Toward a Policy for Lifelong Career Development: A Transatlantic Perspective

A revolution in the structures of work is taking place in most advanced industrialized countries. This article suggests that giving new meanings to the concept of "career" is one of the keys to economic success and social harmony in the new postindustrial society. It argues that a number of new social ligatures are needed to make the new concept of career accessible to all. One of these ligatures is lifelong access to career counseling. This article outlines a strategy developed in the United Kingdom for achieving such access and analyzes its cautious application of market and quasi-market principles to career counseling provision. The concept of lifelong career development is, in a sense, a conventional one. Pundits have long been saying that we are now in a world in which most people will have to adjust to having three, four, five, six, or seven careers in the course of their lives. It is never clear how the numerical precision of such statements was derived. But such statements demonstrate a recognition of the increasingly fragmented and iterative nature of the concept of "career" and, accordingly, the possibility that career counseling might be needed more than once. Now, however, the concept hints at more radical notions. It is beginning to be recognized that advanced industrial societies are in the midst of a profound revolution in the nature and structure of work. It threatens individuals, sense of their identity; it also threatens the social fabric. It could potentially offer new opportunities for more widespread personal fulfillment, but only if new concepts and new social forms can be found that make it possible to realize this potential. Career counseling is at the heart of this search. Giving new meaning to the concept of career is one of the keys to economic success and social harmony in the new postindustrial society. In developing and implementing such a concept, career counseling has a critical role to play. Its role is potentially much more extensive than it has been in the past and also of much greater social significance. At the same time, some of the existing career counseling structures are being destabilized by the same forces that are affecting the rest of the world of work. Career counselors need to be in the vanguard of understanding these forces and adapting creatively to them. Accordingly, career counselors need to pay much more attention than they sometimes do to the social, political, and economic contexts of their work. Because career counseling is, at its heart, concerned with helping individuals, its theoretical base tends, understandably, to be psychological. It is, however, a deeply sociopolitical activity. It operates at the interface between personal and societal needs, between individual aspirations and opportunity structures, between private and public identities. A broader and more dynamic theoretical base is needed if career counseling is to find and deliver the new role that is now demanded of it. In developing such a base, an international perspective may be helpful. The sociopolitical dimension to career counseling has been more widely recognized in Northern Europe than in North America. Moreover, examination of counseling systems in different countries can act as a useful reminder of how such systems are deeply influenced by stages of economic development, by the nature of political systems, by social structures, and by cultural mores (Watts, Law, Killeen, Kidd, & Hawthorn, in press). It helps career counselors to avoid the assumption that what seems self-evident and inevitable is necessarily so. THE WORK REVOLUTION The profession of career counseling and the concept of career to which it relates are creatures of the industrial age. Within this limited era, work has been regarded as synonymous with employment, and employment has been the basic source of status, of social identity, and of income. For most people, employment has been provided in large organizations: factories, commercial organizations, government bureaucracies. …