Paying more attention to CVs

It has been noticeable on most of our placements so far that one of the most common activities that goes on is CV preparation.

Given the importance of this activity to most of the organisations that we have been to, it is surprising how little serious thought is often given to the process.  A client will come in for an appointment and leave 45 minutes later with a completed CV.  There generally didn’t seem to be any particular quality checking or reviewing going on and it seemed like there was often a one size fits all approach.

The organisation that I have just been with has identified this as an area that needed to be looked at and have got together as a team to produce a set of standards.  They have put together examples of different types of CVs depending on the candidates situation, for example  if they have no work experience or perhaps are looking for a career change.  They are also putting into place an ongoing quality review process among staff to ensure that they are constantly producing CVs that work.

Given that the quality of the CV plays such an integral part in a client’s success in gaining employment, it is good to see it being given the importance it deserves.

Brief Thoughts on Interviewing Approaches…

One of the things I have noticed on my placement at a council run careers service is how their interviewing approach sometimes differs from the person-centred approach favoured by Careers Scotland. 

The latter believes that the client has all the answers and the resources to find things out for themselves.  The staff on my placement organisation commented that not all of their clients necessarily have the motivation or the ability to make decisions or research things themselves.  They take a more practical view and believe that sometimes a more directive approach is necessary in order to move the client forward, the alternative would result in no action at all.

Whilst the organisation does not claim to be offering their clients ‘career guidance’ as such and so follow no specific interviewing theories, the different approach is interesting because their clients could have just as easily ended up at Careers Scotland instead.  The situation is you have two organisations in the same area offering a similiar service (bizarre in itself!) but approaching the delivery of the service differently.

I have to admit I have found their practical approach to moving people towards employment very refreshing.  I think Careers Scotland could learn a few things from them!

Why Careers advisers need to be marketing experts

One thing I’ve noticed on placement, particularly when I was at a University was that an important part of the job of a Career Adviser was the process of marketing the services they offer.  It was not something that was ever  discussed explicitly, particularly in Careers Scotland, but nonetheless it was something that needed to be done.

In Careers Scotland, the marketing activities in a school involved little more than the occasional career session, the odd poster on  a wall or information in the careers library. 

In the University the methods were a bit more sophistacated, although I suspect this was very much dependant on the type of institution, in this case a ‘modern’ University. 

They had plasma screens around the university advertising events, display boards, window displays in the careers centre to entice students in (one of the careers advisers was from a retail background!).

It appeared that the University staff were very much more concerned with numbers coming through the door than their counterparts in Careers Scotland.

Given that a Careers Service is just like any other organisation that provides products or services, surely more importance should be placed on marketing skills when talking about the skills needed by Careers Advisers?

Just as we tell our clients to sell themselves on their CVs, we need to be selling the services we offer more effectively.

We worry about how to make our career sessions more interesting and engaging, but perhaps we need to be more concerned about raising the awareness of what we do so that our clients actively seek us out rather than coming because they have been sent by someone else.

Would the real community please stand up?

 The issue of communities is one that I found very thought provoking when considered in the context of my own town.

Whilst people talk about the strong sense of community in the town, the reality is the town consists of two separate communities.

The town is split between those ‘locals’ who were born and bred in the area and the ‘incomers’ who have moved to the area from elsewhere. The former would probably claim to be the ‘real’ community. They are the ones who have the real interests of the town at heart, they are the protectors of the green spaces and they alone stand against the developers endless quest to turn the town into one giant housing estate. They argue that because of their place of birth, the incomers have none of these interests at heart.

The battle between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ communities are played out on a weekly basis in the local paper where the leaders of one ancient institution or another proclaim their views as if they were the only ones that mattered.

Whilst you cannot deny that this community believe they are doing good, maintaining their 1950′s nostalgic view of the town, they are in fact just causing disharmony in the town. The reality is they are actually in the minority these days and the irony is that if you look at the people who do most of the ‘good work’ in the town, the majority of them are the so called incomers.

Despite this I still think of the town as being a good community to live in. I think this blog shows that it is hard to define what a community is, one persons definition of who is in their community is different to another’s – even when talking about the same physical group of people.

Getting Clients to Engage with Career Services

Over the past week I have observed various employability sessions with second year students at University.

Attendance at these sessions was generally fairly poor and the interest from those who had turned up was limited.  It occurred to me that from school level upwards, career advisers seem to come up against the same old problem of lack of engagement from their client groups.

It seems that whilst many career education sessions are well planned and delivered pro-actively at an early stage, it is not until the clients urgently require the services that they seek them out.

So what are the possible solutions to this problem?  At school ‘blanket interviewing’ could be seen as an attempt to ensure engagement from pupils.  On placement in Careers Scotland I noted a number of different incentives used, ranging from bus tickets handed out to cash payments in return for engagement!

As part of my current placement I have been lucky enough to spend a day at a more ‘traditional’ university.  They actually have a credit bearing module in career development which students can take as part of their course.  This module covers a range of useful employability and career related skills and is compulsory for students to attend.

In the opinions of some career advisers I spoke to, this was a good way to ensure better attendance at career sessions, whilst allowing more time to effectively cover the topics in detail.  Unfortunately the timetable at many universities just doesn’t allow the luxury of such courses.

So incentives do seem to work to a certain extent but I can’t help feeling that we need to find ways of getting clients interested without the need to use incentives.

Theories aside though, it also occurred to me that maybe your average second year student just isn’t really interested in preparing for an event that is still a couple of years away…

Crisis in Confidence in the Banking System

Reading through Schon’s article again made me think about the current crisis in the banking system and the effect it has had on their image among the general public.

He makes particular reference to the ‘overload’ suffered by the professions, in particular the medical profession.  He cites the cause as being the ‘task of coordinating the proliferating specialities which had arisen out of successful medical research and practice’.

A similiar comparison could be made with the banking system.  With increases in technology over the years the system has changed beyond all recognition.  Money no longer seems to be something physical, more just ones and zeroes flying around the globe in the blink of an eyelid. 

Billions of pounds mean nothing to us now when we hear about finance on the news, we now measure things in trillions.

Perhaps bankers have simply become  ‘overloaded’ with the pressures of the complex transactions that they now deal with on a a daily basis?

Who needs Professionals when we’ve got the general public?

The crisis of confidence in professional knowledge, discussed in the articles by Schon and Illich, seems to mirror the general dumbing down of society today.

Take the media for example and the popularity of shows such as X-Factor and Strictly Come Dancing.  In the old days, wannabe stars entered talent shows to be judged by the professionals and would succeed or fail based on their efforts and their talents.  Nowadays, the expert’s opinion, whilst still heard, is no longer valued when choosing a winner.  The general public is King and their votes are what make the difference between super-stardom and Karaoke.

To add insult to injury, the public even seem to enjoy taking advantage of the situation by turning their votes into a vote of popularity.  They deliberately vote against the most talented individual in favour of the most entertaining individual. 

This new phenomenon was observed recently on Strictly Come Dancing when John Sergeant was kept in the competition by the general public despite having all the dancing talent of a sack of potatoes.

Whilst the examples above are trivial, they illustrate how  the role of professionals in society is being degraded as a result of the increasing commercial and financial forces exerted upon them.

In this case, programme makers no longer have the funds to make quality entertainment and instead rely on tried and tested formulaic tv funded by call charges from the general public.  

For the Doctor, the financial forces are those of budgetary constraints and targets that state that they must see a certain number of patients in a certain timeframe.  Inevitably this leads to a decrease in the quality of the service and the general public losing faith in their abilities.