Rethinking career development for a globalised world- SAVE THE DATE

The Fellows of NICEC are delighted to be organising this two day conference, which will will provide a mixture of keynotes, debates, seminars and open discussion and will seek to address the big issues relating to the career development field.

To register your interest in attending or presenting at the event please use this Eventbrite booking system. At this stage we are just registering initial interest, and more information about how and when to submit papers to speak at the event will follow..

Rationale for the conference

Twenty years ago Tony Watts and other NICEC colleagues published Rethinking Careers Education and Guidance: Theory, Policy and Practice (Watts, Law, Killeen, Kidd & Hawthorn 1996).

This was unique as a multi-authored text that sought to integrate career education and career guidance and develop a more nuanced educational basis for our work. It featured new career learning theory and methods of measuring impact through learning out comes. It was argued that careers work is inevitably political and an influential framework was developed for understanding this. The role of career theory in one-to-one work was discussed in new ways. It was further recognized that careers work takes place within a range of international socio-cultural contexts and sectors (e.g. private sector, workplace, statutory, schools, colleges, universities, and communities).

Rethinking became a well-thumbed classic for reflective practitioners and a core text on reading lists, but it is increasingly out of date. In this conference we invite you to look forward to the next 20 years and ask:

• What can we still take from Rethinking today?
• What was missing? What voices, theories and contexts were neglected?
• What now appear to be the dead ends, the fertile areas, the new paradigms?
• How do we make sense of our field today?
• Where does the future of the field lie?

Conference themes

The conference will be organised around three main themes as follows.

• The changing context for work and career
• Shifting theories and concepts
• Innovating practice