Siobhan Neary

The ‘Blueprint’ framework for career management skills: a critical exploration

This article examines the Blueprint framework for career management skills as it has been revealed across sequential implementations in the USA, Canada and Australia. It is argued that despite its lack of an empirical basis, the framework forms a useful and innovative means through which career theory, practice and policy can be connected. The framework comprises both core elements (learning areas, learning model and levels) and contextual elements (resources, community of practice, service delivery approach and policy connection). Each of these elements is explored.

Ensuring quality in online career mentoring

This article explores the issue of quality in online career mentoring. It builds on a previous evaluation of Brightside, an online mentoring system in the UK which is primarily aimed at supporting young peoples transitions to further learning. The article notes that participants in Brightsides mentoring programmes reported satisfaction with their experiences, with many stating that it helped them to make decisions and to positively change their learning and career behaviours. However, the article argues that there are challenges in ensuring quality and consistency connected to both the voluntary nature of mentoring and the online mode. The article proposes a 10-point quality framework to support quality assurance, initial training and professional development for online mentors.

Only qualifications count: exploring perceptions of continuing professional development within the career guidance sector

ABSTRACT This paper explores the views of a group of career development practitioners undertaking a postgraduate qualification as a form of continuing professional development (CPD). It offers insights into how these practitioners perceive and view different forms of CPD. A case study methodology was adopted to gather examples of the CPD activities practitioners engaged in and the value placed on these in supporting the development of professional practice. Their views were synthesised to create a typology representing a differentiated model of CPD. The model proposes three types of CPD: operational, experiential and formal. Formal CPD is perceived as having the highest value in developing professional practice. The study supports a deeper understanding of how careers practitioners engage with and understand CPD.

Enabling reflective learning in lifelong career guidance

caused by social injustice’ (p. 75). Given Rutten’s (and Hawkins’s) stance on autism, it is nevertheless puzzling to see them both quote approvingly Baron-Cohen (pp. 28, 29, 39, 77, 85), an autism researcher whose definition of mindblindness has been mercilessly and brilliantly disputed by writers of the neurodiversity movement. They see his formulation as deeply human-centred and his perspective as neurotypically centred. Rather than being non-empathic, as Baron-Cohen believes, the equal level of attention a person with autistic process pays to human and non-human aspects of the environment can be understood as a way to be alive to the multiple textures of reality. Hawkins’s and Rutten’s examples are both indicative of a general trend in the book and representative perhaps of significant sections of the person-centred community: genuine and humane engagement with clients paired with the adoption of pre-existing and culturally dominant theoretical markers that at closer scrutiny appear to be at variance with the practitioner’s ethos. New practices need new metaphors; in the process, the very meaning of psychotherapy may be altered. Some useful pointers are given by Van Werde who discusses and amplifies the meaning of contact, the first of Rogers’s necessary and sufficient conditions for therapeutic change. When working with clients considered unsuited for therapy (in his case people recovering from psychotic experience), ‘we do not do psychotherapy in the strict sense in these meetings’, he writes, ‘but we do work to strengthen affective contact’ (pp. 64–65). He combines the latter with exercises in anchoring: ‘the efforts ... to strengthen contact with reality and support communication’ (pp. 64–65). Yet the overriding importance of affective contact is self-evident, and a useful lesson, I believe, for any of us working with the so-called worried well. The primacy of affect over the customary predominance afforded to the cognitive dimension could potentially mean that, for example, a neurotypical therapist may learn from a client with autistic process, an ontologically secure therapist may learn from an ontologically insecure client. In adjusting our empathic attunement to our clients, we may be prompted to re-evaluate our taken-for-granted place in the world. As Alfred Adler admirably put it, and quoted here by Hawkins (p. 30): ‘We need ... to see with the eyes of another, to hear with the ears of another, to feel with the heart of another’.