While I was in Alberta I was able to meet up with Harvey Krahn of the University of Alberta. Harvey runs the School – Work Transition Project and particularly specialises in longitudinal research around career and life transitions.
I asked him whether his work had very much to say about the efficacy or otherwise of career development activity in school. In general he felt that it was very difficult to isolate the impact of a very small part of the educational experience on life and career trajectories. Having said that I’d be really interested to have a look at some of the kind of big longitudinal datasets that people like Harvey work on to see what we could pull out of them from the career development perspective.
However, aside from this self-interested line of questioning it was really interesting to talk with Harvey about some of the work that he’s been doing. I often feel that the career development literature isn’t very well connected up to the sociological literatures that look at the issues that career development is concerned with. People like Harvey are doing research that is all about career and the career development world should probably pay more attention to them.
I’ve added a few of Harvey Krahn’s articles to my CiteULike if you are interested in exploring some of his work.
Adventures in Career Development 