Welcome to another edition of Pondering Careers, where we chat about everything related to career development, jobs, work, and the choices young people make about all of the above.

Over the past few weeks I’ve had a whole stack of ideas rolling around in my head as we start to do a few things a little differently, and in this week’s newsletter I wanted to talk a little bit more about one of the topics that’s kept coming up again and again; young people needs multiple opportunities to interact and learn about a career path before they are willing to take any action.

Anthony Mann talks career development as essentially an exercise in ‘throwing mud to see what sticks’, and this topic is really an extension of that idea. We need to throw lots of mud consistently and in many different ways to give students the best opportunity to find something sticky.

In this context, the ‘mud’ can really be anything – a career talk organised by Speakers for Schools, a presentation from someone amazing like Tyson Day or Jake Richings, taking a career quiz like Morrisby or Kate McBeath‘s Bullseye quiz then looking at the results, participating in a She Maps drone program in school with Paul Mead and Katie Vidal, or even reading one of our Study Work Grow Job Spotlights.

The point is not that any one type of ‘mud’ is better than any other, but rather that we need all of these opportunities for young people to help them make informed and confident decisions.

And this isn’t a new idea – in fact, the concept of needing multiple exposures before making a decision is popular in other fields, and in marketing it’s often referred to as the Rule of Seven.

The Rule of Seven

This well-known principle suggests that a prospective customer needs to see or hear a marketing message at least seven times before they take action and make a purchase.

The concept is often attributed to Dr Jeffrey Lant, who wrote about it in his 1985 book Money Making Marketing. I’ve not read it myself, but after seeing this incredible vintage cover I’m tempted to order a copy…

The idea behind this rule is that repetition is crucial for building brand awareness, trust, and ultimately, driving sales.

Here’s how it works:

1. Awareness: The first few exposures to a marketing message help a potential customer become aware of a product or service. They may not be ready to buy yet, but they’re starting to recognise the brand.
2. Interest: As the potential customer sees the message more times, they begin to develop an interest in the product or service. They may start to pay more attention to the ads or seek out more information.
3. Evaluation: Around the fourth or fifth exposure, the potential customer starts to actively evaluate whether the product or service meets their needs. They may compare it to alternatives or read reviews.
4. Decision: By the sixth or seventh exposure, the potential customer has likely formed a positive opinion of the brand and is ready to make a purchase decision. The repeated exposure has built trust and credibility, making them feel more comfortable with the choice.
5. Action: Finally, after seven or more exposures, the potential customer takes action and makes a purchase.

Obviously this isn’t a hard and fast rule, and it varies by both the ‘thing’ being sold, and the person to whom it is being sold, but the principal is pretty valid – we can’t expect people to see something once or twice and then be able to make a decision.

What does this have to do with career development?

Choosing a career pathway isn’t exactly the same as buying a jumper, but the process of Awareness >> Interest >> Evaluation >> Decision >> Action is pretty familiar to anyone working in career development.

And we need to keep the Rule of Seven in mind when planning career interventions, because one-offs aren’t going to cut it if we want students to actually take action.

As career counsellors, we often focus on providing students with a wide range of information about different career options. We might bring in guest speakers, organise career fairs, or share online resources. But if we’re only providing one-off exposures to each career path, we’re not really setting our students up for success.

Think about it this way: if a student hears about a particular job for the first time at a career fair, they might think it sounds interesting. But without further exposure to that career path, they’re unlikely to take any real action towards pursuing it. They might forget about it entirely, or assume that it’s not a realistic option for them.

On the other hand, if we provide that same student with multiple opportunities to learn about and engage with that career path, they’re much more likely to take the next step.

These opportunities could include:

• Hearing from multiple professionals in that field through guest speaker events, career stories, or informational interviews
• Participating in hands-on workshops or simulations related to the job
• Researching the educational requirements and job outlook for that career path
• Connecting with mentors or alumni who work in that field
• Reading guides, articles, or websites about working in the field
• Attending industry-specific events or conferences

By providing these repeated exposures, we help students move through the decision-making process more effectively.

They have the opportunity to build their awareness, explore their interest, evaluate the fit with their skills and goals, and ultimately, make an informed decision about whether to pursue that path.

Now, this doesn’t mean that we need to provide seven distinct exposures to every single career path out there. That would be nuts… But it does mean that we need to be strategic in our approach to career interventions.

When planning events, workshops, or other career-related activities, we should always be thinking about how we can extend the learning beyond that one-time experience.

This might involve:

• Providing follow-up resources or activities that students can explore on their own time
• Collaborating with teachers to integrate career-related content into the curriculum
• Using posters, booklets, and other ‘sticky’ items around your school that can be engaged with when students are ready
• Connecting students with relevant extracurricular clubs, organisations, or volunteer opportunities
• Hosting a series of related events or workshops that build on each other over time

By taking this more comprehensive approach, we can help students engage with career ideas in a deeper, more meaningful way.

We’re not just providing information; we’re facilitating a process of self-discovery and exploration that leads to more confident, informed decision-making.

When students have the opportunity to explore career paths in depth, they’re more likely to find a path that truly aligns with their interests, values, and goals. They’re more likely to feel excited and motivated about their future, and more prepared to take on the challenges of college and career.

So, as you’re planning your career interventions for the coming year, I encourage you to keep the Rule of Seven in mind. Think about how you can provide multiple, varied exposures to different career paths, and how you can extend the learning beyond one-time events.

By doing so, you’ll be setting your students up for success not just in their career decision-making, but in all aspects of their lives.

You can read previous editions of Pondering Careers here.

Welcome to a special edition of Pondering Careers – this week we’re celebrating National Careers Week Australia which is obviously my favourite week of the year! It doesn’t hurt that the new Bridgerton episodes are dropping today – all in all, it’s shaping up to be an excellent week.

For this special edition, I’m going to share some of the best posts and resources from this week, because there have been some crackers, and then we’ll talk for a little bit about Labour Market Information (LMI).

It’s Day 4 of NCW, and each day this week I’ve been sharing some of the resources that really helped me out when I started working as a Career Counsellor, so today I feel like an LMI Deep Dive is in order. LMI is one of those essential things that you really need to be across when you’re working in our space, because without a working knowledge of the labour market how are you going to provide informed guidance to students?

That being said, it’s a slippery beast to grasp – always changing and moving and sliding all over the place.

You can’t rely on just one source of LMI to rule them all – you need to use a variety of sources to get a great grasp of what’s happening, and it’s something that takes pretty much constant maintenance.

So, this week I’ll share what I do, and if you have other things you do to stay on top please add them to the conversation.

But first, all the best bits (so far) from NCW 2024

One of my favourite bits about my favourite week is that we see more people talking about careers and sharing their thoughts, so here are some of the best I’ve seen this week:

Chrissy De Blasis asked us about how we make well-informed decisions (very pertinent to today’s Pondering Careers), and she posed a great set of questions that can help us reflect and make career decisions. I love that she included one of the questions JP Michel has been posing lately around challenge mindset, since I feel like this is such a great way to reframe purpose/passion in a way that’s more accessible and less elitist.

Her post prompted a bit of self-reflection on my own career, which is something I should certainly do more of! Beth Welden joined the celebration with a post about careers in forestry –

Apparently they have a new Forest VR program which sounds amazing. When I was little, we would drive past plantation forests and I always wondered what went on inside, so I’m really looking forward to checking these resources out.

The NSW Department of Education have been sharing some great posts with little stories on inspiration and career decisions, which is such a smart way to celebrate NCW –

Amanda McCue CF, RPCDP and Jennifer (Jenn) Barfield RPCDP, PCDAA, CHATP are hosting an event this afternoon (Thursday) talking about helpful career concepts for Defence members and Veterans –

And I believe they’ve just unlocked some additional tickets because it sold out so quickly! Staying in the defence/technology space for a moment, the South Australian Space Industry Centre shared this fantastic career story earlier this week –

I love it when organisations share career stories like this, because they make it real for students; ‘Launch Operations Engineer’ sounds quite abstract, but Nishanth’s story puts it into context.

Last but not least, Michael Healy shared a couple of great webinars he’s running for myfuture which focus on social justice and equity in career development:

Where I find my LMI

As I mentioned earlier, LMI can be a complex beast, so rather than doing what I usually do and giving you a raft of links to click on I thought I’d go through how I keep on top of what’s happening in my own local area.

For the past ten years I’ve been living in Cairns (which is about halfway towards becoming a local), and I love it up here.

We’re in the tropics, so it’s wet and hot for about 5 months of the year, and dry and warm for the rest. Winter takes about a week, and we all rush out to buy jumpers that then collect mould for the other 11.5 months of the year.

Things are quite laid back, but we have two universities, a thriving defence industry, strong agricultural industry, and as the gateway to everything north and west of us we have a stack of other essential services.

We also have some exciting projects in the works; Screen Queensland have just opened their facilities here, so they can shoot movies more easily (we get quite a few of them) and there are plans in the works for Space Centre Australia to build launch facilities locally.

So, when I’m working with young people up here I need to look at a couple of different sources, which start at the macro and then move to the micro level.

Macro LMI

When I say ‘macro’ LMI I’m really talking about the national stuff. This either relates to the national (and international) labour markets, or is collected and then shared at that level.

This sort of LMI includes information on changes broadly in the world of work, the unemployment and underemployment rates (particularly for young people), and as well as staying on top of the news, I’ll also refer to websites like the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Jobs and Skills Australia‘s Labour Market Insights Portal.

I like both, although you could find a lot of the ABS data on the JSA site, but the ABS site has stayed the same for a while now so I know where to find things, so I’ll often go there first.

LMI that matters for me includes national data like this table on the unemployment rate from the Labour Force release:

This is a super broad picture, but I can see that this graph confirms some of what we’re hearing in the news, and that the unemployment rate is starting to creep up from it’s historic post-pandemic lows.

This data is repeated (with a bit more colour) on the LMIP:

We don’t have the graph, but it’s a bit more user-friendly, and I’d probably go here if I was working directly with a student who wanted to know what was happening.

On this site, I can also drill down to local data for my region:

A lot of the data at the top does exactly what we expect, and simply reflects national data, so I’m going to scroll to the industry breakdowns:

This kind of data is what I try to stay on top of, which means regular visits back to this page and also keeping an ear out for news on the most significant industries.

It’s easy when we live somewhere to focus on the ‘noisy’ industries – the ones that make us stand out from other areas, and which set the tone for the region while also providing a good chunk of the employment, but in doing this we can sometimes distort the picture for young people.

The reality is that most towns anywhere in the world will look pretty similar to this. Lots of people are employed in healthcare, education, retail, and construction, and the noisy industries (in my case defence, agriculture, and tourism) only make so much impact.

In between LMI

You can also usually find some LMI that sits kind of in-between the Macro and the Micro, which is often state or region-based, and which I find can be useful for different things.

For example, the Queensland Treasury share regional unemployment figures which are broken down in a more sensible way than the national data. Obviously the type of data you can get from sources like this will depend on what’s on offer in your local area, but in mine I like this data because it tells me different things. For example, this graph shows how employment changes in Cairns by month:

There’s nothing super earth shattering here, but I can see that we have a regular pattern throughout the year (excluding the covid blip) where employment stagnates at the end of each year. This makes sense, as organisations will often hold off on hiring new people right before Christmas (unless we’re talking Christmas casuals), and then we see a sharp rise again in the new year.

If I’m working with a job seeker who’s starting their search after September, I might use this graph to point out that it’s normal to feel like they can’t find anything at the end of the year, and to reset their expectations.

Another source of in-between LMI is the information published by local organisations, including groups like the Chamber of Commerce and the local council (or other government body, depending on where you are). For Cairns, this means we can use sites like Choose Cairns to talk about local conditions with students and job seekers.

I love these local sites because they go beyond the raw data and talk about what’s actually happening, for example:

Tourism has always been a huge part of the Cairns local economy, but contrary to popular perception, Cairns has one of the most diverse economies in Australia. Retail, education and training, public administration, transport, manufacturing and professional service industries are also well-established employers. As the capital of Far North Queensland, Cairns is the primary service centre for the wider region, which has established economic strengths in Mining, Renewable Energy, and Agriculture.

Micro LMI

The most specific level of LMI for me is that which is current and on-the-ground, such as local job ads.

Job ads are a great source of LMI, because they go beyond the theoretical to look at what’s actually happening on the ground. I can see what types of jobs are on offer, what they pay, what the conditions are like, and where I’d be working.

A quick search of SEEK for jobs in Cairns turns up 1723 jobs, which is a good number to be starting with. I can easily refine by classification, and I can also see how many jobs are advertised in each classification as I search:

Instantly I can see that there are lots of jobs on offer in admin and also in community services, but that if I’m looking for something in advertising or the arts I may be out of luck.

If you wanted to incorporate this into a lesson students can quickly build an idea of the jobs that are out there and available right now, and if I was working one-on-one with a student I might use this in a session to help them build their own ideas about the labour market, rather than just sharing my opinion, and I find this is particularly useful when I’m working with someone at either end of the spectrum.

Sometimes people are convinced they’ll never find work, even when they want to get into a field that’s in high demand, but I also see the other side where a person is convinced that they can find work that meets all their demands with no consideration of what’s actually available in the labour market, and this exercise is a good way to reset both ideas.

Other types of micro LMI include things like Chamber of Commerce events or local economic updates or industry expos, and as someone working in careers these events can help you get the ‘pulse’ of what’s really happening on the ground, because you can have conversations with a range of stakeholders.

How do you use LMI?

What works for me might not work for someone else, so finding your own sources of LMI and methods for using it is so important. I’d love to hear about your own favourite sources of LMI and tricks for using it with students and clients, so please reach out or share in the comments so we can all learn together.

You can read previous editions of Pondering Careers here.

Welcome to Edition 46 of Pondering Careers, where we talk about all things work, jobs, careers, and aspirations, and this week we’re going to be focusing on what I believe is probably the most important aspect of Career Development – the career conversation.

I’ve called this edition ‘Unusual Career Conversations’, but I actually think that the conversations we’re going to be talking about today are the ‘usual’ ones. We talk endlessly about how to structure a 15 minute career consult (btw 15 minutes is never long enough), or which counselling technique to use, but I want to talk today about the real career conversations that matter.

These often look different to how you might expect – I’m talking about the 5 minutes in the car on the way to netball training, or the reflective (and potentially snarky) comment on someone else’s job choice.

So, I’ll start by explaining why I feel that some of the most important conversations we have may not be ‘serious’ at all, and then give you a couple of the examples we’ve used in our Career Conversation Cards (like the question about the zombie apocalypse).

While I have you here…

To be honest, I’ve not been enjoying the past few weeks of writing this newsletter as much – I’m not sure if it’s the algorithm or my writing, but LinkedIn is making me feel like I’m shouting into the void.

I’m not having a whinge, I guess just voicing that sometimes I have all the same normal doubts that we all get.

On a bright note though, I received an email this week letting me know that a student had referenced my little newsletter in an assignment for their degree… and so now I have no choice but to continue writing Pondering Careers forever!

I guess what I’m asking is, if you read the newsletter and have an idea, thought, question, or even want to share your own experiences, please please please do so in the comments (or re-share it with your ideas) – that way I don’t feel like I’m writing all alone.

OK, self-flagellation is over, now into the newsletter…

What a ‘conversation’ actually looks like

Career Conversations, just like every other conversation, are very rarely neat and tidy. I’m not talking about a formal conversation with a start and finish time, where someone takes notes, and was likely arranged in advance.

That’s not really how we communicate most of the time; most of our conversations actually take place as ‘running’ conversations over multiple interactions.

Think about your closest relationships – those with your partner, children, parents, or friends – and how you communicate with these people. We have a set of ongoing conversations that we work through a bit at a time, depending on what’s happening, and it’s rare that you’ll ever have a totally ‘isolated’ conversation. In this context, an isolated conversation doesn’t draw on anything that came up before in conversation, nor is it usually referenced in future conversations.

Most of us have ongoing conversations about our next holiday, repairs we might need to make, plans to socialise with others in our network, or a disagreement we haven’t fully worked through. These conversations will ebb and flow, sometimes with an exchange of just a few words, while at others you may canvas the topic for hours.

For example, I have a few ongoing conversations right now with my 16 year old:

• One is about our trip to Japan early next year (I’m aiming to take each kid for a trip, just the two of us, in their last summer holiday before they graduate);
• Another conversation is about his career plans, but that’s pretty dormant right now because he’s not making any big decisions and the open days haven’t started yet; and
• Another one about walking, because we both enjoy hiking and it’s an activity we often share.

Sometimes we talk about these things for hours, but most of the time the conversations are unplanned and incidental, and could take place in five minutes over dinner, or even via social media, where I’ll send Ethan a reel of a shrine I want to visit in Japan and he’ll send me one from Tokyo Disneyland.

The ‘good stuff’ often happens quickly

Career Conversations are no different to other conversations, and the ‘good stuff’ often happens in this messy, dynamic space, which is one of the reasons why I value opportunistic career conversations almost as highly as formal ones.

Yesterday I had a great conversation with Leonie Stanfield RPCDP about just this – we were talking about career expos, where conversations are often quick and interrupted, but still incredibly impactful. It’s rare that you’ll find a full, in-depth conversation taking place within the noisy and merch-filled environment of a career expo, but the fleeting conversations that do take place often lead into something more substantial.

I also had a conversation yesterday along the same lines with Bonnie Alexander from the Greater Victoria School District in BC, who shared some of her insights into running the Guess My Job program.

This is a primary school career-panel style event which does pretty much what it says on the box – kids get to ask a series of questions, then guess the guest speaker’s jobs, and much hilarity ensues when the actual jobs are revealed.

When the guest speakers are chosen well, they can challenge stereotypes and broaden horizons, because students get to see people doing awe-inspiring things in their local community. But, coming back to the topic at hand, Bonnie finds that sometimes the best part of the event is actually the time the children get to spend talking to the speakers afterwards during the ‘table tour’.

These conversations may be fleeting, but they leave an impression, and they then lead into other conversations with other people (like “guess who I got to meet today…”).

There are two things to take from this.

We need time to percolate our ideas and opinions

We can’t just make decisions on the spot. The reality is that we rarely make concrete decisions that are unable to be reversed, and most of our ‘decisions’, rather than being fixed, are actually moving between states from solid to fluid to not even visible at all right now, and that’s OK.

Conversations naturally take place over time because we need time to work things through, especially when they are important. I find the same thing occurs in career counselling sessions – a student can only really work through so much in the one session before we need to call it a day and make a time to meet up again. Often, and especially if I’ve challenged their thinking, they’ll need a week or two to think things over and have other conversations with the people in their lives before we can move on to the next part of the decision – they need time to percolate.

Not every conversation we have is ‘serious’, but they are all part of the conversation

Elements of our conversations bleed into each other – it’s impossible to stop it from happening.

I’ve had career conversations with adult clients that covered the death of a spouse, global conflict, moving overseas, and in the same session we shared our preference for tea over coffee, and laughed about how Benedict Cumberbatch says ‘penguin’. The non-serious elements of the conversation were not somehow less important, even though we literally covered the potential for one of her possible career pathways to lead to her being killed in conflict.

In fact, the non-serious stuff probably helped us get through the serious stuff.

Bonnie shared another example from a Guess My Job event (the one I mentioned earlier) where, after the panel session, students got to visit the Detective at her table. As part of how she explained her job to the children, she taught the kids how to handcuff each other. No one would suggest that this type of conversation is ‘serious’, but I would put money on one of those kids becoming a police officer one day – and that can only happen when the non-serious merges with the serious.

This means we sometimes need to talk about things that are hypothetical (even fantastical) because these irrational conversations inform all the others.

I’ve had a few relationships in my life where every single conversation had to be serious – sometimes with bosses or colleagues, sometimes with friends, and at no point did that help us build our relationships.

In other words, sometimes we need to share non-serious conversations.

It’s easier to think when we remove the pressure

Last week I shared some of the Career Conversation cards we’ve put together (I’ll go into them more in a minute), and as part of the conversation that took place around those cards on LinkedIn, Michelle Cheshire pointed out that having ‘mythical’ conversations is much easier for young children.

In the same vein, I had a conversation with the incredible Jacqui Hutchinson last night (yesterday was a very long day), and she shared how in her primary school workshops she asks the children to imagine they have a fairy godmother who makes it possible for them to learn any skill, or follow any interest that they want.

This is such a clever approach – she doesn’t ask them what they’re actually interested in, instead, she first removes the idea from the day-to-day, and lifts it into the hypothetical, away from assumptions and limitations.

To start with, the children find this tricky, especially if they’ve never had this kind of imagination-luxury before, but once they get the hang of it they start to move beyond into the world of the fantastical.

Not only does this open up possibilities, but it also removes the pressure – the cognitive load is reduced, because they’re not trying to balance multiple competing priorities. They don’t need to ‘factor in’ anything, other than the things they’re interested in, and this is incredibly liberating.

We’ve been supporting some of the work the Beacon Foundation has been doing with their Beacon Career Program (which is fabulous, by the way) and, as part of this program, Jake Snepvangers and Nick Humphreys have designed a session where students use the Clusters and our Pathways cards to deliberately remove the pressure.

Students can’t rely on their assumptions about the jobs they want to do, because we literally remove their ability to connect their choices directly to one specific job, so, in the session, they are asked to think only about what they’re interested in. The result is that the students end up with career ideas they love, but which were unexpected.

All of this brings me to some ‘alternative’ Career conversations

I should start out by saying that yes, we know these Conversation Starters are cheesy. We 100% expect that teenagers will groan when they see these posters up at school – to be honest, I’d be disappointed if they thought we were serious.

At no point in my life have I ever been what you would call ‘cool’, and I’m not going to start at this point, so I might as well just lean into the cringe (which, unlike cool, is a word my teens would actually use).

We designed these cards and posters to start lots of messy, unscheduled, quick career conversations, with no right or wrong answers. There’s just one question which gets them thinking, and then talking, and then thinking. They’re not designed to be serious, or to get you to an ‘answer’, but they are designed to fit into the flow of the conversation

Rather than going on about them endlessly, I thought I’d just show you them and ask what you think

First up – zombies

What career would you pick in a zombie apocalypse?

Sounds like it should be easy to answer, right? But it’s not.

One of the things I notice first when I ask teenagers this one is that they start trying to define what a ‘career’ is, and what it isn’t. Technically, in a zombie apocalypse no one is getting paid, so ‘jobs’ as we know them don’t really exist any more.

In the same way, all the ‘normal’ measures of success go out the window as we focus on survival – what will keep us safe, and how will we find food?

Which means that, in order to answer the question, they need to think really deeply about how they define a ‘career’.

Once they get past that bit, they start to think about how the things they enjoy and the skills they have might relate to survival skills, so, for example, someone who’s into beauty and makeup might start thinking they could use their skills to make humans look like zombies so they can blend in.

Kids who enjoy physical activity often say they want to go out searching for food, and some who are considering careers in healthcare start coming up with ideas for how they could cure zombies.

The real beauty of this conversation is its ability to remain just one or two steps away from reality, while also upending our assumptions about what matters.

Next – pirates

My 12 year old, Lincoln, is super quick and he didn’t miss a beat when I asked him this one: “I’d give everyone their own wellbeing parrot.” Love it. Problem handled, no negativity, and everyone gets a parrot.

This question is designed so that students are thinking about typical work-type behaviour (managing teams and resolving conflict) in a highly unusual situation (pirate mutiny).

I’m sure a fair number of people would say that they’ve worked in teams that didn’t feel that far removed from a mutiny situation (the Screen Actors Guild Strike could be just one example), so it’s something that could potentially happen, but the methods you have to manage the situation may look somewhat different.

This is also a question which leads into two types of conversations – first, the practicalities of handling conflict at work or at sea, but you can also find yourself talking about whether or not you’d ever want to work in this kind of situation. Would you want to work in management, or does the idea repel you? How would you handle conflict in the workplace? And how do you even decide which side you would be on?

There’s a lot to consider…

Shakespeare’s socials

This one is a little more tricky, and, like the other questions, there are a couple of key points we’re trying to get at here.

First up, there’s the question of why a poet who’s been dead for hundreds of years would even want social media. If he was alive now, would he have a profile, or would it be beneath him? He was pretty good at promoting his work, so there’s a good chance he’d have been on at least one platform…so which one?

But the other key point we’re trying to get at here is to get teenagers thinking about their social media, and how or if it relates to their career.

I’m not sure how many 14 year olds are thinking about the long term career impact of their social media profiles (Tyson Day or Jake Richings might be good people to talk to about this), but there’s a chance that their social profiles, if they have them, will come into the equation at some point.

This question could get them thinking about their own choices, and why they’ve made them.

We’re just trying to start the conversation

And I think there’s a lot more we could do here. I love some of the other ideas that people come up with – Katherine Jennick and Liane Hambly‘s creative fuddles come to mind, as do Tyson Day‘s dinner conversations sheets.

If you have creative ways that you start career conversations, then I’d love to hear about them, so please continue the conversation (see what I did there) and share in the comments.

You can read previous editions of Pondering Careers here.

We’re back with another edition of Pondering Careers, and we’re heading (some optimistic people may say barrelling) towards 2,000 subscribers, so whether you’re new here or have been following along from the first newsletter – welcome! This week, I’m going to unpack some of the insights we’ve gathered over the past week from the Subject Selection Calculator, because I think they’re well worthy of a discussion.

Wondering what the Subject Selection Calculator is? It helps young people connect the Pathways they’re considering with the subjects that could be useful for that pathway. I’ll explain more in a minute, and you can find out more here.

As part of the process, the Calculator asks students four open questions about the things they’re looking for in a career, and while these answers help us work out which Pathways to suggest to students, in aggregate they also provide us with information about how young people are thinking, which is what we’re going to look at today.

What are they looking for?

We’ve spent a long time thinking about the type of resources that will actually help young people make decisions about their senior subjects, because we want to help them clarify their thinking without giving them the answers.

It’s not an easy thing to do – if anything, it would probably be easier for us to just give them a list and tell them what to do – but in our experience students and their families often put much more stock in PDF reports and psychometric testing than they possibly should, and I think it’s more important that they have the chance to have conversations.

We first built the Subject Selection Calculator back in 2020 (I think, it was a while ago…) and since then we’ve had tens of thousands of students use it as one part of their decision making process. In the past we didn’t collect any data at all from the Calculator, but we’ve tweaked things as part of the recent refresh so we can collect anonymous data (without attaching it to individual student accounts), and so far we’ve had over 400 students use the Calculator in the past 7 days (not a bad start).

We ask four questions:

1. What kinds of work environments most appeal to you?
2. What working conditions are you looking for?
3. How would you describe your academic performance?
4. Select one or two areas of interest:

Students can choose as many options from each question as they like, but we tell them that if they select less options we can be more specific (see below).

I’ll go through the data for each question in turn, followed by diving a little deeper into a couple of areas.

What kinds of work environments most appeal to you?

We ask this because it’s something that’s relatively easy for young people to identify, but we can use it to match to specific Pathways that feature those work environments.

For example, if a student said they were interested in working in an office, they would see results that included Pathways like Business, Counselling, Cyber Security, and Finance. Not all jobs in these Pathways will be office-based, but there’s a pretty good chance you could find something in an office if that’s what you wanted.

Here’s what the results show us:

No huge surprises here – people want to work in educational settings, medical facilities, offices, outdoors, and in creative studios.

Considering how many people tell me they want to be engineers, I was surprised to see so few want to work in Industrial Settings – perhaps they have ideas about engineers working in offices?

There’s a chance that my wording needs to be reconsidered (perhaps ‘remote work’ could mean working from home OR working in remote communities?) but I think it’s interesting that these preferences don’t always align with the jobs I hear students talking about.

What working conditions are you looking for?

This question is designed to get students thinking about how their choices at this stage might influence the working conditions they access down the track. We know that some fields are notorious for not offering flexibility at work, and many Pathways have few part-time or casual options, so it’s worth considering.

That being said, we found that the vast majority of students are looking for both full-time and flexible work. 75% of students said they wanted something full-time, and almost half also want their work to be flexible.

While I was not surprised about the percentages for part-time and casual work, I was surprised to see so few students thinking about self-employment. Part of this could be that they’re thinking they’d like a job to kickstart their career, and so they’re not thinking about going straight into self-employment, but I don’t think it’s the whole answer.

They are able to select as many as they like, so in choosing to not select self-employment they’re saying they’re not interested in selecting subjects that align with this.

Does this mean that only 9% of students in Year 10 are actually thinking about self-employment? I’m not sure – if you have any data on this, I’d love to see it.

How would you describe your academic performance?

I love this question – we have to ask it, because it has a bearing on some (but certainly not all) Pathways, and if we know how they’re going then we can give them more accurate answers, but it’s also fun to see how people rate themselves when they know nobody’s watching.

Rather than ask them what ATAR they expect to achieve, we ask them to rate their performance between developing, satisfactory, strong, and outstanding.

Obviously, this is going to be completely subjective. We were talking about it in the office and some of the team (who shall remain nameless) had no hesitation in saying they would have picked ‘Outstanding’ as a 15 year old, but others would have chosen ‘Strong’ so as not to overrate themselves. Here’s what the students chose:

Now, I would say that this is potentially not overly reflective of their actual marks (if it is, we have some serious numbers of high performers), but I love that the majority of students think they’re doing pretty well.

Select one or two areas of interest

I feel like this is the question that’s the most open – they can choose as many options as they like from the eight interest areas, but we recommend they only pick one.

Proving my case that teenagers will follow instructions but also push things as far as they can, the average number of interests selected was 2.06, but this is good because it means they really have to think about the things that interest them most, so their Pathways are aligned with their interests.

We had a pretty even spread over the interests, and I’d say they also reflect the conversations we have with young people:

Wellbeing is the top contender with 41%, followed closely by Society (37%) and Creativity (36%), down to Mechanical Systems with just 10%.

I wasn’t surprised by the Wellbeing result – the current crop of young people are so aware of both physical and mental wellbeing, that they make me cringe when I think about how much time I spent as a teen on the couch eating Nutella with a spoon. I feel like the Wellbeing result is also echoed in the proportion of students already thinking about flexible work and working remotely.

I was more surprised at the number of students interested in Society – especially compared to other areas like Technology, or the Environment.

Other connections we can make

The data from the Subject Selection Calculator is a great place to start, but I noticed a couple of themes which I also wanted to unpack for a minute.

Creativity is popular

I totally get this one – there’s something freeing about being creative – but one thing I noticed is that an interest in Creativity doesn’t always equal a desire to work in a creative space.

14 people said they wanted to work in a Creative Space but weren’t interested in Creativity (not sure why they would want to work there if not creative…) and 55 students who identified as Creative didn’t want to work in a Creative Space.

This trend gets worse as the student’s results improve – Creatively minded students who stated their academic progress as ‘Outstanding’ were even less likely to align themselves with working in a Creative Studio.

I’d be making a whole lot of speculation if I dig much deeper into this and the reasons why, but I do wonder if it has something to do with high achievers wanting to find ‘serious’ work.

I’ve had many conversations with talented young people who were creative (music, dance, art, etc.) but who fully expected to put that to one side and keep it as a hobby so they could get a ‘real’ job, ridiculous as that may be, and while I haven’t interviewed these students and have no data on their rationing I would guess this may be one reason.

The difference between Developing and Outstanding

I also noticed a trend that students who rated themselves a ‘Developing’ selected workplaces that are more aligned with trades (Outdoors, Worksite), and the opposite happened for ‘Outstanding’ students who chose Office, Medical Facility, or Educational Institution.

There’s a pretty good chance that this is a case of students self-selecting workplaces on how they feel they are performing, which goes back to the question of how vocational identity develops.

I don’t think we can just attribute this to a case of people choosing the workplace where they are most likely to end up, as the Developing students had average rates of interest in working in retail or hospitality, despite the increased number of entry level jobs in these fields – 10% of all students selected hospitality, compared to 11% of Developing students, for example.

In contrast, almost half of all Developing students said they want to work Outdoors (44%), far outweighing the 29% average for all students.

The reality is that there are jobs for all types of people in all types of workplaces, and this could indicate the outcome of the limitations we build for ourselves about what could be possible based on our performance.

Where to next?

This iteration of the Subject Selection Calculator is just starting it’s life, and I’m excited to revisit the data in the future when there’s a bit more to go on, but for now, I’m just pleased it’s up and working!

If you’re interested in the Calculator and our other Subject Selection resources you can read more here, or just let me know and I’ll walk you through it. You can also catch up on a recent webinar here which goes into a bit more detail about the what/where/why.

If you’ve got something that works for you when it comes to making subject selection easier please please please share it, because, after having gone through it myself as a parent, I appreciate anything that can help make those difficult conversations a little bit easier!

You can read previous editions of Pondering Careers here.

Pondering Careers is back again, and this week I’ve been writing a rationale document for primary career education, so I’m going to share all the juicy quotes I’ve collected.

I’ve arranged them in a way which essentially makes the case for starting earlier with career related learning for primary/elementary school (or, potentially for even earlier), and shared some of my own thoughts on each quote and section.

My hope is that if you (like me) are wondering about primary career education you’ll be able to use these quotes to justify your position and potentially incorporate them into your own planning documents and rationale.

Curious about the little monster in the pic?

I’ve been working on a primary school program for what feels like years (seriously, this stuff takes forever), and we’re moving closer to a launch date for a pilot program. AweHunters is designed for teachers (not so much for careers advisors), and the program is designed to integrate careers into the curriculum without asking teachers to learn how to do anything new or increasing their workload.

We’re still pre-pilot, but I’m keen to hear from any schools who would like to try out the program once it’s good to go. If you want to learn more, you can register for the webinar on 23 May and come along for a chat.

What actually is ‘primary career education’?

“Activities in primary schools look different to the career education that may be familiar in secondary schools. The emphasis in primary is on diversity, exploration, and making learning fun. Activities excite children about the subjects they are doing and show them the relevance to their futures.”

Percy & Amegah, 2021

Education and Employers explain that it’s not just a dumbed-down version of what we deliver in secondary schools – children in primary school are at a different developmental stage, and they need a different set of learning experiences to achieve different outcomes.

It’s about broadening horizons and challenging stereotypes

From The Careers & Enterprise Company, written by the incredible Janet Colledge and John Ambrose:

“Career-related learning in primary schools is about broadening pupils’ horizons, challenging stereotypes and helping them develop the skills and sense of self that will enable them to reach their full potential.”

Colledge & Ambrose, 2021

This is really what’s at the core of the work we’re doing with AweHunters. And yes, some of this still takes place in secondary school, but we also know that occupational identity begins to crystallise at the end of primary/start of secondary (Skorikov and Vondracek, 2011), and at that point both broadening horizons and challenging stereotypes becomes significantly more difficult.

“Career exploration in primary school can help to limit biases students may absorb from parents, friends and society, such as gender stereotypes.”

Parliament of Victoria, Economic, Education, Jobs and Skills Committee, 2018

When we deliberately deliver career related learning earlier, we can avoid the development of some of the most insidious biases before they become incredibly difficult (if not impossible) to unpick.

“The term ‘career-related learning’ includes early childhood activities in primary schools designed to give children from an early age a wide range of experiences of, and exposure to, education, transitions and the world of work.”

Kashefpakdel et al., 2018

Primary school career education is already happening in a wide range of ways – the work conducted recently by CERIC and the team (Lorraine Godden, PhD, Nicki Moore, Stefan Merchant, and Heather Nesbitt, PhD) on the Exploring Possibilities Toolkit (which is an excellent resource) looked at how teachers are talking about careers in their classroom. They found that every classroom is different, but that 100% of the Grade 4 to 6 teachers they surveyed talked about careers, jobs, and the world of work with children.

It’s not about doing just one activity (like bringing speakers into schools), but rather blending a series of experiences to open their eyes to what’s possible. I liked how the OECD described this concept:

“A bit like throwing mud at a wall, the more the students experienced, the more likely it was that something useful stuck with them.”

OECD, 2021

In other words, try lots of things lots of the time, and give students lots of opportunities to find something that sticks.

This approach supports career learning through an ongoing dialogue between the student and the world of work – they have multiple opportunities to experience, learn, and talk about what could be possible, which places them at the centre of their career narrative.

This is an approach used to great success by Ed Hidalgo and the Cajon Valley team, and exemplified in this quote from an article recently shared by Ed;

“A learning environment aiming at the development of career competencies and a career identity should therefore be practice-based, and focus on dialogues with the students in which their thoughts and feelings have a central place.”

Draaisma et al., 2017

So, if we know what primary school learning is, let’s look at what it is not…

What we don’t do in the early years

“The purpose of primary career education is not to dissuade young people from fantastical aspirations or from using their imagination to dream big; rather it is about demonstrating new and exciting possibilities and preventing children from closing off possibilities.”

Hooley, 2021

We’re not asking them to grow up too quickly, to make decisions about their lives, or to stop being children – in fact, most of us working in this space hope that kids will dream big and think wildly about what might be possible.

We can talk about the world of work without needing to bring children ‘back to reality’ – the world (and high school) will do that for us, unfortunately. We’re also not asking them to define their identity or make any decisions, which would be entirely inappropriate at this age.

“In the elementary school context, engaging in career conversations is not about getting children to make decisions about what job they will have in the future. Rather, it is a time when we ask our young learners to begin the process of investigating themselves, find out more about their interests and aptitudes, and consider what type of life they feel they might want to lead.”

Godden et al., 2024

Which is one of the reasons why we try not to use the word ‘career’ too often:

“…In the primary phase there is a need to be cautious about the use of ‘career’ or ‘careers’. This is a period largely of exploration and children’s aspirations should, rightly, be tentative and imaginative. Yet there are a range of attributes, skills and behaviours that can be instilled in this stage of child’s life that will leave them in the best possible position as they begin their transitions to secondary education and to future life. The focus should be on broadening horizons and giving children a wide range of experience of the world – which includes the world of work.”

Kashefpakdel et al., 2019

I certainly agree with this statement, and the more I move into this space I feel like explicitly teaching about ‘career’ is not actually necessary. We can use storytelling and skill development to support positive exploration and help children develop accurate ideas about pathways, without needing to teach them explicitly what ‘career’ means.

And it’s this type of embedded, incidental, real-world learning that is already happening (albeit in a haphazard manner) in classrooms across the world.

Career-related learning right now

There’s no ‘switch’ that gets turned on to start the process – occupational identity development starts before children are even born. How many parents daydream about their unborn baby’s illustrious career?

Baby clothes and paraphernalia are covered with references to the work we hope our children will do as adults, and, while cute, all these premonitions mean in reality is that we take our first steps to build our occupational identity well before we take our actual first steps.

In other words, you can’t start too early.

“Career-related learning begins at a very early age. Children absorb ideas about careers from many sources including the work that they see in the home, the stories they read and the games that they play. Primary schools have a key role in ensuring that the more formal aspects of this learning provide opportunities for personal growth, enjoyment and challenge.”

Colledge & Ambrose, 2021

Children are curious – I know I certainly had days where I could go without all the ‘why’ questions when my three were little (and, on occasion, still feel that way now).

They’re interested in the world around them, but also in the adult world they hopefully will one day enter.

“Elementary school-aged children become increasingly interested in what adults do and how people get the goods and services they use. In the early elementary school years, developing an awareness and appreciation of the many kinds of work and workers is the primary emphasis; career exploration at this level is designed to create the awareness that work-tasks are applications of academic skills.”

Magnuson & Starr, 2000

We know children are already open to ideas about jobs and work, and that teachers are already incorporating these concepts into their lessons, so the problem is not so much that it isn’t happening, but rather that we’re not always aware it is happening.

“How early is too early? The response indicated by the child development and career development theories is “It’s never too early.” The early years are crucial in the formation of ideas and perceptions about self and the world.”

Magnuson & Starr, 2000

Teachers who are unaware of the impact of their influence on their student’s career development can inadvertently contribute to the development of bias and stereotypes, even though they would never intend to do so.

We can’t ignore childhood career development

This leads me to possibly my favourite quote:

“Ignoring the process of career development occurring in childhood is similar to a gardener disregarding the quality of the soil in which a garden will be planted.”

Niles & Harris-Bowlsbey, 2017

The entire concept summed up in 26 words.

The reality is that, despite what some people would like to think, children need positive and proactive career-related education if we expect them to have half a chance of building a career they enjoy.

“Childhood experiences are foundational in the construction of identity; observations of attitudes towards work within families, cultural stereotypes, and influence of the media may influence children’s meaning of work and in turn their occupational identities.”

Kashefpakdel et al., 2019

What happens in primary school is foundational, and if we want to have impact later on (in senior secondary school, for example) we need to prepare the soil, so to speak.

“Elementary school is a time when young people are exploring their environment and the roles of the people around them. We would be doing young people a disservice if we did not equip them with the tools and, in this case, the vocabulary to enter conversations, and to equip them to understand and interpret the world around them.”

Godden et al., 2024

Employers, universities, and secondary schools all need to think about how they support primary schools – sure, these children are 10 or 15 years away from even starting their career, but waiting until they are about to walk out the door to start talking to them essentially guarantees failure, because they made up their minds years earlier.

“Holding biased assumptions and having narrow aspirations can, and does, go on to influence the academic effort children exert in certain lessons, the subjects they choose to study, and the jobs they end up pursuing. Research has shown that early interventions can bring a lasting impact on children’s development and perceptions of different occupations and of the subjects thus enabling access to them.”

Kashefpakdel et al., 2019

In short, we need to start earlier.

You can read previous editions of Pondering Careers here.

References

Colledge, J., & Ambrose, J. (2021). Career development framework: Handbook for primary schools. https://www.thecdi.net/write/Framework/CDI_124-Framework-Handbook_for_schools-v5.pdf

Draaisma, A., Meijers, F., & Kuijpers, M. (2017). Towards a strong career learning environment: Results from a Dutch longitudinal study. British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 45(2), 165–177. https://doi.org/10.1080/03069885.2016.1217979

Godden, L., Moore, N., Nesbitt, H., & Merchant, S. (2024). Exploring possibilities: Journeying through career-related learning in grades 4-6. CERIC.

Hooley, T. (2021). Career education in primary school (Myfuture Insights Series). Education Services Australia.

Kashefpakdel, E., Rehill, J., & Hughes, D. (2018). What works? Career-related learning in primary schools (p. 45). The Careers and Enterprise Company.

Kashefpakdel, E., Rehill, J., & Hughes, D. (2019). Career-related learning in primary: The role of primary teachers and schools in preparing children for the future. Education and Employers. https://www.voced.edu.au/content/ngv:81677

Magnuson, C., & Starr, M. (2000). How early is too early to begin life career planning? The importance of the elementary school years. Journal of Career Development, 27(2), 89–101.

Niles, S. G., & Harris-Bowlsbey, J. E. (2017). Career development interventions. (5th ed.). Pearson.

OECD. (2021). Career conversations: Why it is important for students to talk about their futures in work with teachers, family and friends (42; OECD Education Policy Perspectives). OECD. https://doi.org/10.1787/15b83760-en

Parliament of Victoria, Economic, Education, Jobs and Skills Committee. (2018). Inquiry into career advice activities in Victorian Schools. https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/images/stories/committees/eejsc/Career_Advice_Activities/EEJSC_58-04_Text_WEB.pdf

Percy, C., & Amegah, A. (2021). Starting early: Building the foundations for success. https://www.educationandemployers.org/starting-early-executive-summary/

Skorikov, V. B., & Vondracek, F. W. (2011). Occupational identity. In S. J. Schwartz, K. Luyckx, & V. L. Vignoles (Eds.), Handbook of Identity Theory and Research (pp. 693–714). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7988-9_29

Welcome to another edition of Pondering Careers, and this week we’re going to be looking at what some other great minds are pondering when it comes to core/transferable/human skills.

Where I am we’re in the middle of the school holidays, which I love because it means less chaotic lunchbox packing in the morning, and more time hanging out with the teens, but it also means I don’t have the same amount of energy for epic articles. Hence, this week we have a wrap-up of some great reports from organisations across the globe, which you can dive into if you’re looking for a bit more depth.

I will undoubtedly have missed some crackers, so please share them for our community reading pleasure.

Report 1 – Transformative Competencies for 2030

Author: OECD Education and Skills

Why you should read it: I like this report because they’ve really taken a step back to rethink skill development, and their framework focuses on practicality. Rather than a list of discrete skills, they’ve grouped skill development into three actions which are easier to understand.

I actually find them easier to use myself; when I’m creating lessons or materials it’s easier for me to think about if I’m asking students to ‘Create New Value’ (which is one of the Transformative Competencies) than to work out if I’ve incorporated Innovation, Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Collaboration.

I can also imagine teachers would find them easier to use and define within a classroom, and anything that makes skills easier to understand and integrate should increase implementation.

Read the full report here.

Report 2 – Towards a National Jobs and Skills Roadmap

Author: Jobs and Skills Australia

Why you should read it: This report is designed for Government, so it gives us a good idea of what’s going through their minds, which is always helpful when you’re working within a system like ours.

The report acknowledges that we have a skills crisis, and that it’s getting worse, not better, and that there are real benefits to thinking about which skills are valued, and how they are developed:

“A focus on enhancing Australians’ skills also aims to support increased productivity, real wage growth, increased labour force participation and sustainable economic growth.”

The report identifies three megatrends which are impacting skills development, and also looks at some of the skills shortages we face.

Core skills are not the only focus of the report, as they’re also looking at technical skills, so you end up with a more holistic but less focused report than some of the others in my collection.

This document is also the document that’s going to guide the development of the National Skills Taxonomy, which is one of the priorities identified in this work, so it could be a good read if you’d like to keep up with the development of that framework as well.

Read the full report here.

Report 3 – Global Framework on Transferable Skills

Author: UNICEF

Why you should read it: They take a global approach, grounded in equity, and explore transferable skills holistically, not just in an employment context. They’ve created what they call a ‘working definition’ of transferable skills, and while they don’t aim to provide curriculum guidance, they do offer a reference document which can then be used to create more practical resources in a local context.

All of which makes it a really useful starting place, especially for anyone who’s keen to take a life-long approach, rather than just focusing on benefits for the workforce.

They’ve also worked with young people from around the world to create Plan 12, which is designed to help them build skills as they re-imagine what is possible.

/ead the full report here.

Report 4 – Future of Jobs Report

Author: World Economic Forum

Why you should read it: If you’re only keen for skills skip to section four, but this is a great ‘crystal-ball’ type read for anyone who wants to think about what the future of work might look like.

It’s important to keep in mind that the report is essentially just a prediction, and, as such, is liable to change, but it’s not a bad place to start if we want to try to future-proof our work (if that’s even possible).

The data is generally drawn from employer surveys, which gives it a distinct ’employment’ focus, and the skills listed are often those needed by people who are essentially corporate employees, not necessarily by contractors, gig workers, or entrepreneurs. That being said, it’s still worth a read.

Read the full report here.

Report 5 – Learning Beyond Limits

Author: Learning Creates Australia

Why you should read it: This report is a little different to the others, as there are multiple practical examples of how core skills are being used in schools to reimagine education.

The context is that LCA feel that students need core skills to thrive at work and in their lives, and that developing ways to measure and assess core skill development will lead to greater focus on this development in the classroom.

They describe it thus:

“We need a system that can build and recognise the breadth of skills and capabilities that young people possess so they can successfully navigate a complex world.”

This report uses the skills list from the WEF Future of Jobs Report, so I’d suggest reading both if you want to get the whole picture, but it’s a great read and I appreciate the practical aspect of the real-world examples. There’s also a list of barriers to skill development which are worth exploring if you are thinking about how you can also embed core skills in your curriculum.

Read the full report here.

That’s it!

Thanks for joining me again this week, and I’d love to hear your thoughts and learn about any must-read reports I’ve missed, so please share them.

I’m starting to feel a bit ‘skilled-out’, so I’m thinking we might have a change of topic for next week, and I hope to see you all again then.

You can read previous editions of Pondering Careers here.

If you’re new here – welcome! If you’ve been with us here in the Pondering Careers community for a while, then welcome back – this week we have another topic that’s pretty close to my heart – Early Entry programs.

Waaaaay back in 2019 we published the first version of our Early Entry Guide, and back then, it was a pretty new concept. In the years since, and probably in part due to good old Covid, Early Entry has exploded in Australia and become somewhat contentious.

If you’re not from Australia, and/or you don’t know about our Early Entry system (and I use the word ‘system’ loosely) here’s a quick overview:

In addition to, and separate from, the traditional ATAR application process (which you can read about here – thanks University of Sydney) some universities invite school leavers to apply via an alternative Early Entry model, which assesses applications and makes offers before the traditional process is complete.

Students apply using their senior grades, a letter of recommendation from their Principal, their community involvement, extra-curricular activities, or with personal statements (which are sometimes requested in video-format).

Back in 2019 when we published the first version of the Early Entry Guide there were just 17 universities who made some sort of early offer, and they tended to focus on high achievers. These included programs such as La Trobe University‘s Aspire Program, which turned ten this month:

In 2024, there are 33 universities who will offer an Early Entry program, which means that over three quarters of universities are participating now.

In other words – it’s become a big deal, and last year tens of thousands of early offers were made to students, so it’s worth taking a moment to talk about the implications, both positive and negative, of such a system.

Hence, this week I’ll be sharing a couple of my own thoughts, as well as some insights from others in the field. I’m also working with a couple of other incredible Career Advisors to collect some more data around Early Entry, including Claire Pech, so I’ll talk about that as well, because I think it would be great to build a better picture of what’s actually happening.

First up – please ask your Graduates to complete the survey

Before I go any further – if you are from Australia can you please share this link with your past Year 12 students – studyworkgrow.com/education/early-entry-survey/

The survey takes a couple of minutes to complete, and we want to hear from students who received an Early Entry offer.

Thanks!

The current state of Early Entry

Last year felt a little bit like the wild west, as universities made offers from as early as March, and to be honest we all struggled to keep up. I think the first requests from schools for our Early Entry Guide in 2023 came through before the end of Week 1 of the school year, which is just nuts.

This year, things seem a lot more stable.

Following the release of the Universities Accord Final Report a month ago, the education ministers agreed that offers should not be released before September 2024.

So far, we’ve seen the universities comply with this requirement, and all of the universities who have already released their dates have said they won’t be releasing any offers before September.

Some universities always held their offers until later in the year, and it seems that most of these universities will keep their original offer date.

From our end, this doesn’t seem to have overly impacted on the number of students who are thinking about Early Entry, and we’re still getting the same number of phone calls and enquiries from worried students (and their parents), but I’m hopeful that this change will at least give people a bit of certainty.

We also see Early Offers making up a significant proportion of the total offer pool:

Each university manages their own early offers, and many students receive more than one offer, which makes it difficult to calculate the real percentage of students who use an early offer to get into university, but there is evidence that a good proportion of students receive an early offer.

It will be interesting to see if the later release date, and the negative press Early Entry has recently received, has any impact on the number of offers which are made in 2024.

Speaking of the negative perceptions of Early Entry, not everyone is pleased with the idea.

In the Universities Accord, they agree that the process is contentious, and that there is little organisation or transparency, and next-to-no available data on early offers.

They note that early offers can reduce stress levels, which is an important consideration in senior schooling, but they also raise concerns that students may ‘disengage’ in their final weeks if they have an early offer.

Dr Sally Patfield from the University of Newcastle recently authored a report into their own experiences with early entry, and you can read it here.

In this study, the team interviewed recipients of Early Entry offers from underrepresented background who had successfully gone on to study at the University of Newcastle.

They found that Early Entry offered significant mental health benefits for students, and that contrary to expectations, rather than ‘slacking off’, students actually felt that they didn’t just work as hard as they would have without the offer, but potentially performed better.

This makes sense – freed of a significant chunk of their stress, they had more brain-space to focus on their study without being overwhelmed by it. Some of the students also reported that the early offer gave them a confidence boost which lifted their self-efficacy and gave them faith in themselves.

This correlates with much of the literature on the impact of positive reinforcement on test results, and I think it’s worth considering when looking at the impacts (if any) on eventual ATARs.

Of course, the concern around slacking off does not come from either the students or the universities, rather, it comes from schools, who traditionally use the ATAR as a yardstick against which they can measure their performance.

As was comprehensively covered in Dr Patfield’s report, the ATAR is not a perfect measure, and it is not held in wide regard by most students.

I don’t want to enter into an argument about the usefulness of the ATAR, but I would say a couple of things. First, the Crunching the Number Discussion Paper from Sarah Pilcher and Kate Torii is an excellent overview of the intended and unintended (but actual) uses of the ATAR, and it was written back in 2018, well before Early Entry became a big ‘thing’. As they said back then:

“While this ranking of school leavers remains important, it is also true that in 2017, 60 per cent of undergraduate university offers were made on a basis other than ATAR. This would surprise many young people, as it seems at odds with the message reinforced by many schools, families and the media – that the ATAR is everything.”

In other words, the ATAR was becoming less relevant well before Early Entry was a factor. And it didn’t start there; this paper from George Cooney back in 2001 (23 years ago) posed the question, ‘Is the Tertiary Entrance Rank an endangered species?’ (the Tertiary Entrance Rank or ‘TER’ was the predecessor of the UAI, which eventually became the ATAR, all of which basically do the same thing).

George pondered the implications of university admissions processes on what we teach in the senior years, and how we teach it, but he went back even further, and quoted a professor from the late 1800s who complained that university admissions dictated what was taught in high school.

In other words, criticism of the ATAR isn’t new.

What is new, is the potential threat to the ATAR – Early Entry – and in this context it’s not overly surprising that there has been some push back from the establishment against the establishment’s old, easily-comparable friend.

Next question – if Early Entry programs don’t use the ATAR, what do they use instead?

They use a wide range of measures, which tend to reflect the priorities of the individual universities (which is probably the first indication that, when given the chance, universities will choose to admit students based on their own priorities).

So, universities that focus on widening participation will ask for measures which go beyond academics – community participation, volunteering and sporting activity, work experience and personal statements. Universities that are seeking a diversely talented cohort might offer Early Entry based on portfolio, audition, or interview, and it seems that many universities are happy to trust the recommendation of the school Principal.

To be honest, it seems that when given the chance the universities will set up systems that allow them to screen and recruit the type of students they would prefer, which reminds me of the system in the US.

And, while this may not suit some students who have prioritised their ATAR over everything else in their lives, this actually ends up with well-rounded students who focus on a range of skills, not just academics.

Medical programs are another example of where this shift has taken place – 10 years ago we would list medical programs and in almost every case they admitted solely on the basis of ATAR. Today, the ATAR is just a hurdle, and medical students need to be able to juggle study with work, extra-curricular activities, and community involvement if they want to be competitive.

Which makes sense, because no one wants a system that produces academically excellent robots who are unable to function without a parent to manage every other aspect of their lives.

Does this make the programs less equitable?

This was a claim made by the Universities Accord:

“…there is a risk that early offers can favour students who have existing personal or socio-economic advantages such as strong school performances, principal and parent advocacy, school culture and career guidance, and community and extracurricular claims.”

Now, I admit that, on the surface, this is a risk.

We can see what could happen down the track when we look at systems like the one in the US, which has an entire industry set up to ensure the kids who can afford it get into their college of choice.

Students who cannot afford experts to help them write their admissions essays or prepare for interviews are obviously going to be at a disadvantage.

In response, I would say two things:

Things are already inequitable

Students who can afford tutors, who don’t need to work 16+ hours a week, and who can afford to participate in extra-curricular activities (because those things are expensive) are going to be at an advantage. They are already probably at schools which provide more support, and they’re surrounded by peers who also have these advantages.

Only someone with zero experience of the ATAR and senior schooling in Australia would suggest that the ATAR system is set up to level the playing field. The brightest child in Australia will be scaled down if they live in a rural community, that’s just how the system is set up.

The other thing to consider is the economic privilege of being able to wait until you receive an offer in January before working out where (or if) you’ll be going to university.

This is a huge privilege, and even more so when compared to low SES regional students, who will inevitably need to relocate to attend university. Asking regional students without a lot of funds to wait until January to know where they will be studying means they have to wait until January to arrange accommodation, and most of it is expensive and already booked out by January.

It also means they may turn down secure employment until after they receive their offer, or, alternatively, take the secure employment offer rather than risk it and wait for an offer for uni that might never come.

Early Entry can actually improve equity

By its very nature, Early Entry widens participation.

People who wouldn’t normally have applied or considered themselves a good chance at getting an offer give Early Entry a shot because of the way it is set up. They don’t need a high ATAR, and they can be valued for their other abilities and experiences, which gives them an alternative pathway to uni.

Many of the programs are actually set up to encourage applications from underrepresented groups, including First Nations people and those from regional and rural backgrounds.

Some of the programs are actually designed so students with an offer don’t even need to finish school, and these programs are those targeted at underrepresented groups.

Dr Patfield’s work also supports this; the students she interviewed talked about how without Early Entry they would not have applied for uni. They were first-in-family, or came from schools with low expectations for university study, but Early Entry gave them a chance.

Receiving an Early Offer before they finished school allowed them to start planning out where they would live, and they could transfer or seek new employment that would suit that university.

Plus, it gives them a confidence boost – the value of which cannot be understated. Universities make it easy for students to apply, and give them lots of support throughout the process, which is vastly different from the impersonal and remote ATAR process.

Want an example? Here’s Hunter the Hippocampus from the University of Newcastle to help you apply:

The value of an alternative route to university lies in its flexibility, and my hope is that the proposed regulation of the system doesn’t impinge on what’s working well.

Perhaps we just need some new KPIs?

I’ve already seen a number of schools proudly declaring the number of early offers their students received, and it’s a great marketing metric for schools to be able to share, so, potentially we just need to shift the conversation sideways a little and start measuring some new metrics.

We can let go of the days where the number of ATARs above a certain mark are all that counts, and start celebrating our early offers, apprenticeships, and even congratulate students who find work straight out of school.

That way, schools would still be able to compare their performance, and students could follow the post-school pathway of their choosing.

What do you think? Do you hate early entry, or have you had good experiences? I’d love to hear either way, so please share your own thoughts, and, as always, thanks for joining me again this week.

You can read previous editions of Pondering Careers here.

Welcome to Pondering Careers, where we share ideas and talk about lots of things related to study, work, jobs, and careers, and where, this week, we’ll be talking about core skills at school.

If you’ve been reading along with me, then you’ll know I’ve been talking a fair bit about core skills lately (check out Edition 39 for an overview of where I sit on the topic).

I want to know more about how we talk about core skills within our schools and education systems:

• Which core skills do we value at school?
• Which core skills should we be teaching at school?
• Which core skills do we actually teach at school? and,
• How do we teach and/or embed them at school?

If we know the answers to these questions it will help us ensure young people have the skills they need to live the type of life they want to live.

So, to start to find the answers I’ve compared core skills curriculum models from around the world, which I’ll cover in this newsletter.

I think this builds into a larger-scale conversation that seems to be taking place right now into what we want to get out of education – what makes something ‘worth it’?

No one is going around denying the importance of 21st Century skills, or that we need to equip young people with these skills to help them succeed in their lives, but this doesn’t seem to translate into action when we look at what ‘counts’ in evaluating educational outcomes.

In Chris Webb‘s latest newsletter, which is always a great read BTW, (read it here if you haven’t already) he started a conversation about what we ‘get out’ of education, in response to an inflammatory doco on the uni vs. apprenticeship debate.

I’ll let Chris explain his point:

“However, what interested me more about the documentary was what I felt it said about our attitudes as a society towards career decision making in general – notably, Geoff Norcott framed much of the focus of the documentary around money and the idea of University no longer being the Return-on-Investment (ROI) that it used to be, in part due to the increase in student tuition fees over the past 30 years (although not, of course, over the past decade, where they have remained locked at £9,250, along with maintenance loans, which have also failed to rise proportionately with inflation). While this in itself is absolutely a fair line of inquiry to pursue (IMO it is always important to weigh up if something is going to be ‘worth it’ before we make career-related decisions, even if what ‘worth it’ means can differ considerably from individual to individual), the idea of applying the same approach to other pathways (such as apprenticeships, and what the benefits/trade-offs of these might be) was conspicuously absent from the programme.”

Chris Webb, #TheWeekInCareers – Episode 71

This made me think back to what Tracy Ryan said in a recent myfuture webinar hosted by Michael Healy about how different groups measure success. Tracy explained that First Nations students often conceptualise success in a way which conflicts with colonial monetary ideas of earning potential and lifetime income.

In other words, we need to embrace a variety of ideas about success if we want to provide inclusive support to a diverse client population.

Core skills, unlike technical skills, are required across the job spectrum, which makes it much more difficult to evaluate their value on the economic yardstick of educational outcomes, but this doesn’t mean they don’t have value, just that we don’t have a clear an easy way of measuring it.

I also don’t have the solution to this larger conversation, but I feel that there are implications for our career development space, as the skills we need to manage our career (or ‘career management competencies’) form a subset of core skills, and, hence, core skill development can influence career management skill development.

Learning to fly

A couple of weeks ago, while researching literature on Careers in the Curriculum, I came across some work from New Zealand by Karen Vaughan and Lorraine Spiller on career management competencies in the school subject classroom.

I would recommend reading their work for yourself, but what I took away was that in ensuring core skill development takes place across the curriculum at school, we meet many of the aims of modern career education programs.

This led me to a deeper exploration of the core skill curricula that exist around the world – I wanted to know what’s already happening, and what the outcomes have been for students.

These frameworks are developmentally appropriate for children and teenagers, and intend to help them develop the skills they need to thrive in the adult world. They tend to relate to work and life, not just work or career management, and a common aim is to prepare children to be ‘good’ citizens.

What makes a ‘good’ citizen is a whole other debate, and I think Foucault might have had a fair bit to say about systems that prepare us to be self-controlling good citizens (and tax-payers), but I’m just going to put that to one side because there are some clear individual benefits alongside the societal benefits.

I found that these frameworks tended to include both core skills, as well as what we would normally refer to as career management competencies (i.e. Finland’s Working life competence and entrepreneurship competency).

I also found that these curricula tended to lump core skills together, so Critical Thinking, Innovation, and Making Decisions would become simply ‘Thinking’ in the core skills curricula – whether this is because they were aiming for simplicity or because they felt it was less important to separate out these skillsets for children, I’m not sure.

Other than Singapore, all of the curricula contained both Literacy and some form of Communication, which I also found interesting. I always think of literacy as something which has its own (and very highly regarded) subject within education systems, and whenever I see it listed again in with other core skills it makes me think of Literacy as a bully who has to make everything about themselves.

Perhaps it’s because I’m not a literacy expert, but I do wonder at the overlap here, and the necessity of restating Literacy (and occasionally Numeracy) as core skills when they have their own subject areas.

It’s important to note that I haven’t explored how any or all of these curricula are implemented, only which skills they identify. That would take me a lot longer than one article.

OK, so here they are one at a time…

There are only a few core skills curricula out there

I’d made the mistake of assuming that every curriculum would include a section in some form on core skills, but that is not the case.

In the end, I looked at five curricula, and the OECD’s Transformational Competencies:

• Australia’s General Capabilities,
• New Zealand’s Key Competencies,
• Finland’s Transversal Competencies,
• British Columbia’s Core Competencies, and
• Singapore’s 21st Century Competencies/Student Outcomes.

I then mapped these frameworks to the common set of core skills I identified when I looked at all the Core Skills Taxonomies (see Edition 39 for those), which are as follows:

1. Critical Thinking
2. Innovation
3. Making Decisions (Problem Solving)
4. Communication
5. Collaboration
6. Adaptability
7. Self Management
8. Interpersonal/Cultural Awareness
9. Literacy
10. Numeracy
11. Digital Literacy

Here’s what the full mapping looks like:

For anyone without a magnifying glass, I’ll go into it a bit at a time now. Because the OECD’s Transformative Competencies are so massive, I had to map those separately.

I should also say that I’m not the first person to map these curriculums – for example, ACARA completed a significant amount of work to map these curriculums to the Australian General Capabilities over 2017 to 2019, and their work is also fascinating reading for anyone interested in this topic.

Transversal Competencies – Finland

I’m starting here because I really liked this list.

They cover the literacy problem by creating one mega-skill, which gets it out of the way, and re-frame each skill to place it in context. For example, Self-Management becomes ‘Taking care of oneself and managing daily life’, which feels more comprehensive and understandable.

They are also the only ones to include entrepreneurship, which I love to see in a list like this.

Key Competencies – New Zealand

I also liked this list, which is short and simple but also covers quite a bit in it’s brevity, as it leaves room for interpretation. Relating to others can cover both Collaboration and Interpersonal/Cultural Understanding neatly.

It would be interesting to learn more about how these manifest in the experienced curriculum in NZ, and to see if the brevity gives scope for localisation, or if there is a tendency to fall into the most obvious or simple interpretation of the skill.

General Capabilities – Australia

This was one of the more literacy-heavy frameworks, and the only one that separated out ethical thinking from other forms of citizenship and intercultural understanding.

One result of this is that the majority of the core skills get lumped into just two of the capabilities (Critical and Creative Thinking, and Personal and Social Capability), while another two focus entirely on just one core skill of Interpersonal/Cultural Awareness.

I’m all for simplicity, and I know that the General Capabilities come with direction on further distinction, but I feel this consolidation may not give enough scope to develop all core skills.

Core Competencies – British Columbia

If you’re looking for a robust set of core competencies, backed by resources and guidance, then you need to start here. BC has integrated these competencies into the curriculum, and made them foundational to all learning, which I just love.

Their list maps very closely to the skills identified from the Core Skills Taxonomy, and they are the only curriculum that splits out Critical Thinking from Innovation.

There’s enough definition to ensure all the core skills are covered, but the list isn’t overwhelming.

If you can’t already tell, I like this model.

21st Century Competencies – Singapore

Singapore uses a tiered model with three areas that are then split into sub areas, and a heavy focus on collaboration and interpersonal skills. I’d be interested to learn more about how the three areas are prioritised in the curriculum, and whether there are tensions between what is incorporated and what is left out.

One thing I do like is that they have removed the literacies from their list entirely, and left them in the rest of the curriculum. Once again, I’d love to learn more about the outcomes of this approach, and would be interested to see if it changes how teachers view the skills, without the distraction of literacy/numeracy.

The OECD Transformative Competencies

These are a bit of a special case, as they really rewrite the rules for how we think and talk about core skills within a learning context. I found that they mapped to four of the Core Skills (Critical Thinking, Innovation, Collaboration, and Making Decisions), but that the majority of the competencies they identified actually mapped more closely with the Self-Efficacy section of the World Economic Forum‘s Global Skill Taxonomy.

Here’s what I mean:

Ok that’s also pretty hard to read, so I’ll break it into two. Basically, they have three main competencies, which, through reading their rationale, can be broken into smaller skills. Some skills are found in more than one competency:

As I said, most of these skills map to one of four Core Skills, or Self-Efficacy:

And all of this talk about Self-Efficacy leads me back to thinking about how we incorporate it as a skill or competency or if it should actually sit apart, as a mega-skill that allows us to evaluate all our other skills.

The OECD’s Transformative Competencies are really a radical re-conceptualisation of core skills, situating them squarely in outcomes that relate to the real world.

Perhaps boiling all the skills down to the three skill areas would make things easier for teachers, as instead of thinking about how they can work Intercultural Awareness into their lesson on poetry or algebra, they can focus on giving students opportunities to Create New Value, Reconcile Tensions and Dilemmas, and Take Responsibility.

Something else to ponder in the future I feel.

Back to the questions…

At the start of this newsletter, I said I want to know more about how we talk about core skills at school:

• Which core skills do we value?
• Which core skills should we be teaching?
• Which core skills do we actually teach? and,
• How do we teach and/or embed them?

And I’m pretty sure I’ve not answered all of those, but I hope I’ve made a start on the first one.

It seems that, across the globe, curriculum writers value the same sorts of skills (with some variations) as we find in the Core Skills Taxonomies, albeit with less definition. They also include literacies which, as technical skillsets, would perhaps not normally make a list of ‘transferable’ skills.

Are these the core skills we should be teaching at school? Probably, but once again, we need more research into outcomes for students with and without exposure to explicit skill development before we will know.

As it stands, I’d love to hear what others think. Have you tried to embed core skills within the curriculum at school? If so, how did it go, and what would you do differently next time?

There’s so much potential here, and I’m curious to see how others approach the issue.

Until next week!

You can read previous editions of Pondering Careers here.

Welcome to another edition of Pondering Careers, where we share ideas and start conversations about pathways, futures, and careers.

Now, this week might seem a little different, so hear me out.

I want to make an argument for the introduction of basic training.

Let me clarify, I don’t want to send every school leaver into some sort of military service. What I think we need to consider is making the first stages of any post-school training (vocational or tertiary) into an introduction into the industry, where students pick up the basic skills they need and learn about a range of different pathways they could move towards next.

This would give them time to develop career clarity and confidence before moving forward, something that could increase completion rates, reduce anxiety, and, in theory, lead to improvements in earning potential and career satisfaction.

I’m also aware that there will be lots of reasons why doing something like this will be difficult, and that there would be a plethora of reasons why this won’t work, but I want to put this idea out there and see what others think – who knows, maybe I’m onto something.

What is basic training?

If you Google ‘basic training’ two things come up – the initial training we do when we join the military, and the years of basic training junior doctors complete.

In both cases, the aim is to build a foundation of skills that are used across the organisation, before students move into specialised training.

GoArmy describe this as:

“Basic Combat Training, also known as “boot camp,” is required of all new enlisted Soldiers to create a strong foundation for their Army experience and future goals. Once it’s over, your day-to-day will focus more on what’s required for your specific job…”

And the Royal Australian College of Physicians describe their basic training thus:

“This program includes a broad exposure to a comprehensive range of discipline areas that can be further developed during a subsequent Advanced Training program.”

We can define basic training as a program of education that covers fundamental skills and knowledge required for all pathways in the sector or organisation, and which also introduces the culture and process of the organisation.

Having been through basic training at the Australian Defence Force Academy myself, I would suggest it offers other benefits as well, such as a chance to build connections outside of your own specialisation, and to align your goals and values with that of the organisation.

Incidentally, it’s twenty years this year since I graduated, but ADFA still run their basic training or ‘YOFT’ in pretty much the same way now – this video is from this year:

Basic training gives you a chance to do just that – to cover the basics – without locking people in to one pathway or another.

How would this work?

The thing I keep coming back to is that we already do some of this (I’ll explain in a minute), which means that we should be able to make some tweaks to existing practices, such as how we enrol students.

Trying to get large-scale systemic change off the ground is often an exercise in futility, but we could borrow some of the practices that are already working and reshuffle them into discrete ‘basic training’ modules, giving us the desired outcome without freaking everyone out.

I also don’t think we need a universal model of basic training – it would be OK for institutions to design their own, and decide for themselves what they want everyone to know (and at what stage) rather than creating one ‘model to rule them all’.

I believe we’re already doing some of this

Think, for a moment, about the first year of an undergraduate business degree.

Chances are, there are going to be some major similarities between all the undergraduate business degrees offered by the same institution. For example, at RMIT University, they offer a Bachelor of Accounting and a Bachelor of Business (as well as a few other business-related degrees), which share an entire semester’s worth of first year courses.

Here is the Bachelor of Business:

And the Bachelor of Accounting‘s first year:

Both courses require:

• Business Decision Making,
• Understanding the Business Environment,
• Business in Society, and
• Integrated Perspectives on Business Problems

And all of these courses make sense – they cover the fundamentals you need at the start of a business degree.

Other universities have gone one step further and are already of the game, like the University of Sydney, who only offer one general business degree (in their case, the Bachelor of Commerce) which has a number of majors to choose from, all of which share the majority of their first year subjects.

Surely then, from a university standpoint we can work to combine degrees wherever possible at an undergraduate level, and avoid creating suites of degrees that contain similar first years.

Now, I know that there’s an argument that students can always change degrees if they realise they’re in the wrong one, but this isn’t always as easy as it seems. Whenever I’ve worked with higher ed students they are generally unaware of the process or that it’s even possible, and unsure how to go about a transfer without losing some of their credit.

When students transfer between degrees they also often lose credit if they’ve taken subjects that were in one degree but not in the other (this has certainly happened to me), which could deter some students from changing even if they realise they’re in the wrong degree.

We could do the same with apprenticeships

As an example, if I lived in NSW and wanted to become an Electrician, I could choose from eight different Cert III courses at TAFE NSW in the Electrotechnology stream, all of which share a number of basic units.

These include:

• Apply work health and safety regulations, codes and practices in the workplace
• Fabricate, assemble and dismantle utilities industry components
• Use drawings, diagrams, schedules, standards, codes and specifications
• Licence to perform dogging (if someone knows what this is can they please explain)
• Solve problems in magnetic and electromagnetic devices

Don’t ask me what most of these things actually teach, but since they’re in all of the courses I’m going to assume they’re basic, foundation skills.

Many of these units also appear in the Cert II or ‘Career Start‘ course, which suggests that, with a bit of a rejig, all students could technically start with the Cert II units before deciding at that point which way they want to specialise. This is, after all, what the pre-apprenticeship courses are designed for, so perhaps all students could be required to start with the Cert II?

So (aside from the fact that we currently ask students to find a specific employer before commencing an apprenticeship, which locks them in to a set career path) why can’t all commencing Electrotechnology apprentices learn the same things in an initial six-month basic training course?

During this course, they could learn more about the industry and explore a range of pathways, before locking themselves in.

Towards the end of the course, they could then be matched with employers in the apprenticeship they want to pursue.

Perhaps if we set this up we could do something about the vocational completion rates, which are languishing below 50% for Cert III qualifications, as there is some evidence that an incorrect career choice (evidenced by loss of interest in the apprenticeship) is a predictor of non-completion (Powers & Watt, 2021).

They need to be able to choose a specialisation after the course

One key factor that we need to talk about, before we move into the benefits, is that this only works when students are free to either choose or change their pathway at the end of the basic training.

It doesn’t work if you put them all into the same training then tell them they have to go down the path they picked earlier, in fact, you could even increase their dissatisfaction with their career if you force them into something they now know isn’t right for them.

Going back to my own experiences, when I was at ADFA those of us in the Air Force had to choose our jobs before we arrived, but the Army cadets didn’t choose (or find out) their specialisations until they left RMC, four years after they started.

The Navy cadets (midshipmen) went to sea for a year before they got to ADFA, where they experienced a range of jobs and learnt basic skills.

This meant that by the time the Army and Navy cadets had finished, they had experienced all of the different pathways and could make an informed choice about what they did next.

Now, I don’t have access to the vast majority of the data that I would need to make any observations about the long term impacts of this decision, but I will share one thing.

This is a table from the Defence Annual Report showing the number of separations of officers from the three services:

I only looked at officer data, since we’re talking about officers going though ADFA and RMC, but, on face value, we can see that the RAAF has an officer retention problem that is disproportionate to the other services, and also not reflected in it’s retention of other ranks (RAAF only had a 21% share of voluntary separations for other ranks, compared to 37% for officers).

Does this prove that locking people in before they start a course of training is a bad idea? I’m not sure, but it’s certainly interesting, and possibly something for ADF Careers to take a look at.

What are the benefits of a basic training component?

Giving young people more room to grow into their careers, without locking them in, is always a good idea in my opinion. We change A LOT between the ages of 15 and 25, and making kids pick a pathway in their mid-teens is fraught with danger.

Here are my broad arguments for incorporating an element of basic training into your courses:

1. Students can get started without narrowing their options. This makes it a hundred times easier to take that first step, because it removes all the pressure of being ‘locked in’.
2. Basic training can ensure that everyone is starting from the same place, with the same level of basic knowledge and understanding of the sector. It essentially gets everyone on the same page, with the side benefit that people will be more likely to meet and connect with people outside of their eventual specific stream, creating a broader network for the industry.
3. Career exploration and work experience can be ‘built in’. In fact, any basic training program is going to include a high-level overview of the industry and the variety of jobs it contains, but this kind of learning may be skipped when students jump straight into something specific. Indeed, there may be a case to exclude this information for students who are locked in, to reduce the likelihood of them realising they should actually be somewhere else.
4. Basic training can reduce anxiety. It’s in the name – you know that you’re going to start with the basics, and that you’re not expected to arrive with a level of knowledge, and you also know you don’t need to make any solid decisions at this stage. Anxiety is a huge factor for our young people, and anything we can do to reduce levels of anxiety is a good thing.
5. It could lead to improved career satisfaction and engagement. Dr Michael Openshaw shared a great report from the OECD earlier this week which looked at some of the factors which indicate teenage career readiness, and that found that career certainty and alignment were key factors in determining outcomes for young people. It’s possible to assume that students who have had more time to explore and more exposure to work will be able to develop greater career certainty and alignment, leading in turn to improved outcomes.

And I’m sure there are more benefits I’ve missed, in particular for employers and training organisations (because I tend to think student-first).

I’m really interested to dive deeper into this topic, particularly to see if exposure to some form of basic training increases completion and retention rates.

If you have any literature on this topic, or would like to share your own experiences then I’d love to hear them.

And as always, thanks for being part of our community.

You can read previous editions of Pondering Careers here.

In this edition of Pondering Careers, Lucy looks at core skills and whether or not how we define them impacts their efficacy.

Welcome back to another edition of Pondering Careers, where we talk about everything related to careers, work, and jobs.

Over the past few months I’ve done a fair bit of thinking about skills taxonomies (see Edition 35 for my ponderings on skills-based hiring) because they present a conundrum.

On the one hand, I want to incorporate transferable/core skills into our programs, but I’m not sure which ones to use, or what to call them.

We all need to get on the same page when it comes to non-technical skills, because how on Earth can we teach these core competencies if we can’t even agree on what to call them? So while I want to rampage ahead with resources and learning tools that build key skills, I can’t because I’m stuck on which ones to teach, and what we should be calling them.

Just in case you can’t tell by now from my tone, I’m frustrated.

Core skills are incredibly powerful – they help us not just at work, but in every aspect of our lives – and they are in demand by employers.

Some believe that we’ve reached the point at which core/transferable skills have overtaken technical skills, and as our existing educational systems are not geared to teach these skills we need fundamental systems change – but I’m not sure how we can start this process when we can’t even agree on what to call them!

Others have also been speaking about core skills, especially Chris Webb in his the Week in Careers Newsletter and Tom Ravenscroft who often writes on the intersection of technical and essential skills.

So, in this edition I’ve outlined my thoughts on a couple of key questions those of us in education and career development should be asking, and then listed all the Core Skills Taxonomies I can find. If you know of others, please send them my way.

A rose by any other name…

Before we can dig into this topic we need to agree on some naming conventions.

I’m talking about those skills which are non-technical, and which are commonly referred to with any of the following descriptors:

• Core Skills
• Transferable Skills
• Soft Skills
• Human Skills
• Durable Skills
• Essential Skills
• Power Skills
• Future Skills

And I’m sure this list isn’t exhaustive.

For the purposes of this article, I’m going to refer to them as core skills, not from any preference of my own (personally, the term makes me think of skills you build during pilates), but simply because I’ve found that this is the term used most frequently in the taxonomies.

If you prefer something else, please feel free to argue your case in the comments because I want to hear your ideas.

I’m not even going to try to list my preferences for individual skills – there are too many and to be honest I think some people just like to be creative, so I’ll use the terms from the taxonomies when we get to that bit.

First question – do we actually need to build these things, or do they develop organically?

Easy answer – yes, we need to build them.

Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) did some work comparing their General Capabilities to the core skill curriculums of four other high performing educational systems from across the world (find the research here) and they found that when core skills are built into the curriculum, positioned at the same level as other subjects, and taught explicitly student academic performance improved.

The World Economic Forum has also done a lot of work in this area, and have an excellent skills taxonomy which I’ll talk more about later, and they find that employers are changing hiring practices to focus on core skills, such as analytical and creative thinking, and self-efficacy skills.

We can no longer pretend that these skills aren’t as important as technical skills or pure academic knowledge.

There are examples of where this has been done well, and in every case the results speak for themselves.

The archived New Basics program from almost twenty years ago transformed student performance – kids in the program from disadvantaged schools were outperforming those in the most elite schools in the state. This program took a transdisciplinary approach and created a series of rich tasks for learners to engage with, which required core skills to address.

The CPaBL initiative from New Zealand is another example, where teachers were equipped to build core skills and career education into the curriculum, with great academic and engagement results, but unfortunately without ongoing support.

Skills Builder Partnership have been leading the way in this space for a while, and their research indicates that students with access to improved skill development during education feel more confident with their careers, and make more money.

So, in other words, when we make an effort to incorporate core skill development into our educational systems, students benefit.
Next question – which skills do they need?

If I’ve learnt one thing from researching all these taxonomies, it’s that people like to reinvent the wheel. Every taxonomy makes the case for why it’s collection of core skills is superior and fit for purpose, but I’ve been able to break them into three categories of frameworks:

1 – Core skills taxonomies

These focus on the core skills we need to thrive at work, and are generally designed for all ages (not just for students). They also don’t tend to list career management competencies – in other words, they don’t list the skills we need to manage our careers, just the ones we need to do the actual work.

When I started this process, I assumed that these would be one and the same, but it turns out I was wrong, and that’s a story for another article.

These skills tend to be the ones highly rated by employers and industry bodies, and I’ve listed a stack of these below.

2 – Curriculum Core Competencies

These are designed for educational systems, and are developmentally appropriate for children and teenagers. I feel that they’re designed to prepare children for the world, not just for work, and there’s a focus on creating ‘good citizens’ (whatever that means).

I found that these often contained watered-down versions of the core skills from the adult/employer taxonomies – so, for example, the adults usually split up cognitive skills into Critical Thinking, Innovation, and Problem Solving, but in the curriculum these would be combined into Critical and Creative Thinking.

These also sometimes contained elements of the career management competencies (in #3), for example, in Finland one of their competencies is ‘Working life competence and entrepreneurship’.

3 – Career Management Frameworks

These are the skills we need to manage our lives, but particularly our career pathways. I found that they contained different skills from the other two frameworks, and these tend to focus on:

• Self-Awareness/Management, which could also be pushed into Self Efficacy
• Information seeking and processing capability
• Making decisions

There is overlap…

Many of the skills appear in all three types of taxonomies (Communication is a popular contender), but there are also some areas of non-alignment which need exploring further. And that is a subject for another article.

For now, I think we need more research into these skills and competencies, to see if it’s even possible to distil them into one set that covers everything.

I have questions:

• How do the skills interact with each other? Does development in one area lead to development in another, or do you need to build one skill before you can work on another?
• Is it possible to have high levels of skill in one area alone, and, if so, how does this impact on capability?
• Which skills do our young people already develop in school, or through the other things they do, and which ones need work?
• How can we change up our curriculum so it builds core skills alongside subject knowledge?
• What do career outcomes look like for people with different levels of skills?
• Do we even need to agree on one global set of skills, or is it OK for local groups to develop their own sets of skills, based on what people need in each place?

Lots of questions…

One curveball

There is one framework which is relatively new and which needs talking about because, to be honest, it doesn’t really fit with the others.

I’m talking about the OECD Education and Skills Transformative Competencies, part of the OECD Learning Compass 2030:

The three Transformative Competencies are:

• Creating new value
• Reconciling tensions and dilemmas
• Taking responsibility

And these cross over numerous core skill areas to combine them into three mega-skills.

Personally, I like some aspects of this new way of thinking about skills. It takes them out of the abstract, theoretical space and grounds them in purpose, allowing us to bring our own ideas about our strengths and skills to the process.

The three competencies are also as valuable and applicable at home and in the community (including in our schools) as they are in the workplace.

I’m not alone in feeling that these competencies hold potential and can align well with existing frameworks – there’s an excellent paper here from Rosemary Hipkins, Sue McDowell, and Bronwyn Wood which looked at how the OECD’s work compares to the New Zealand Curriculum and it’s well worth a read.

It will be interesting to see if/how other systems incorporate some of these ideas into their own core skill taxonomies in the future. But, now that we’ve looked at the one real outlier, I’d like to list the other Core Skill Taxonomies I’ve found.

Core Skill Taxonomies from around the world

Two things: this list is not exhaustive, so if I’ve missed one you like please share it with me. Secondly, these are only the pure taxonomies that fit into section one of the three types of skills listed above – not the curriculum competencies, or the career management frameworks. If I listed those as well we’d be here all day!

These are not in any particular order, this is just how they appear in my mapping, so don’t read anything into which ones are first. New ones I find get added at the end, which is why some of the best ones are there.

Australian Skills Classification – Jobs and Skills Australia – Australia

There are ten Core Competencies in the ASC which are defined as follows:

“Core competencies are common to all jobs. They describe a set of non-specialist skills gained through schooling and life experience which provide a base to further develop skills and specialities.”

Jobs and Skills Australia – Australian Skills Classification

They seem to have really honed in on academic skills – they break literacy into Reading, Writing, and Oral Communication, for example, which seems a little excessive – and there are some other interesting pairings like Initiative and Innovation, which don’t tend to go together in my head.

Here’s an example of how they appear in relation to a specific job (Architect):

So, the ten skills are:

1. Digital engagement
2. Initiative and innovation
3. Learning
4. Numeracy
5. Oral communication
6. Planning and organisation
7. Problem solving
8. Reading
9. Teamwork
10. Writing

Read more here.

Essential Skills – Skills Builder Partnership – UK

They have eight skills, and while they’re technically a skill taxonomy they also have close links to education, which means the list is less complex than some of the other taxonomies. I’m also interested in the inclusion of Aiming High and Leadership, which don’t often appear in the other adult-focused taxonomies, and it would be interesting to map these to some of the self-management and collaboration skill areas.

The eight skills are:

1. Listening
2. Speaking
3. Problem Solving
4. Creativity
5. Staying Positive
6. Aiming High
7. Leadership
8. Teamwork

The Essentials Skills seem to be really popular with schools, I know I’ve spoken with quite a few devoted Career Advisors about them (thanks Ladi Mohammed-Chapman for introducing me to them) and they offer some great learning programs to help build these skills, so this taxonomy is one really worth checking out if you’re working in the education space.

Read more here.

Global Skills Taxonomy – World Economic Forum

This taxonomy is part of a really interesting reskilling project the WEF is undertaking to establish a skills-first approach.

This taxonomy differs slightly from the others in that they’ve included technical skills (i.e. Programming) alongside core skills, but the taxonomy makes sense and you could argue that they’re just being more specific about things like digital literacy, which appear in other taxonomies.

You really need to go here to explore the taxonomy properly, as it’s quite involved with multiple levels.

I’ve mapped the skills to their Top 10 Skills, and one thing that stood out to me was the prominence of Self-Efficacy in the skills they predict we’ll need to navigate the workforce into the future:

This is from my mapping, not their site, but you can see how when we look at the four Self-Efficacy sub-skills they all appear in the Top 10 Skills.

I found this really interesting because self-efficacy is incredibly important, but it was missing from the other taxonomies – sometimes the sub-skills would appear, but self-efficacy itself was absent.

Through this process, I’ve started to wonder if we need to split out self-efficacy from the other skills and see it as a meta-skill, one that we need on top of all the others to be able to accurately assess our capabilities. But that’s also a topic for another day.

Career Readiness Competencies – National Association of Colleges and Employers – USA

I really liked this taxonomy – it’s very focused on skills college grads need to thrive in the workforce, but I liked the simplicity of it. They also include career development as a skill, which many of the other taxonomies ignore, and within this competency they include things like self-awareness, networking, lifelong learning, and exploring opportunities.

They list eight competencies:

1. Career & Self-development
2. Communication
3. Critical Thinking
4. Equity & Inclusion
5. Leadership
6. Professionalism
7. Teamwork
8. Technology

Skills for Success – Government of Canada

This is another broad taxonomy which is designed for adults but could be applicable in educational settings as well. They define these skills as:

Skills for Success are skills that help you in a quickly changing world. Everyone benefits from having these skills. They help you to get a job, progress at your current job and change jobs. The skills also help you become an active member of your community and succeed in learning.

Government of Canada – Skills for Success

The nine skills are:

1. Adaptability
2. Collaboration
3. Communication
4. Creativity and Innovation
5. Digital
6. Numeracy
7. Problem Solving
8. Reading
9. Writing

This is another taxonomy which is quite literacy-heavy – this is something that seems to happen when the creators try to cover educational competencies alongside the skills for work.

Read more here.

Critical Core Skills – SkillsFuture SG – Singapore

With this taxonomy we’re back to a workplace-focused list. They list 16 skills overall, but these are broken into 3 key areas:

1. Thinking critically
2. Interacting with others
3. Staying relevant

And I quite like these three areas – they remind me of the OECD Transformative Competencies.

By including double the number of skills (compared to the usual 8) they’ve brought more depth to the conversation, but the three overarching categories give it structure. One interesting point is that the taxonomy refers to ‘core’ skills, but the literature refers to ‘soft’ skills – not sure if that was deliberate or not.

Read more here.

Future Ready Talent Framework – University of Waterloo – Canada

This is another work-focused taxonomy, designed to help individuals prepare for the workplace. I like a lot of the language they’ve used in this framework as it’s very practical, for example, under each skill they link the skill to its practical application:

There are 12 competencies across four areas:

And you can read more about the framework here.

I particularly like the ‘Design and Deliver Solutions’ group – they’ve linked the ability to think critically and innovatively with the practical implementation of solutions, which is something that tends to be lumped with other self-management skills in other taxonomies. In this grouping, they’re saying that the ideas are only as good as your ability to implement them.

Durable Skills – America Succeeds – USA

Last but not least we have Durable Skills, which is a mega taxonomy with 100 skills split into ten areas:

They analysed job postings to develop this taxonomy, which is one tactic I quite like because it ensures the skills are grounded in what employers are literally looking for (and, incidentally, in their research they found that the top durable skills were requested in job postings more than 5 times as often as the top ‘hard’ skills.)

I’m not going to list all 100 skills, but there’s a lot to unpack here – thanks Evelyn Van Til for sharing them with me.

You can learn more about the skills here.

That’s a lot of skills…

I’m still mapping and unpacking, and I’d love to hear what everyone else thinks, so please reach out if you’d like to chat about skills, or if you’d like to write something for a future Pondering Careers Newsletter about your own experiences with core skills.

Thanks again for joining me this week, it’s always so great to have you here and to be part of this incredible community of people trying to do good things for the next generation.

You can read previous editions of Pondering Careers here.