Creating Individual Futures a new perspective on career management by Charles Brass

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Over recent years a new breed of consultant and counsellor has emerged.  Called career managers their advertisements and opinions often grace the employment section of major newspapers.

Careers counsellors have long been employed within schools and universities to guide those just setting out on their careers.  Recently these same practitioners have emerged into the wider world, offering their services to people at all stages of their lives.

There are a number of reasons for the broadening of the roles of career management consultants.

The first is the difficulty many people face in navigating their way through the recruitment maze.  This is a complex process and, like much in our modern lives, recruitment is a race in which there are many contestants but only one winner.

As Robert Frank, economist author of “The Winner Take All Society”, noted in 1994: the high value of the prize given for winning such races encourages participants to undertake all sorts of ethical (and not so ethical) behaviour, which might include hiring a coach.

A second reason for the emergence of career counsellors (not unrelated to the first) has been an increasing use of informal recruitment channels.  Some sources suggest that 70% of jobs are filled without ever having been advertised.  Understanding how to tap this ‘hidden recruitment market’ requires specialised skills and experience.

A third reason has much to do with the changing nature of work itself, and of people’s expectations of their work.

Australia has been steadily deregulating our labour market for over 20 years.  This has lead to an explosion in the type of jobs available and an erosion of the expectation that someone might have a single career for life.

My first job, in 1970, was to help a licenced grocer meet her legislative obligation to have all alcohol off the road before 1pm on Saturdays.  Nowadays, not only does no-one know what a licenced grocer was, but the idea that you could not buy anything you wanted 24 hours a day 7 days a week only identifies an unexploited niche market.

My son’s first job, in 2000, was delivering prescriptions for a chemist, but no-one, least of all himself, expects him to spend his entire life in pharmaceuticals.  He does recognise, however, that he might possibly need some professional help as he changes his career directions throughout his life.

The combination of these three factors has increased the demand for specialist consultants focusing on helping people change careers.

Most of these professionals have begun either in human resources of psychological counselling and slowly begun to bring their expertise to helping manage career changes.

Recently a new perspective – futures thinking or strategic foresight - is beginning to be brought to these activities.

Futures thinking as a discipline emerged in the USA during the 1960s, but for over 10 years one Australian university (Swinburne) has been offering a masters degree in strategic foresight, and is now expanding to offer futures subjects in a wide range of undergraduate courses.

Many of those who graduate with a masters in strategic foresight intend to work with governments and corporations to help shape large scale futures.

A number, however, are offering to help individuals create their personal futures.

Just as an archaeologist or crime scene investigator brings a wide range of tools and techniques to helping understand the past, a futurist employs their specialist skills to help others better engage with the future.

Adding this foresight dimension to the career management process recognises that one’s job is only a part of one’s life – and that one’s life tends to work better when all the parts are both aligned and coherent.

Traditional career management consultants focus on helping clients understand and navigate their way through the complex recruitment and selection process.  Some provide significant support in identifying and accessing the majority of jobs which are filled without ever being advertised.  As its name suggests, creating an individual’s future builds on this networking and marketing support by encouraging clients to be much more pro-active both in sharing their life goals with a broader range of people and in seeking to create a working life which integrates with their non-working life.

The world of work has changed profoundly over the past 40 years.  The once secure job in which you worked full-time for 40 years to get your gold watch and then retire is now only a minority option.

More than a quarter of all jobs today are part-time, and it is considered normal to make more than three significant career changes in a working life which may well extend into your 70s.

Australian futurist Peter Ellyard talks about there being two approaches to the future.  He suggests that a passive future-taker approach is much less likely to be successful than an active future-maker attitude.

The same principle applies to work.  Those who actively participate in making their future work are likely to be more successful and certain to be more fulfilled than those who sit back and take what the future brings.

The world of work is just one of life’s domains in which futures thinking offers new perspectives and fresh insights.  Thanks to a growing network of tertiary educated practising futurists, these insights are becoming available to ever growing audiences.

Charles Brass is the Chair of Australia’s premier futures organisation – the futures foundation – which incorporates a network of practising futurists.