Peak Careers

Professional Development for Career Practitioners

future of work

Respecting all Career Pathways

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There are many career pathways to success.

career pathways

Our job as career coaches and practitioners is to help our students and clients discover a career by exploring career pathways that match their strengths and interests. Then to explore all the career pathways on how to get there, whether it is an apprenticeship, bachelors degree, trade school, or certificate.

All too often, I hear people say they will go to college and figure it out there. That is a very expensive and time-consuming way to do career exploration. I do get the sense that the “college for all” mentality is slowing down, but we still have a long way to go. The message that everyone should go to college to be successful has hurt our economy a couple different ways.

  1. Many people attended college who should not have been there and incurred lots of debt that will need to be paid back.
  2. Those same people could have been working during that time and making money.
  3. Many of those people would have been happier in trades and technical positions which are in need of people.

One problem, in my opinion, is that we have too many colleges in our country fighting over the same 18-year-olds. The college’s motivation is to fill seats at their college, not to help these people discover their best career pathways. We have begun to see higher education institutions closing down and I think we will see more.

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The Future of Work is Now and Why it Matters to Career Practitioners

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coworking_space_in_berlin

Work has changed…and continues to change. Career practitioners need to pay attention. There is much talk out there how millennials are forcing the change of work and I think they have been given too much credit. Many boomers like and want the changes too. (As do all the other generations). I believe our economy is changing and all generations are changing with it. This also means that companies need to be nimble in order to succeed and deal with these changes in our workforce.

It appears to me the U.S. economy is a bit like a teenager with the growing pains of changing from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. And then overlay the changes in technology and the dearth of work after the 2008 crash, and you have an economy trying to figure itself out. This creates a very dynamic place to work.

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Rich Feller interview on the HEROIC article and future of work. (9/22/16)

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rich-feller

*Note this is not an exact transcript of our conversation, more of a summary of the essence of what we talked about.

Rich and I agreed on so many things, I felt I could have talked with him for hours on this topic. Here are the key highlights of our conversation. Our conversation begins with his article on the HEROIC Career Model.

The HEROIC model starts with ‘H’ for Hope which is really where our work needs to start. It starts with having hope about the future. It builds upon the concept of psychological capital for people to look towards the future with hope. We as career practitioners need to help people build their psychological capital and look optimistically about managing their future.

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The Future of Work: Attract New Talent, Build Better Leaders, and Create a Competitive Organization. By Jacob Morgan

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FutureOfWork

This is a book about the future of work written by a millennial. After listening to our keynote speaker, Gio Twigge at the Maine Career Development Association conference (June 2016) talk about how IDEXX is embracing the future employee and workspace, I picked up this book. (Gio referred to it in his talk).

I wanted to read this book in one setting as I was captivated from the start. I get tired of hearing how businesses have to adapt to millennial’s. That’s crap. Businesses need to adapt to the modern world of work! I want what they want. The future of work requires offering flexibility in the work schedule, location, and devices. The future of work wants recognition and ability to work as a team, collaborating on exciting creative projects using problem solving skills. I want that too.

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A World Gone Social by Ted Coine & Mark S. Babbitt

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world gone social

Owning my own business, I struggle with “selling” my online seminars too hard and “not selling them hard enough”. Do I send direct emails to potential clients? Do I post in Linkedin groups and add content? When do people buy? How hard do I push in my monthly newsletters to career practitioners?

In A World Gone Social, Ted and Mark do a convincing job of explaining their mantra, “Social First – Sell Second“. They make the argument that we live in a different world these days where one disgruntled employee or customer can post negative comments on a variety of social media sites and really hurt the company. AND happy employees and customers can also post, and that is where we should be focused.

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