This week we saw Grade Nine students across the country accompanying a parent, relative, neighbor or family friend to their workplace as part of a national initiative organized by the Learning Partnership.  The first Take Our Kids to Work (TOKW) day in 1995 represented the first time that parent’s were actively encouraged to be involved in the career exploration activities of their children by bringing them to their workplace.  Since the initial event, held solely in the Toronto area, the initiative has evolved into a research-supported activity that involves 200,000 14 year olds across the country.  TOKW day provides many students with knowledge about occupations, both specific to the job and about the world of work generally, and the day’s experiences help them with their future decision making as they define their path through high school and post-secondary education. If TOKW is to be an effective exploratory activity, we think that the information gained must be linked with the concepts, attitudes and skills learned during the growth stage.

It is significant that this opportunity is provided in the transition year between the Growth stage, which we addressed in the last blog, and the Exploration stage which involves trying out occupational possibilities through school classes, work and hobbies, and in the later part of the stage, involves tentative choices and skill development.  The Growth stage focused on the tasks of developing personal concepts and behaviors that will enhance future job exploration and job choosing skills.  The Exploration stage begins process of actually attempting some tasks and jobs, but unfortunately high school students typically have limited access to workplaces, other than those of their part time jobs.  The Learning Partnership website (http://www.thelearningpartnership.ca/page.aspx?pid=250) states that the TOKW program “was created through the philosophy that awareness leads to knowledge”.  The belief espoused is that the knowledge necessary to future decision-making is fostered through awareness of the many facets of the world-of-work and that that awareness is best experienced first hand.  Vicarious learning through the observation and imitation of role models is a good starting point as young people benefit from seeing the significant adults in their lives contributing to their workplace, families and society as a whole through their daily actions on the job.

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From a developmental perspective, the tasks involved in growth as a person and as a future employee greatly overlap. In our last blog we described the phases and tasks involved in human development between the ages of 4 and 13 according to Erik Erikson and explored how these relate to career development and the growth of a self-system that is characterized by a sense of trust, personal autonomy, the ability to take initiative, and personal competency. The resulting resolution of each of Erikson’s stages is a particular character trait.  Career guidance and education is often focused on the provision of information – about occupations and about self – and over time the emphasis evident in the information changes.

It is not uncommon to have a student engage educators at the post-secondary level in discussion on the importance of their final grades because of their belief that their grades will play a pivotal role in the realization of a satisfying career.  Our response as educators is often that students should look past the grades attained and consider what they have learned and how they have grown as a result of the learning experience. Often this advice falls on deaf ears, however, as the myth of achievement as the defining indicator of potential success in their future endeavors is too firmly ensconced after years of pursuing good grades and being evaluated by such.

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Being privy to the career development needs of a wide variety of people, it is clearly evident that career has different meanings depending on where you are in life.  At the age of thirteen, career can mean needing a job for spending money.  At eighteen, and with high school in the past, the primary task may be trying to figure out what to take in university. And for the middle-aged woman, with a career and family demands behind her, re-entry into the workforce may be of foremost concern.  Donald Super viewed career as a life-long endeavor, or as he referred to it, a life span cycle.  The cycle, as he described it, constitutes numerous stages over the lifespan and in the coming months we will be addressing some of these stages along with the tasks characteristic of each.  In brief, the life span cycle includes the following stages and tasks:

• Growth (birth to age 14 or 15) – fantasy, interests, capacities
• Exploration (ages 15-24) – crystallizing, specifying, implementing
• Establishment (ages 25-44) – stabilizing, consolidating, advancing
• Maintenance (ages 45-64) – holding, updating, innovating
• Disengagement (age 65+) – decelerating, retirement planning, retirement living

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Concepts are the mental integration of multiple aspects of reality that may come from our current perception or from earlier-formed concepts.  While seminal concepts are generally viewed as being derived from the processing of direct experience and discovery, the ongoing process of concept formation, where a person learns to sort specific experiences into general rules or classes, is commonly depicted as the classification of new or existing into some type of hierarchical structure.  The models described in the literature vary and include (but are not limited to) depictions of concepts as being organized around: rules of inclusion and exclusion; prototypes (that possess a central tendency); exemplars; and explanations, or outlines, of the experience.  While the space here does not allow in depth explanation of these theories, all agree that awareness of the hierarchical distinctions being used can help guide behaviour in new situations.

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