Careers

DISCOURSE ON METHOD

by Enrico Viceconte

A comparative study, such as the one in this book, has the ambition to give “depth of field” to our view on a particular problem. The problem faced by DeSCarTES project is to develop a conceptual framework and a good model for lifelong career guidance services.

The inductive research methodology – a benchmarking study – is based on empirical data,  rather than on theoretical assumptions. A method that, however, needs the development, from the information gathered and coded, of an implicit theory – a “grounded theory” – to be compared with the empirical data collected in the field in order to generate a feedback loop between the different levels of analysis. It is therefore up to this conclusion chapter to give feedbacks, once unresolved problems are found, and to stimulate new research.

Recalling Descartes, whose name is in the acronym of the project, we will use the four rules of his “Method” to reflect on the work done by the research group.[1]

1. Evidence

«The first was never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to comprise nothing more in my judgment than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt» (Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth)

It’s evident the suffering underlying the growing demand of labour flexibility and the efforts of the “social planners” to counterbalance its effects in a context of “flexible capitalism”, as Richard Sennett calls the emerging model of capitalism. A model which would subsume “Atlantic Capitalism” in a more general form, in which you may recognize the “Rhenish Capitalism” of a large part of Europe and of Japan, the capitalism of the emerging countries (like China) and, finally, the Italian “capitalismo padronale” of small businesses. All cases presented refer to the two classic drivers of late modernity, globalization, and technological innovation (with the subsequent dematerialization of value), which are pressing for a continuous and often painful change on regions, labour markets, companies and, ultimately, on people. (Sennett, 2000)

The way in which the different European regions observed in the study create actions to mitigate that suffering is specific to the country, as pointed out the works here presented. It is a constant, however, the recognition of the need for targeted action at the level of individual, potentially “confused”, consisting of structured guidance and help actions, aimed to offset the loss of steady references with respect to the professional role (its skills and values) and to the organization (its cultures, norms and values). Uncertainty is a consequence of asymmetric information that characterizes the condition of the worker in a complex world, despite the greater wealth of information available. A scarcity in which the careers guidance in the workplace could remedy.

The diffusion of flexible work in all countries where the study was conducted was accompanied by organizational change, lean organization, downsizing (a smaller number of hierarchical levels and less bureaucracy) with a continuous reconfiguration, centered on business objectives.

Consequently the term “career” (which Sennett refers to the path of the carts on a track) does not represent properly what happens to a person during his working life. The organizational design and the design of the “job” become more blurred (“job” is a term which Sennett refers to the a word that indicates the solid brick of a building).

It is no longer adequate the concept of “career” to which constant reference is made in the essays of this book. The career, seen as linear and quite predictable path of development, learning and growth, is a key to understand your personal history and a basis for planning your life. A model that flexibility is radically undermining. The focus on the individual, that is the typical approach of counselling, is significant of the growing isolation of the worker, the loss of all forms of belonging and the need for the individual to be able to read and write his professional history.

The condition of the individual and the worker in the “liquid modernity” described by Zygmunt Bauman, is of a relative loneliness in the moments of choice and defeats. (Bauman, 2002).

Accountable on his own performance and on his own fate and possible failure, the employee of the “second modernity” is in search of a “biographical solutions to systemic contradictions,” as Ulrich Beck says in his book “Risk Society” (Beck, 2000). A growing risk and an instability that lead to a rethinking at the level of organization of the territory that is configured, according to Enzo Rullani as “habitat of the movement”, a place where labour mobility reconfigures the services to the employers and to the workers. (Rullani, 2008)[2]

2. Analysis

«The second, to divide each of the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible, and as might be necessary for its adequate solution».

The field of analysis about Career Guidance and Career Counselling partially overlaps the field of organization studies, in particular the issues of change management, competence management, human resource development, training and motivation, partly overlaps studies on labour, employment, education and vocational training.

The framework of the “learning region[3]” (in the EC defined as ‘A city, town or region which recognises and understands the key role of learning in the development of prosperity, stability and personal fulfilment, and mobilises all its resources creatively to develop the full human potential of all its citizens.’) seems the most suitable to unify the different experiences, for the role played by the organizations outside the company which have the mission of the local development and of the representation of the interests of workers and enterprises[4]. While organizational development was established within the company and business objectives, guidance services were born outside the company, with a “no business” perspective.

The study provides a portrait of a European career guidance service which has the following characteristics:

• individual;
• focused on the needs of the worker rather than the company’s;
• support decisions and actions of the individual concerning especially the career and training;
• conducted by third parties outside the company;
• aimed at bridging gaps and informational asymmetries which relate to the worker;
• often supporting the individual as regards the organisational well-being and work/life balance;
• decisions and actions are included in a personal action plan;
• based on tool kits that structure and standardize the process;
• linked to the issues of lifelong learning;
• preferably integrated with training programs;
• performed by specialized and skilled operators with a “non clinical” approach to the difficulties of the employee;
• centered on “transitions” (in the educational curriculum, in the school/work transition, at the entrance or exit of a period of employment, in the case of organizational changes and changes of job);
• often promoted by agencies dealing with training and employment in the various regions, as a service for the “learning region”;
• not overlapped to other organizational development instruments (competence assessment, position, performance and potential evaluation, interviews for organizational assessments, organization climate assessment etc.);
• governed by an ethical code based on confidentiality, transparency, equity and focus on the worker;
• systematic and repeated over time;
• rarely on individual demand;
• based on trust;
• free.

Success factors of the process are identified mainly

• in the capacity of the counsellor to adapt standardised tool to the individual person and to his biography, kind of company, kind of problem;
• in the link of the process and the subsequent action plan to a training curriculum;
• in the trust that the worker puts in the operator and in the guidance process.

Causes of failure were found in the initial lack of understanding and of usefulness perception about the tool by the employer’s management, especially in small enterprises, but also by the unions. Career guidance runs the risk of a misunderstanding. The experiences reported show a constant concern to clarify that the approach focused on the needs of the individual can promote business objectives of the companies, to motivate them to support the project, as well as it always seems necessary to clarify that counselling does not contain a risk and a negative effect for the workers on their career and that the priority objective of the process are the training opportunities.

This last aspect, that the guidance is mainly related to educational aspects, unfortunately and paradoxically makes difficult the approach to the tool. Short-term vision, which characterizes the current competitive context, does not facilitate the intangible investment in training.

3. Synthesis

 

«The third, to conduct my thoughts in such order that, by commencing with objects the simplest and easiest to know, I might ascend by little and little, and, as it were, step by step, to the knowledge of the more complex; assigning in thought a certain order even to those objects which in their own nature do not stand in a relation of antecedence and sequence.»

The features of Career Guidance, with their specificity compared to other organizational tools and other services, and the analysis of the critical success factors, show a loose coupling between career guidance, which concerns the individual and her/his more or less conscious and explicit goals, and other processes that are related to the organization and its goals. Mostly critical is the trouble in linking what emerged during the counselling sessions (for example the individual action plan) to what is done by the company in terms of design, planning, delivery and evaluation of training programs.  Thus the employer miss the opportunity to set up workforce empowerment actions, job rotation, career plans and replacement plans.

We lack also the essential advantage of career guidance: promoting “self-directed” learning (a concept of Boyatzis[5]), and other form of formal and informal learning.

The trouble with labour flexibility, “the ability of a tree to bend in the wind and straighten again” says Sennett, once moved from the concerns of the company to the concerns of the worker, although informed and supported by guidance services, tends to relieve the company from adopting certain conceptual tools that bind the needs of the individual to his training and these two aspects to the competitiveness of the company and its actual flexibility and resilience.

This critical point dims even the possibility of a full and effective use of resources that are devoted to continuous education: public resources and interprofessional funds.

4. Review

 

«And the last, in every case to make enumerations so complete, and reviews so general, that I might be assured that nothing was omitted.»

The synthesis presented here highlights some vagueness-related problems in the area of intersection between the business practices and those of career guidance services.

Problems to which our study and our collection of empirical data have given only partial response and that deserve further research opportunity, even within the Leonardo da Vinci programme.

In particular, further research should be done about the connection between self-directed learning and the way companies design and structure training plans. With particular attention to SMEs, for the most part stressed by the urgency of the challenges of the international competition, but still far from being able to consider their role of “training enterprises”, a place to learn.

Moreover, we can not neglect large firms where, beyond the rhetoric of the “investors in people”, of  the “Best place to work” and of the “employer branding” approach,  the employer has still a bureaucratic model, tending to standardize career paths and training.

Since the HR departments of large enterprises increasingly define their mission as a “business partnership”, the flexibility of work, seen from the point of view of the employer, shows only the advantage over business goals and no other side effects.

The practice of segmentation of the internal market, which consider “key people” only the employees with a high potential and a high performance, identifies specific activities only for them: for example training and coaching activities designed to unleash the full potential of people and, as a result, their retention.

These policies often ignore, or pretend to ignore, long-term effects of a lack of investment in services dedicated to other segments of the company population (such as training and counselling).

The common practice of organizational re-engineering, downsizing and outplacement tends to undermine the trust and the “social capital”, to de-motivate and misalign the central driving body of the company, made by workers and managers of average performance and/or potential.

The trust, that is the engine of the economy, is a key to read the experiences written in this volume. A career guidance practice must be able to trigger a circular process of “trust building[6]” and the enhancement of social capital[7].

Trust is essential for both enterprises and workers in order to invest in training; trust, as it is remembered by the essays in this volume, is an essential requirement for counselling and only by trusting the employee can properly evaluate the relevance and the neutrality of the information collected during the interviews; trust should characterize the relationship within the company that asks the employee to participate in the procedure.

Once started the process, it must be able to generate additional trust: trust that learning will give a better perspective; trust that training can enhance the competitiveness of the company and, finally, self-trust, self-confidence, and self-esteem.

The “corrosion of character” (that is the title of the book by Sennet) consists of a loss of self-esteem and a loss of confidence in society. A loss of trust that plagues the flexible worker and marks his behaviours.

Career guidance in the workplace, while not using clinical methodologies aimed at enhance confidence and self-esteem, thanks to a professionalism and a very precise code of ethics, would be able to provide the worker with neutral information and analytical check-lists that can help the individual to rebuild a map of the opportunities.

In an advanced society, in which each one could be overloaded by information, quality is more important than the amount of information. “Mediation” of information would be more and more important, ensured by the authority, transparency and professionalism of the operators.

The Swedish experience, presented in the book, of a Career counselling university programme, shows the sustained focus on these problems in European countries where “social design” and welfare have a great tradition.

The spread, in Italy, of the attention to the organisational well-being, caused largely by the legislator’s decision to include the work climate between the psycho-physical risk factors related to work (and the assessment of the organizational climate among the compliance requirement) can move the attention of the employer on the views and the needs of the worker in the processes of development and training.

It would be interesting, however, in undertaking new research activities, to pursue the task of identifying the patterns and the best practices welding guidance to training, within and outside the company.

At the end of the research, it seems us that, in pursuing this goal, we can shed new light on the process that transforms a territory in a learning region, a territory that learns.

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[1] Descartes R., Discourse de la méthode, Flammarion, 2006

[2] By Rullani see also: “Lo sviluppo del territorio: l’evoluzione dei distretti industriali e il nuovo ruolo delle reti di città”, in Economia Italiana, N°2, 2009 (http://www.unicreditreviews.eu/uploads/04_rullani_427-472.pdf)

[3] Learning Region, definition: in Wiki-management (http://cek-lab.stoa.it/wiki/index.php/Learning_region) edited by Stoà

[4] Stoà (a cura di), La formazione manageriale in una learning region, Franco Angeli 2008

[5] Boyatzis R.E., Cowen S. S., Kolb D.A., Innovation in professional education: steps on a journey from teaching to learning, Lavoisier, 1995

[6] Richard M. Locke, Building trust – Paper presented at Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association, September 2001 (http://rlocke.scripts.mit.edu/docs/papers/Locke_BuildingTrust.pdf)

[7] Nacamulli, R., Quacquarelli, B., “Nuove metodologie di formazione per la formazione del capitale umano e sociale”, in Stoà (a cura di), La formazione manageriale in una learning region, Franco Angeli, 2008

DeSCarTES – Development Skills for Career, Training and Employment Support

Agreement n. LLP-LDV-TOI-09-IT-0483

Lifelong Learning Programme (2007 – 2013)

European Parliament Decision n. 1720/2006/CE and Council Decision on 15/11/2006 (GU L 327/45 on 24/11/2006)

Financing Agreement

Transfer of Innovation Multilateral Projects

Leonardo Da Vinci Lifelong Learning Programme

DeSCarTES project has been funded with support from the

European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information container therein.