People thrive and help build the decent society we all want to live only when they feel secure about life beyond tomorrow.  The way careers pan out now means too many of us are on the edge of not coping too much of the time, chronically anxious about our jobs, finances and family life. 

Where should the UK be looking for the good new careers to replace the jobs we’re losing to China and India? 

How can we produce financially and psychologically worthwhile careers for the many as well as the few? 

Why should parents and carers have to choose between meeting their care responsibilities or paying the mortgage (which too often means they have to give first priority to their careers)? 

Why should we live with shortages of electricians, plumbers etc because we haven’t yet found sustainable ways of training people for these careers? 

Why do we allow school careers education programmes to be led by teachers without specialist training or resources?

Why do we encourage so many to study for degrees when we know graduate careers are in such short supply?        

I’d like the Career Czar to start working on issues such as:-

- promoting a “paradigm shift” in the way the UK manages careers and our working lives, one in which human well-being and productivity are of higher national priority than narrow economic good (this isn’t so airy-fairy, the World Bank itself now works to this model)

- finding and developing new careers with decent pay for the many (these new careers may be in global warming related flood and drought protection, human demographics / workforce monitoring and management, new technology infrastructure development, etc)
         
- re-balancing working life within the UK, to provide more career opportunities outside London and the South East (this could mean encouraging more companies to offer more staff the option of working from home or at a distance)

- under Equal Opportunity legislation, only allowing job ads to specify academic and experience qualifications when they’re essential to do the job (eg my GP needs to be a qualified doctor but there’s no good reason for restricting admin careers to grads with degrees at 2.1 or above)

And this is only a starting point!  There’s a huge amount for a Career Czar to do if we’re to rebuild sane, rewarding working lives.

Sustaining your morale when you’re out of work is as tough as focusing on the stars (and not the dark and rain) when you’re in the countryside at night, teeth-chatteringly cold.  You know your chances of getting another job depend on putting your heart and soul into the job search but it’s hard to psych yourself up into believing the jobs outlook merits the huge efforts you’re making.

Use these glimmers of hope in the jobs outlook to help you believe in the better future that’ll come along soon if you continue working at your job search. 

Demographics are on your side, much more than you might think.  There are far, far fewer young people coming onto the jobs market (even though the jobs outlook for those aged 19 – 24 is particularly bad).   An increasingly high percentage of the workforce are older workers who don’t want to work on into retirement.  The jobs outlook for the majority is at least improved by these demographic factors.

The way this recession has developed helps too.  In previous recessions (1979 – 81 and 1990 – 92), the jobs outlook stayed bad for longer because government didn’t actively try to protect employment (as the Brown government did this time round).  Similarly, employers did less then to try to keep their workforces intact.  The net effect is that today’s organisations haven’t lost as much employee knowledge and commercial contacts as previously and they’ll be able to recover faster from this recession.  While the jobs outlook for the next 2 years worries me, this recession is unlikely to be as long lasting as the 79 – 81 recession (which dragged on in the Midlands until ’86). 

There’s also survey evidence to show the jobs outlook is improving.  The REC & KPMG Report on Jobs (July 2010) showed actual increases in perm and temp employment.   Flexplus’s Midlands survey showed 80% employers expect to recruit soon.

A final thought …. Even at times when the jobs outlook is particularly dire, some opportunities are constantly being created; some individuals will benefit from them.  Today or tomorrow, “it might be you” who gets the offer of a really good job.  There are grounds for hope.

What’s happened over the last few weeks is an astonishingly sudden turnaround in student career advice and a collapse in belief about the public and employment value of a degree (just see the stream of media articles and government speeches).  No hope of a university place or of a decent job – why shouldn’t teenagers despair? 

As parent, career advisor or tutor, what student career advice can you give right now that’s useful, encouraging and honest? 

Students’ career advice should remind them, I think, that just because a goal’s got more difficult for most people, if it’s the right goal for them it’s probably still within reach.  They’ll need to work in a different way to reach that goal, though.  Students’ career advice should explain they’ll need to put much more effort into finding more about themselves and the “goodie” they’ve targeted, thinking “out of the box” and planning like project managers.  They’ll also need to be politely pushy – student career advice is one of the state’s “Cinderella services”.     

Career advice for students panicking they may not get a university place?  Advise them to first think long and hard about the value of a degree to them (is it more than £20K?) and how likely it is that they’ll get a 2.1 in their chosen subject. 

Students should push their tutors and specialist career advisors as hard as they possibly can for one to one assessments of their developing academic potential (ideally based on both their course results and good psychometric information), personal strengths and career interests.  Armed with this student career advice, teenagers can then investigate the many ways of achieving their goals (eg a rewarding adult life, a professional job, etc) beyond those which require study at a conventional university.  Students can get ideas and help from their colleges’ careers advisors and local Connexions service, from www.notgoingtouni.co.uk – or from us!

What about the students who despair of getting a decent job in a time of rocketing youth unemployment?  Students’ career advice should encourage them to get as good qualifications as they can at “A” Level (NVQ3) or equivalent, to make themselves competitive candidates for most of the good jobs that are around.  Although students will of course use the services of state-funded agencies like Connexions to help them job hunt, they and their parents should also put a lot of effort into networking to identify hidden job opportunities.  Mums chatting at the supermarket can sometimes unearth very useful students’ career advice and information about jobs not yet advertised.

Students’ career advice should never forget the importance of personal development and having fun at this stage in life, even when the outlook’s as dreary as it now is.  One way of keeping yourself motivated throughout the job hunt and also of improving career prospects over your lifetime is to enjoy yourself learning about a different country’s culture and / or improving your languages through an exchange programme.  See student career advice sites such as www.ukcisa.org.uk and www.britishcouncil.org/connectyouth for details about some of these programmes.  Any town with a twinning arrangement could set up its own schemes.

Be warned – the job search strategies you’re urged to use by Job Centre staff don’t work that well (especially if you’re after professional jobs).  Job Centres’ job search strategies will have you scurrying after every vacancy, regardless of its suitability and the chances of you being offered the job, just to prove you’re genuinely looking for work.  This approach to job search infuriates employers and wastes job hunters’ time and energy.  You’re better off developing your own job search strategies, then persuading your Job Centre advisor to let you try them.

The most successful job search strategies start with a little hard thinking plus basic research and a bit of project management planning. 

Effective job search strategies depend on researching your job market and the right niche for you within it.  Go online, tap in [your job title] jobs.  Do a broad UK wide search first, just to get a feel for the jobs market, then narrow it down to the locations you’d consider working at.  Do you see a reasonable number of vacancies offering salaries you’d find acceptable?  If not, tweak your job search strategies to track down a more promising career path. 

There’s a reasonable number of jobs at the right level – now are you a good candidate for them?  If there’s a shortfall in your skills and qualifications that hampers your job hunting your job search strategies should include how you top them up at least cost to you. 

As you go through all the UK jobs advertised online, take notes of the exact words employers use to describe their jobs and what they want from applicants.  One of the easiest and most profitable job search strategies is to give recruiters the “messages” they want to hear about you, in the words they themselves use.  

Now think about project managing your job search on your PC.  Set out on your work plan / electronic diary each of the job search strategies you’ll use (eg “use Tuesdays for networking activities”, together with the results you expect to achieve from them (eg “Tue wk 1 -make 1st approach to 5 contacts on networking database, aiming to achieve at least 2 useful pieces of job market information / further contacts”).   Regularly monitor whether your job search strategies are working as planned. 

Don’t forget to reward yourself (quickly and often) for all the hard work you’re putting into your job search strategies.  Job hunting is draining, demoralising and thoroughly awful.  A bit of spoiling does wonders in restoring your energy levels and helping you stick to the task unfazed by reject letters and other disappointments.

Let’s look at what government says about degree study and what will happen if they’re able to put their proposals into practice.

The Universities Minister says student fees for degree study shouldn’t rise (much) because the Treasury can’t afford to fund the costs of a hike in student loans.  Mr Willetts also says – correctly – students are on the brink of revolt over rising student debts. 

His solution?  Reduce the costs of degree study by using FE colleges (cheaper than universities) to teach external degrees, the study centres being so close to most students’ homes they won’t need to live independently (allowing the government to cut back on funding that element of the student loan).

This Universities Minister is the first government representative to accept the debt burden of degree study is getting too high (even though he’s more worried about the state’s finances than those of the students!).  He’s also right in saying there are cheaper routes to degree study than the one currently favoured by most students. 

What the Universities Minister refuses to acknowledge is that FE colleges can’t provide the same quality of degree study as the universities do if the state doesn’t pay up to fund the same (expensive) resources – eg better libraries, more highly qualified teaching staff and so on.  Why does it save money to pay into one pot what you’ve previously paid into another pot? 

While he’s not admitting it at this stage, the logical implication of the Universities Minister’s proposals is that degree study will soon be delivered almost exclusively through distance-learning organisations such as the Open University.  There will be a very few traditional universities offering the face to face learning experiences.  Much of the remaining university sector will disappear, due to bankruptcy.  How much will it cost to make all those academic staff redundant? 

The numbers of students willing to embark on home-based, distance learning degree study will also reduce sharply – while this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, a dramatic fall off in the number of graduates over a very few years will have huge consequences for employers and the professions.

When the traditional universities lose out on degree study funding, they’ll be less able to fund their research function.  Most research into the arts, humanities, business and pure science is done by universities and very little of this research is of the type that attracts paying customers.  Research skills are most commonly taught in the universities by practising researchers.  Universities’ loss of degree study funding will gradually impact on UK management’s ability to understand complex business and professional issues and develop solutions to them.

Pause for hollow laughter from any manager / owner of a small company!  Staff performance management isn’t any easier when you’ve fewer than 10 employees, it’s just different and even more of a worry.  Small companies live closer to the knife-edge than large ones and a single individual’s failings may be enough to put everyone out of work.   As boss, you’re sorting out 101 little and large problems at once and relying on your instincts to make the right decision every time.  Being also chief sales executive and company representative, it’s likely you’re out of the office most of the time so staff performance management problems may reach crisis point before you spot them.
  
In the middle of the mayhem, what practical steps can a busy boss take to stop staff performance management problems arising in the first place (and solve them if they do)?

The first essential is to sort out what aspects of staff performance management truly are key to your business’s survival and growth.

Use the whole team’s contacts to track down a couple of intelligent, trustworthy but currently unemployed business studies or accountancy graduates who’ll do a first class independent business assessment in return for pub lunches, their expenses and something good to put on their CVs.  NB: asking your team to help you find staffers for this project makes them feel more in control and more confident about your motives!
 
You ask your graduate “consultants” to guide the whole workforce (you included) on what the business has to do now and in the future to attract and keep sufficient numbers of profitable customers and supply them with services / products at margins high enough to pay everybody’s wages.   The graduates should analyse the contribution each job makes to keeping the business viable; also, what simple, verifiable staff performance management measures will most help each job holder and the business keep track of how they’re doing.
 
Allow plenty of time for staff to question, dispute, discuss and refine the graduates’ presentations.  The staff performance management measures eventually agreed will then be used by each worker for routine self-monitoring and for setting improvement targets from their current baselines of performance.
 
From then on, manager and team should regularly review what the staff performance management measures are telling them about the well-being of the whole business.  The whole emphasis should be on celebrating and spreading good staff performance, dealing with any areas of weakness through a problem-solving / co-coaching approach.  No, this isn’t a soft, cosy way of dealing with staff performance management issues – it’s one of the few methods that very small companies find practical and productive.

We’re reaching the tipping point at which university education costs outweigh the economic benefits of doing a degree.  This is already true for for a minority (eg mature students, graduates stuck in low paying jobs and graduates from less affluent backgrounds).  It’ll be true for a lot more students if the new government further reduces state funding for the universities and its inquiry into student fees agrees to remove the cap on fee levels.
      
The “elephant in the room” issues hidden behind these which university, which degree course discussions are what happens in the real worlds of education, career development and employment when teenagers and their parents stop believing that being a graduate gives you a leg-up in the jobs market?

Most candidates don’t (they haven’t been taught how) though job interview success depends on it.  The right way to prepare for an interview isn’t to exhaustively rehearse answers to the questions you expect to be asked nor to “research” potential employers by quickly flicking through their web sites.   You’ll need a completely different mindset.  

Starting with a very clear view of your target employment sector and the type of job you want to apply for, work at understanding the wider context of the job.  This is how employers think – you’ll instinctively answer their questions in ways making job interview success more likely if you adopt their pattern of thinking. 

Working on the context of the job vacancy from “outside -in”, what are the marketing changes, technological developments and financial pressures and so on that confront your target employment sector right now?  If the sector’s being hit by rapid, destabilising change, for example, job interview success is much more likely for candidates showing they’ve hit the ground running all through their earlier careers.

Zooming in a level from employment sector to potential employer, what are the organisational implications of these various developments for your potential employer?   Currently, highlighting earlier triumphs in virtually pain-free, consensual cost-cutting should help you to job interview success in all public sector management roles! 

The next part of preparation for job interview success involves reviewing in fine detail your career history (anything older than 15 years back probably won’t be that helpful).  This is the bit most candidates do, but usually don’t do in enough depth.  So – do you know your career history well enough to give at least 3 different (good) examples of your achievements in every aspect of your work a sensible interviewer might ask you about?  Can you explain the value to your employer of everything you did, preferably using financial data or percentages to back up what you say?  If you can’t, you’re wasting chances of job interview success. 
 
Lastly, remember interviewers are human too. 

Job interview success sometimes depends on candidates diplomatically prompting the recruiter to ask job-relevant questions that are to the applicants’ advantage (eg “You mentioned earlier in the job interview, success in driving up market share is a key goal for your client – I helped my company become market leader in my last job but one; should I explain how I did it?”). 

Similarly, most interviewers can’t interview and take decent notes of the interview at the same time.  At the end of the interview (not during it), leaving the recruiter a brief written record of the achievements you think are directly relevant to that particular job and company just tweaks the chances of job interview success in your favour.

First, make sure you know exactly what career retraining you need to get you wherever you want to be.  Start looking at the online job ads for the posts you want and be guided by what they say before signing up for a course. 

What qualifications, experience and skills do most employers ask for?  If there’s a difference between what employers ask for and your “offer”, could you convince enough potential employers this difference is so slight you’ll be a good candidate for their jobs without any “top up” training?    

Let’s assume your research shows you won’t be a competitive candidate until you’ve done the career retraining necessary to upgrade your qualifications.  Leaving to one side the thorny issue whether your current employer might pay for this career retraining, is there anything you can do to keep the costs down?  

There may be, if you can claim exemptions from part of the career retraining through accreditation of prior learning (APL) and / or accreditation of prior experiential learning (APEL).  List all the study, qualifications and experience you’ve already completed that’s relevant to the qualification you’re now after.  Back up this information with documentary proof (eg exam certificates, course timetables etc).  Contact the course tutors of all the courses you’re considering and ask them what exemptions they’d be prepared to offer you under the APL and APEL schemes.  You have to take the initiative here – many course tutors won’t.  

Also, don’t forget that work-based training and assessment can provide NVQ qualifications up to Masters degree level.  Depending on your employer, it’s often less easy to organise this type of career retraining than a course; however, NVQs are usually employer-funded. 

Consider your full range of options for different types of career retraining.  Classroom-based courses are more expensive than their distance learning based equivalents (even before you factor in extra costs like travel).  On the other hand, some people just don’t like studying on their own and prefer classroom-based career retraining programmes.  Ring the national Careers Advice Service (0800 100 900) for information on suitable training courses near you and the distance learning options.

There are government backed Career Development loans to fund career retraining.  Personally, I doubt the wisdom of taking on debt when the jobs market is so shaky.  Similarly, I’d recommend you opt for part-time career retraining courses rather than full-time ones, given that employers look for up-to-date experience as well as up-to-date training and competitive qualifications.

Our view is that individuals need individualised outplacement support (including emotional support) because each person struggles with different aspects of job search.  People who’ve been with the same company for years need to learn modern job search techniques and develop the tools” (professional CV, etc) that go with them.  Others know the theory but feel so fragile they can only apply it when prompted and supported by their redundancy counsellor.  Yet others need a “critical friend” to drive up their performance to the level where they’ll get offers in an extremely competitive jobs market.  Oddly enough, it usually costs the employer less to provide a few individualised one to one outplacement support sessions than to put redundant staff through group outplacement support programmes. 

Ours is the “think, do and be upheld” approach to outplacement support.  Each person practises one to one with us the job search skills they need, using their real job applications as their learning material  They discover with coaching from us their own USPs (Unique Selling Points).  We help them overcome the self-doubt and embarrassment (eg over networking) that would otherwise hamper their job search.

The New World of Outplacement argues outplacement support can now be largely automated and online.   Specialised software can help with many of the key job search tasks – searching for vacancies, producing CVs and job search “project management” – says its author.  Richard Alberg agrees people made redundant want human contact but suggests this should be for a cathartic discussion of their plight rather than for delivering practical help with their job search.  The other role he sees for human beings in outplacement support  is that of encouraging the less active job searchers to put more oomph into their hunt for work.   This is a “paddle your own canoe – but we’ll provide the paddles” approach to outplacement support. 

The Insala Outplacement Report 2010 gives the buyers’ perspective on which outplacement support services are most valued by purchasers and users.  The 181 executives surveyed rated one to one coaching as the most valuable outplacement service on offer.  Group workshops and networking groups were placed second and third in importance; online self-service outplacement support ranked fourth.  The customers’ verdict then is that “outplacement support definitely needs a human face – but it should have an online capability as well”.