Rumpole, equilateral triangles and career development

Can teachers provide advice that will help students make effective career choices? Should teachers limit their attention to factual topics such as equilateral triangles? Alan Bevan considers the evidence from the use of myfuture.edu.au and what statistics suggest about the motivators for occupational choice.

John Mortimer, the creator of Horace Rumpole, can always command my attention. But it was John Mortimer's father's words that gave me cause to reflect during the last Christmas holidays. Amusing, somewhat unkind, but thought provoking: 'All advice is perfectly useless,' my father told me when he sent me away to school. 'Particularly advice on the subject of life. You may, at a pinch, take your schoolteacher's word on the subject of equilateral triangles, or the Latin word for “parsley”; but remember that life's a closed book to schoolteachers, if you want my honest opinion' (extract from Mortimer, JH 2003, Where there is a Will, Penguin, UK).

Life is not really a closed book for a teacher, but inevitably, like everyone else, a teacher has a limited set of experiences. Even if the teacher has an uncommon breadth of awareness about today's world, it is impossible to accurately predict tomorrow's world with its turbulent labour market, globalisation, changing demographics and technological advances. How then can a teacher prepare students for the world beyond school?

Further, if giving advice is 'useless' (I suspect it is but I don't feel I should offer gratuitous advice on the matter), what hope is there for the teacher providing career advice? If we are truthful, we probably need to acknowledge that there is not much hope at all really. But the fact that offering career advice does not seem likely to be fruitful, doesn't mean there is no role for the teacher. Far from it. In fact, preparing students for the world beyond school is the role of all teachers and it transcends Mr Mortimer's limited view of the profession.

In a nutshell, the role of the teacher is not to offer advice; it is to provide experiences and challenges that develop students' capacity to chart their own course through life. The Australian Blueprint for Career Development describes this capacity as a series of competencies that, at the highest level, can be described as personal management competencies (self-esteem, interpersonal skills, preparedness for change), learning and work exploration, and lifelong career management skills.

Consider the second of these three competencies—learning and work exploration. As a basic understanding about work, students need to recognise that work choice must juggle two priorities: personal satisfaction, and the needs of society, especially the economy. If this is a basic understanding, then how well are we helping students grasp this fundamental concept?

Having been closely involved with the development of myfuture.edu.au—Australia's career information service, a joint initiative of Australian, state and territory governments—I have been fascinated to watch the statistics about occupational search. They tell a lot about the degree to which the users of myfuture are driven by either economic realities or personal interest. Let's examine these statistics briefly.

Firstly, it needs to be said that the myfuture website is a good national indicator of student career decision-making behaviour. Since its launch, demand for information from the site has been high and it has grown dramatically.

Given this high degree of usage, it is interesting each month to see which occupations are being reviewed by students. There is a surprising consistency in these statistics. It is also interesting to compare the league table of the top ten occupations from the 635 occupations featured in myfuture during December 2005 (see Table 1) with published skill shortages data. For example, the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) recently published its own table (see Table 2). Chef, engineer and accountant are on both lists. Notably, flight attendant is not on the DEWR list, but it heads the popularity polls for students.

Perhaps we can conclude that the motivators for occupational search on myfuture include both an awareness of economic realities and personal interest drivers—that sounds pretty good to me. But what is worrying is the possible source of those personal interest drivers. Are students' personal interests being expanded by their experiences at school, or are they more a product of mass media? Is the interest in forensic science a testament to the success of school science courses, or the popularity of the TV program NCIS?

What do we conclude from the fact that make-up artist appears to reflect the personal interests of so many of our students? No doubt there are people working as make-up artists who are providing a useful service for our community, but the high degree of interest in this occupation is a little saddening when compared with other forms of public service. For example, state government public servant ranked 500th in the myfuture search.

John Mortimer's father was probably right to doubt the value of teachers giving advice, and I'm sure this includes not giving advice to those young people who aspire to make-up artistry as a career. But when teachers get it right, they help young people open the windows in their minds. It starts with a positive self-image, which can make young people more employable as well as allow them to visualise themselves in careers where they can make a worthwhile contribution to society. From a positive self-concept, interpersonal skills can be developed, and with that comes an ability to listen to others and to consider experiences from the world beyond the immediately known. Interestingly, these attitudinal qualities are also the foundation of what industry wants, as described in the generic employability skills developed by the Business Council of Australia and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

This is the business of all teachers. The notion of the experts taking full responsibility for career choice in school is a flawed model. Career counsellors/advisors have understood that the senior Mr Mortimer was right, and now largely avoid the label of being an advice-giver. They more commonly see themselves as career development practitioners and 'view their clients as lifelong learners, themselves as facilitators of learning and their interaction as a learning system' (Patton & McMahon). As such, they are just one part of the mainstream.

The success of effective career development in schools depends on the success of the mainstream teaching program. And, with due deference to Mr. Mortimer, that means so much more than equilateral triangles and Latin.

References

The Australian Blueprint for Career Development (Draft), can be viewed at www.dest.gov.au/sectors/career_development

Job Outlook, Youth Edition, Department of Employment and Workplace Relations accessed at www.workplace.gov.au/NR

Patton, W & McMahon, M (1999). Career Development and Systems Theory: A new relationship, Brooks/Cole, Pacific Grove, CA.

Alan Bevan is chief operating officer of The Le@rning Federation.

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