Careers as a concept used to be synonymous with a job or even a single company. One left school, got a job and then stayed in it until a pension came along.
Society and industry were very different in those days and it goes without saying that a “career” is a much more flexible and layered concept in the third decade of the twenty-first century.
Very few people stay in the same job or even the same job role for their entire lives. Most are now lucky enough to have a wide variety of options available to them not only when they leave school or college but throughout their working lives. “Career-changing” is no longer rare and re-training is something that colleges and universities treat as a mainstream offering.
Careers as a topic is immensely complex. At one end there are the considerations surrounding the psychology of choice and the socio-economic factors behind individual preferences, at the other are the more mechanical issues about qualification structures (and naming) and the flexibility or otherwise of employers and of Government funding systems.
Fifty years ago a young person had the choice of what they felt was a bewildering array of possible careers. Today the horizon and the pathways are virtually infinite, and this has made the task of advising and guiding young people and adult career-changers close to impossible. The amount of knowledge required by an adviser is so huge as to mitigate against anything but a partial view.
Pye Tait Consulting has been working on careers research and development for thirty years. We developed some of the very first careers websites back in the 1990s and our last projects looked at technological careers progression and the advanced qualifications required to support it.
Perhaps more to the point, we understand the vital links between perceptions, psychology, and the mechanics of jobs and qualifications and we have the experience and insight to make the links work.
