I am not a fan of psychometric testing. Granted, it has its uses in specific situations, where for example a company wants to check that the person they are considering for a job has the right level of skills in a certain area, or has the personality to meet the demands of the job or the culture of the organisation. It can also be useful to give a young person a general sense of career direction, since they have little other information about their skills and career needs to go on. But many career professionals use psychometric testing as a default, basing all subsequent work on the results of the test, and I take issue with this approach.

Psychometric testing is a very broad brush approach to understanding the specific traits and skills of very complex human beings. Many career decisions are based on which company one should work in, rather than what career they should follow. And there is no psychometric test in the world that can discriminate between one company and another. And, as the example of my client- who had no interest in either antiques or fishing- shows, the predictive ability of psychometrics is very limited.

The only exception to my dislike of psychometrics is those assessments, like a Myers Briggs Indicator, which purport to show learning styles or personality  types. I do feel that their value is limited, but there are occasions when they can be useful for self understanding.

The moral of my client’s story is that if anyone other than a company to whom you are applying for a job offers you a psychometric test, challenge them. Ask them what they hope to achieve from the test and how the questions that you will be asked are likely to result in the conclusions the test will reach. I guarantee they will not be able to give you a satisfactory answer.

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My first wish is for society to recognise that career planning and long term career management is the culmination of our educational system. We should not have to spend all those years in education only to find that when we come out the other side we simply stumble into the first job that comes along. Nor, for most us, to continue to stumble from one job to another for the rest of our lives. I would like to see career planning integrated into the educational system. Not necessarily at the same time as we leave education, most people need a few years to really understand what full time work is all about, and who they are in their working persona. But a proper career planning process should be made available to all at the right time during their twenties, funded by the state and delivered by qualified career professionals.

My second wish is to get rid of job centres. David Cameron sort of put his finger on it yesterday when he said that job centres should be replaced by local charities, support groups and private companies. He didn’t get it quite right because well meaning charities and support group groups are not necessarily staffed by qualified professionals. But he is on the right track; job centres have been failing for years and need to be replaced by an effective,  professional service. The same goes for Connexions, Prospects and all the other publicly funded initiatives that currently misdirect and ill-advise job seekers and school leavers.

I would like to see common sense in the qualification process for Career Development Loans. At the moment anyone can apply to a bank for government-backed Career Development Loan. For any sort of training, other than career advice. What nonsense! How can one plan a self development  programme properly without effective advice and planning? Career advice should not only fall within the scope of Career Development Loans; it should be a essential prerequisite.

Finally I would like to see a common qualification standard for career professionals. There are some excellent courses out there but there are no regulations as to who can set up as a career consultant. Ours is an emerging profession. It needs to develop. It is vulnerable to cowboys and charlatans. A common standard, backed by an effective professional body (not the handful of self interest groups that currently exist) would make all the difference.

That’s my wish list. Do you think Santa will come on May 6^th?

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At the risk of sounding like a broken record, most of us are in the wrong jobs. And, if we were all the right jobs, jobs we enjoyed, were motivated in and good at, we would be far more productive, the economy would be more successful, we would recover from the recession more quickly and the long term outlook would be far more positive! Simple, isn’t it?

What is really need then is the facility for people to understand which careers are right for them, and to be able to receive personal, targeted career advice which will help them to make the right choices and progress faster. This advice should not be given on the day they leave education, but after they have spent three or four years learning about work, through a structured series of work experience, internship or apprentice programmes; because it takes time to understand what a long term career is all about and people in their teens and early twenties find it hard to make decisions that will last until their sixties.

Structured career planning is the last piece in our young people’s education. It is available today for those who are prepared to pay for it. But it would be far more satisfactory to have it provided as a state service. After all, by helping people into a successful career we will save a fortune in benefits and the cost of running Job Centres.

Extending the 6 month training guarantees for under 24s may have been the best jobs-related benefit the Treasury could think of. But it is a missed opportunity.

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Yes, the recession does seem to be drawing to a close but this seems to have done little to change the general mood. Whatever bright spots there are seem to be eclipsed by a general sense of suffering. But being gloomy and miserable does not help. Particularly if we are facing real personal problems, as many people are.

There are solid strategies that can be put in place both for retaining one’s job and for getting a new one. But strategies are simply modes of action, and unless they are undertaken in the right frame of mind, they will, not succeed.

Which is why it is so important to be positive. Positive thinking may be falling out of fashion in some quarters; the American journalist Barbara Ehrenreich has just written a book condemning the feelgood industry, for denying the value of negative feelings. She may well be right when there is a fundamental, tangible problem which is unlikely to be solved by feelings alone. But the career issues that are taxing many people today are about personal success. Which is an emotional thing. After all there is no objective definition of success, we are successful when we and others perceive ourselves to be so.

If things are tough the imperative is to improve them. And, notwithstanding Barbara Ehrenreich, there is plenty of evidence to show the  benefits of a can-do attitude.  Being positive forces us out of a self-imposed comfort zone in which gloom is the desired state. And that can only be a good thing. Let’s enter the new year in a positive, successful frame of mind. Let’s make the things we want to happen, happen.

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Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing bad about providing young people with information about careers. All education is good. But what is wrong is influencing or advising people whose only full time experience is school to make career choices long before they understand what a full time career is, and how it will impact on their adult life.

I feel strongly about this because, like all career professionals, most of my time is taken up working with clients in their late twenties and thirties who made career decisions too early, who hate what they do for a living, often to the point of depression or worse, who are desperate for a change and who do not know where to turn.

Often these careers are chosen at school. Many students enter higher education convinced that they know what career they want. They take vocational courses or study subjects that can only lead in one direction. Ten years or so later many of them deeply regret their choices. But they have been wedded to their particular career path for so long that not only do they find it difficult to change; they also feel guilty about changing. And that makes it even harder to change. They feel are letting so many people down, themselves not the least. And now the government seems to be suggesting that they make the same mistakes earlier, at an even more immature age, based on even less self knowledge and information.

Unfortunately this is driven by an economic agenda. The argument seems to be that if young people gear themselves up for a specific career at an early age they will become more effective economic units, which will bring greater prosperity to both them and society at large. Has nobody in the Department for Children, Schools and Families considered that if they are unhappy in their careers, economic units will underperform, with negative consequences for themselves and society at large?

According to the DCSF the new careers education will make sure that every young person, “whatever their background can aim for the top”. If “the top” is where this policy came from, I can’t think of a better reason for aiming elsewhere.

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A year or so ago a client came to see me. She was one of these people who have tremendous energy, an outstanding intellect and are great fun to be with. She was a partner in a tough, macho, City law firm- against all the odds because she had young kids, and was black. Not many black mothers get to be partner in waspish law firms.

But she was having a terrible time at work. She was under tremendous pressure, being bullied, working long hours, not seeing her kids and altogether in a terrible way.

She managed to negotiate an exit from her firm and spent the next eight months spending quality time with her kids and her husband. It was a convalescence for her. She had the freedom to think and to dream, with no constraints on her time, other than those she chose for herself.

When she left her City job she had planned to give up the law altogether. But gradually, as she recovered, she began to realise that she still wanted to be a lawyer, but not the sort of lawyer she had been. She wanted to be a lawyer who could take her kids to school. A lawyer who was doing good, not a lawyer who was just making profits for multinational companies. She was in no hurry, she had negotiated a good settlement from her firm and planned to look for a new job sometime over the next year or two.

And then, completely out of the blue, the perfect job came along. It was a few minutes drive from her home, working as an in-house lawyer for a manufacturing company. It was a nine to five job, a varied role, working with people who she liked, in a business that did something she cared about. She heard about it from a friend who introduced her to the chief executive- a woman. They clicked immediately and she offered her the job on the spot.

That is when she wrote to us, telling her consultant that she had landed this tremendous job by chance. But I don’t think it was chance at all. She would never have got that job if she had gone for it as a burnt out, stressed City lawyer. She would never have even realised she wanted a job like that. She got that job because she got herself mentally into a place where she could begin to see what she wanted, where her friend realised that she could make a suitable introduction, where she was able to conduct a successful positive job interview,  and where she clicked with the chief executive. She made it happen for herself; subconsciously.

Sometimes the things that we think happen by chance are actually the result of our own actions. Even if we don’t always realise what we are doing at the time.

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The implication in the weekend press is that Gordon Brown, who is already blind in one eye, would be unable to continue as Prime Minister if the sight in his remaining eye were to deteriorate. Whether or not this is a genuine concern, or simply another stick with which to beat the Prime Minister is of little importance, what matters is that the press is implying that full or partial blindness disqualifies one from holding high office of state.

But this does not square well with the move in recent years towards equal opportunities. We live in a society which goes out of its way to ensure that all citizens can aspire to achieve their realistic career goals. Clearly there are limitations, none of us can achieve beyond the limits of our abilities – an eighty year old is unlikely to get the chance to captain England at football.

But there has never been any reason why a physically disabled person cannot be prime minister. Indeed, modern technology has only made things easier. David Blunkett was first Leader of Sheffield Council and then Home Secretary, despite being blind. There is no reason why the possibility that Gordon Brown’s eyesight may be failing should affect his ability to do his job. More than that, were he to resign, or be forced out for this reason alone, it would send a very negative message about our true commitment to equal opportunities.

No doubt the Equal Opportunities Commission will have something to say on the matter.

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The Winter of Discontent was caused by James Callaghan’s Labour government trying to enforce pay freezes in order to stem inflation. A different economic pressure from today, but nevertheless, is there a danger that 2009 could herald a similar Winter of Discontent? Mail workers have voted to strike, rail unions are in dispute and British Airways staff  are considering industrial action. Are there others in the pipeline.

There was a time when industrial disputes were driven by profound ideological differences. Class battles, workers against the bosses, socialism against capitalism. Now they are much more likely to be the product of poor communication and second rate leadership, on both sides. Every dispute that is reported today seems to be resolvable. If only each side would focus on common interests instead of points of difference.

I heard a postman complain that his round had been increased, he is no longer able to complete it in the allotted time, his bossed will not pay overtime and therefore he would have to cut his round short, people at the end would not get their post. Is this a cause for a strike? How many solutions can you think of this to this minor problem? Pay him per round perhaps instead of per hour, giving him the flexibility to work in his own time? Increase his basic pay in return for some flexibility in his hours? Set up collection points for those who do not receive their mail? If this is a justification for a strike it can only be down to poor leadership by management and unions.

The recession started in an outstanding spirit of co-operation. Companies actively sought alternatives to redundancy. Sabbaticals, part time working, job shares were all implemented as a way of avoiding lay offs. As the recession has prolonged our ability to find creative solutions seems to be waning. Industrial relations are returning to the bad old days. Let’s hope they don’t get any worse.

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On the one hand, the long term picture is dominated by social and technological change. We all expect greater choice and autonomy over our careers. We live in a society whose citizens want to be able to live a lifestyle of their choice. This trend has been evident since at least the birth of trade unionism but has accelerated in recent years as gender, sexual and human rights agendas have come to the fore. These are now giving way to agendas of personal autonomy.

On the other hand there are strong economic pressures, at least in the short term. We will need to work longer before we can draw our pensions, politicians and the press are talking of a new Age of Austerity.

So what is it to be? Will the trend towards greater choice, flexibility and improved lifestyles continue in the workplace. Or will a shortage of money force us to sweat even harder to earn a crust?

Of course only time will tell. But experience suggests that the short term pressures, whilst severe, may not be quite as enduring as we expect. After all, we live in a world where things change quickly. Do you remember how people spoke of the Conservative Party as being finished for a generation after the 1997 election? That turned out to be a short generation. In the 1970s the world was expected to run out of oil in a few years; then the North Sea oilfields  were discovered. The dotcom boom briefly misled us all. It only needs one economic or political event, somewhere in the world, to turn things on their head again.

At the same time, some changes are permanent. The role of women in society has changed dramatically in the last half century, it is unlikely to reverse. The lifestyle changes that the 21^st century is bringing are a similar trend. The nature of work will change dramatically over the next few decades. There may be short term economic pressures. But they are unlikely to impede progress for long.

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Unfortunately however, most applicants are not experienced career professionals and have not properly researched what it takes to help people to make effective career decisions and get jobs. Which is a shame because there are undoubtedly some talented aspiring career professionals out there.

The very fact that many members of the what used to be called the Career Management community now use the term career professional to describe themselves, rather than the old fashioned terms career consultant or career counsellor should give a clue as to the direction that we are heading in. It is no longer enough to have had a senior career, or to be good at giving advice, or to be a bit older and wiser in order to enter the career profession. These days qualifications are essential.

And courses are not hard to find. Some universities offer Masters degrees in Career Management whilst some career professionals choose to study for a variety of diplomas across several disciplines to build up a broad base of skills. What is important is to gain an understanding both of people and of careers in their most profound sense; not just jobs but whole-life embracing activities that define and sustain us.

As our society becomes increasingly lifestyle focused more and more people will seek quality assistance to help them plan and maintain a career that adds value to their life. The demand for good career professionals will only grow. So if you are thinking of becoming a career professional, and you have researched it thoroughly and really believe it is the right thing for you- get qualified!

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