these are the real key four reasons. I'll explain each in a bit more detail:

Reason #1 - Pathways are more inclusive

Our pathway through life naturally includes a whole range of things:

  • Study
  • Caregiving
  • Time away from work
  • Travel
  • Hobbies
  • Relationships
  • Finances
  • And everything else that makes our lives amazing

But when we talk about 'jobs' we miss out on all this stuff.

For me, it's the same as when politicians talk about the economy vs. society. Some of them seem to be obsessed with protecting the economy at all costs, but when they focus on the economics in isolation, we forget about the whole point of the economy, which is to support our society.

For a much better explanation of what I mean check out this video from Luke McGregor about how the Government calculates the unemployment rate (it's a hoot):


Back to jobs vs. pathways, we're moving away from these old ideas that our job is a separate and discrete part of our lives which can be isolated from the rest of the stuff we do, and when we talk about pathways we can help young people think about ALL of the things that matter to them, not just the stuff that counts as 'employment'.

Pathways give us space to talk about all the activities we do, which makes them more inclusive. It's much easier to talk about pathways with people who, for one reason or another, are unable to engage in traditional paid employment right now - it's no longer about whether or not they can get a job, but instead about the career pathway they are on.

Because pathways are unique (more on that in a minute) they can cross over and between different aspects of our life, which leans more towards career development ideas like the Kaleidoscope Theory of Careers. This theory talks about how we shift the balance between what's important in our lives and careers depending on the phase we're in.

If you're looking for a real example of this idea in practice, this week Aaron Tait posted about his own career development using a framework that's very similar to the Kaleidoscope model, but instead with three pistons which represent freedom, wealth, and purpose. He uses these pistons to understand how he moves through his own career, and to guide the decisions he makes about what comes next.

Like many of us, Aaron recognises that his pathway is more than simply a series of jobs.

Reason #2 - Pathways are dynamic, jobs are static

I usually define a 'job' as a specific piece of work that we do in return for money. You do a job for a set period of time, then you'll move on to another job with a different set of tasks, conditions, and objectives.

Most of us don't do one singular job for our entire working life, so why would we talk about one specific job when supporting young people to develop a career ambition? Their career will be more than one specific job, so we need a broader term of reference for this discussion.

Earlier this week William E. Donald shared his work on the Employability Capital Growth model, and I love models like this because they help us understand the myriad of complex factors that influence our career development - and which go so incredibly far beyond a series of individual jobs.

In my mind this also ties back into the Systems Theory Framework, a core tenant of which is dynamism. We can't ask teenagers to articulate their career ambitions and expectations without factoring in the ways in which the world of work is shifting at a pace we've never seen before, so we need to do everything in our power to move away from language that is static.

Reason #3 - Pathways focus on the journey, not the destination

When I talk about a pathway we’re talking about a journey, not a destination. We’re centring on the ‘next steps’, not the longer time goal, and it allows us to talk about the choices we’ll make along the pathway as their own discrete and incredibly important decisions, independent and not reliant on the career goal.

This is so important because things change, but it’s a lot easier to handle a little course correction, and shift to a slightly different pathway, than it is to let go of a distant dream.

In other words, and to be incredibly clear - if they choose a pathway, not a job, we reduce the chance they will feel less successful if their pathway changes and they don't end up in the anticipated job.

When we’re working with young people, we can talk about all of the pathways to success that are open to them, not just the common and most direct ones (like school -> university -> employment).

Why is this important?

Because life isn’t something we rush through, but when we talk about jobs we tend to regress back to thinking about the shortest, most direct route as the best one.

Universities offer courses that you can graduate in ‘just XX months’, as if study is something to get past so you can get to the real fun. I've had many conversations with young people that centred on finding the shortest possible route from where they were to where they wanted to be, often at the expense of all else, but often the less direct and slower routes are the ones that offer the most benefits.

As an example, I worked recently with a student who was studying tourism and concerned about their prospects of getting a job on graduation. They didn't feel they had the capacity to work and study at the same time and just wanted to get through their course as quickly as possible, but they knew they would have more chance of finding a job if they'd had experience.

We talked about the possibility of reducing their study load and seeking out part time employment in the industry as a way of building experience while they also studied, and in the end this is what they decided to do. It's still early days, but things are looking good even though they're no longer on the shortest possible route to graduation.

Reason #4 - We don't actually need to talk about specific jobs with teenagers

I had a conversation earlier this week with a colleague who is integrating some of our materials (including the Pathways Cards) into their in-person career program, and we ended up having a conversation about whether or not to share the jobs that align with each of our pathways with the participants.

On the one hand, showing them the jobs could give them ideas, but it could (and often does) end up with them fixating on one specific job.

The aim of this particular activity is not to identify jobs to begin the application process - it's actually designed to help students work out what they want to do for work experience.

As all of us who work in this space know, finding work experience is hard, and it's even harder to find work experience in the exact job the student is aiming for - more often than not, we find something related. Students also don't just focus on one job during work experience, and they'll usually (hopefully) be exposed to multiple jobs while there.

In other words, there's no need for the students to identify one specific job to be able to start looking for work experience, and, if anything, having a broader set of ideas for what they want to do could be a good thing.

We don’t actually need to talk about jobs with teenagers.

They don’t need to pick a final job when they are 15 and making senior course selections – they just need a general direction – and the likelihood of them reaching any specific job goal they set at that point is about as strong as the chances of them marrying their high school sweetheart – yes, it can happen, but it’s rare.

If they choose a pathway instead of a specific job they can use that pathway to find work experience, choose subjects, even select an apprenticeship or tertiary course, because a pathway gives them enough direction to do those things.

Pathways also give them lots of space to shift direction and yet remain within their original pathway – for example, someone who’s used the Graphic Design Pathway to guide their choice of university degree can easily shift more towards UX Design if that suits them better.

I love this aspect so much because it removes the feeling of ‘loss’ we often experience when we leave behind a career goal. There’s nothing to lose, you’re still on the same Pathway.

These are just the start

We've only really been exploring the idea of replacing jobs with pathways for our purposes for the past 12 months, but the further we go the more comfortable I feel with the process.

Language is so important, and I'm hopeful that with some small changes we can start to have better conversations about careers.


That's it

This was an epic edition so if you've stayed with me then well done!

As always, thanks for joining me, and I love to hear your ideas so please share your own thoughts and experiences with language and career development.

See you next week.


Jane Allen

Vocational Rehabilitation Counsellor MASRC💠Career Practitioner RPCDP 💠Founder: REFRAME💠 Supporting work, study and volunteering possibilities💠NDIS and Lifetime Care Services

11mo

Loved reading this Lucy - just changed the title of a visual worksheet I have designed to from "My Future Focus" to "My Possible Pathways"! than you! Very timely

Chris Targett RCDP

Career Development Professional at CXK

11mo

I love these ideas on so many levels. Having looked at semiotics in Art then discovered Contructivism within career theory, this is a useful reminder that language matters. If we don't have the language we can't have the ideas... a lot to reflect on. Thanks Lucy Sattler 🤠

Sarah Yates great perspectives and language for our work with young adults with disabilities 👏 Lee Miles Jenny Gleeson - Sharpe

Laura Hughes RPCDP

Pathways + Career Counselling

11mo

Feeling very vindicated in making my case and succeeding renaming my department Pathways and Possibilities, and my role Pathways Counsellor :)

Thanks for the shout out, Lucy Sattler - you are absolutely right, #SoMuchMoreThanTalkingAboutJobs is about helping CDPs come together in finding the language to tell our friends, professional allies and the general public about who we are and what we do. CDPs: if you are in the business of doing careers work and want to take part in this year’s campaign to raise awareness, please DM me or Katherine Jennick before the 1st February. A great edition Lucy Sattler - thank you for the shout out!

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