Why are “confident explorers” so important in a discussion about careers education? Somehow they have grasped a key idea: that they and their jobs will change, often rapidly, over their lifetime and that these changes are something they can embrace, rather than guard against. Implicit in their approach is the idea that knowledge emphasis in the world is now ontological (Barnett, 2004) - in other words, it is all about how individuals can BE or what they can DO in the world, not what knowledge they have stored up.

Yet the Confident Explorers’ approach is likely to be misunderstood - by parents, schools and employers - because it subverts many of the accepted notions about career trajectories and meaningful choices. Their approach suggests that careers education is not just about a period of exploration is followed by settling down, or a decision made at one point in time, or something that conforms to 20th century (adult) models of rational decision-making. In short they exemplify a radical departure from many of the assumptions on which school-based careers education in New Zealand has been based.

The New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER) has been conducting in-depth interviews with over 100 young people in its five-year Pathways and Prospects study. The study’s focus is on young people's processes of meaning-making through their early career experiences after leaving school and engaging in tertiary study/training and employment.

We used a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to analyse over 200 interviews in terms of the different dimensions of exploration and security driving and organising them. This allowed us to group the most alike interviews into four different clusters, each with its own distinctive profile. The clusters (of interviews, not people) provide a useful way to think about the different pushes and pulls in young people’s “identity investments” (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000): their framing of experiences and construction of pathway narratives.

Summarised from "Young People Producing Careers and Identities" (Vaughan, Roberts, & Gardiner, 2006).

The clusters in Pathways and Prospects have big implications for how we understand young people’s transition from school, and especially for the priorities of school-based careers education. We know that forging a career pathway is a fundamentally trickier business now than a decade ago. Jobs, skills, technology, markets, ideas – all are changing fast and in ways that involve the global as well as the local and are hard to predict. In New Zealand the Career Services agency has estimated that 200,000 new jobs are created each year and 150,000 disappear or are transformed, creating what they describe as a “maze” of future possibilities where career “cannot be left to chance” (Career Services, undated).

In such a landscape young people and those advising them must somehow deal with all those possibilities and a deluge of information (and advertising) from industry, tertiary institutions, and employers. It is a landscape underscoring that a career is no longer a structure but a process (Wijers & Meijers, 1996). And that this process is a lifelong one, making people learner-workers who potentially “produce” their qualifications and careers, rather than simply entering them as pre-conceived entities (Vaughan & Roberts, 2007).

Within this changing landscape, many schools in New Zealand continue to offer vocationally-oriented forms of career planning and guidance to students. The practice of school-based careers guidance, which has been mandated in New Zealand schools since 1996, has typically prioritised the distribution of career information over providing students with career development strategies and skills. Moreover, a number of New Zealand research studies and evaluations have found careers guidance delivery to be haphazard in some schools, and for careers practitioners to have lower status and less access to professional development than their colleagues (Wilson & Young, 1998; Vaughan & Kenneally, 2003).

There have been several well-supported and well-focused initiatives, such as the Secondary Tertiary Alignment Resource (STAR) which gives state secondary schools additional funding so they can access courses that provide greater opportunities for senior students; and Gateway, which gives students an opportunity to experience workplaces first hand while engaging in structured workplace learning.

There are also positive signs that the policy makers and practitioners are beginning to understand and respond to the challenge of rapid change. In 2007 the Ministry of Education began the Creating Pathways and Building Lives (CPaBL) initiative in 100 schools, which aims to establish a school-wide approach to careers education. Career Services, which provides a range of tools and professional support to schools, has recently been described in an international review as a world leader, with an integrated, all-age organisational structure favoured by the OECD. It has also begun a project to support young people’s decision-making through its Better Tertiary and Trades Training Decision Making project (BTTTDM).

There are no major impact studies on New Zealand school-based careers education in terms of student outcomes. However a number of smaller scale studies have taken account of student perspectives about their school careers education experiences and learning. Some accounts have attempted to get a quantitative sense of students’ participation in careers activities and ranking of different activity- and people-based influences on their choices (Boyd, McDowall & Cooper, G. 2002, Smith, 2006). There are also examples of tracking surveys which pair “aspirations” and “destinations” (Boyd, Chalmers & Kumekawa 2001, Broker, 2002, Career Services, 2003). Still others have focused on students’ qualitative reflections and meaning-making against the context of specific school-based careers activities (Vaughan & Kenneally, 2003).

The new CPaBL initiative includes an ongoing evaluation, which encourages and aims to take account of schools’ measurement of student outcomes. However those outcomes tend to be defined by schools in terms of “engagement” – a term used to describe student attendance and retention at school - and the initial report (Education Review Office, 2007) is pitched outside the theoretical debates around different constructions of student outcomes. It is too early at this stage to know to what extent what students’ learning can or will be measured. There is, however, a stated focus on student, as well as school, outcomes and schools are being supported by careers and school consultants to realise CPaBL for their specific school context and student population. What remains to be seen is whether and how any outcomes will be analysed and understood beyond simple measures of engagement.

NZCER’s recent careers education survey has attempted to map the school terrain in which ideas about student outcomes reside. It found that while new initiatives such as CPaBL and BTTTDM are more in keeping with the emerging acceptance of careers education models that acknowledge the new landscape of career development, many schools seem still to rely on careers advice and guidance activities built on theories about vocational guidance and on outdated “age and stage” models which lend themselves to quite narrow definitions of outcomes.

The NZCER survey asked New Zealand secondary and composite school principals and careers staff (including careers advisors, transition teachers, STAR and Gateway co-ordinators) how they organise their careers education, what activities they are offering students and, crucially, how they see their role now and in the future (Vaughan & Gardiner, 2007 forthcoming).

We found that careers staff were very committed to their job and reported high levels of enjoyment – far higher levels than those reported by other teachers in NZCER’s 2006 National Survey of Secondary Schools. As a group, careers staff tended to be older, were more likely to be female and with more teaching experience than other colleagues in the school. Although most were qualified teachers and held professional association membership for teaching generally and for careers specifically, very few held any careers-specific qualifications. For most, careers work was one of several different roles they performed within the school and, perhaps understandably, gaining careers-related qualifications was not a priority.

Views of careers staff about their work and the purposes of careers education highlighted some interesting disjunctions. They thought the nature of their work had not changed much in the past two years and they did not see their own careers changing much in the next five. Yet they also recognised that they face new challenges as the broad context of careers education changes around them. They felt an increased pressure on their own time, skills, and knowledge and acknowledged increase pressure on students in decision-making.

On the one hand, careers staff described careers activities and approaches that were largely targeted at at-risk students, and a kind of careers education likely to be more about intervention to predicted or predictable ends than ongoing development. On the other hand, careers staff acknowledged that all students now grapple with more and more decisions throughout schooling and beyond, and their own work was largely about providing information, or access to it, for all students.

Careers staff clearly prioritised providing information over other ideas and long-term learning activities such as helping students develop self-awareness or teaching students decision-making strategies. This seems to reflect a possible disjunction in practice between two careers education directives from the Ministry of Education. The National Administration Guidelines (NAG 1.6) say school must provide careers education and guidance for all students with an emphasis on those at risk of leaving school unprepared for work or further education/training (Ministry of Education, 2007). But the associated guidebook to schools says that the aims of careers education are for students to develop self awareness, become aware of opportunities, make decisions and plans, take action” (Ministry of Education, 2003, p. 7).

It’s clear from our survey that careers staff are purposeful in the range of careers activities they undertake with individual students and target groups, particularly in relation to their individual schools and communities. However, as a collective, it’s not clear that careers staff have a sense of priorities for the 21st century. These priorities would surely include thinking about the kinds of things the “confident explorers” have highlighted – adaptability, creative linking of different qualifications and jobs, and self-management.

It might also mean rethinking NAG 1.6 so it better reflects the current careers landscape of ongoing decision-making, career development, and lifelong learning. A good start might be to move away from references to preparation for “the transition to the workplace or further education/training” (our emphasis) to preparation for “the workplace and further education/training”. Put another way, what do we want careers education to be – an information distribution service? A planning workshop? An intervention? A one-to-one guidance service? A lifelong learning enterprise? Decision-making skills development?

The new Creating Pathways and Building Lives initiative addresses one aspect of the possible new direction by supporting schools to make careers education a school-wide endeavour. Currently careers staff perform their role(s) without necessarily having any professional careers training and careers activities often occur in isolated pockets of time within the school. A school-wide approach has the potential to engage people in thinking about the relationship between careers and education.

The new Better Tertiary and Trades Training Decision Making project addresses another aspect of the new direction by recognizing that decision-making occurs at different points in time, not solely as students leave school. These seem like fruitful directions because providing information about immediate options could then extend to fostering individual progression and development over time (Watts, 2001). Similarly it is no longer enough to encourage participationin tertiary learning or the workforce; we need to encourage participation as learner-workers and actively engage students with the "production" of their careers.

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Vaughan, K., Roberts, J., & Gardiner, B. (2006). Young People Producing Careers and Identities. The first report from the Pathways and Prospects project. Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research

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Karen Vaughan is a senior researcher at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research. She leads the research programme on careers and youth transition.