What I’ve written in 2020

Over the last year, I’ve been fairly busy. Not sure whether I’ve been busier than normal as my work pattern has changed so much. But as we come to the end of the year I thought that it might be useful to look back at what I’ve actually produced.

I usually manage to post most of the stuff that I publish on blogs etc to this site, but I don’t always remember to post about the more substantial, print-based pieces. So, I’ll concentrate on those here.

Most of this stuff is with co-authors, but if you follow the links you’ll find out who was involved in all of it. I think that there have been six main themes in my published work over the last year.

Career guidance policy

I’ve been writing regularly on career guidance policy. A lot of this is on the blog, but it included a piece looking forward at the start of 2020 and a plan for career guidance during Covid-19. I also evaluated the careers leader training programme with a team from IES.

Covid-19

Inevitably Covid-19 has been a big theme this year. It has been a big part of my work at the ISE (see below), but it has also seen me writing shaping the new normal: practising career guidance in the time of coronavirus and why a social justice informed approach to career guidance matters in the time of coronavirus with Ronald Sultana and Rie Thomsen. I also wrote up the lecture entitled A global pandemic and its aftermath that I gave to the Austrian Euroguidance organisation this year.

Student employment.

Through my work at the ISE I’ve been publishing regularly and extensively on student employment through the pandemic. A lot of this stuff is behind the paywall, but go to the ISE website if you want to see the territory that I’ve covered. Some bits in the public domain include It helps to have more strings to your bow (looking at the careers of creative graduates), Covid-19: Global impacts on graduate recruitment, recognising the changing labour market, and save the student labour market .

Comparative work on career and career guidance in different countries

Just as lockdown was settling in my Nordic colleagues and I published Career and Career Guidance in the Nordic Countries a 359 page open access book. It included an introduction that I contributed to and a chapter called Pining for the fjords in which I look at how those of us unfortunate enough to live in non-Nordic countries view career in the Nordic countries. Following on from this I’ve also published I don’t think anyone here has thought about career really: What the concept of ‘career’ means to Norwegian teenagers and school counsellors with Ingrid Bakke which again looks at career and career guidance in the Nordic countries (specifically Norway).

A long way away from the Nordic countries I’ve also published on careers work in Pakistan with Gulnaz Zahid and Siobhan Neary. In it we look at careers work in higher education in Pakistan and explore some possible options and ways forward.

I also co-edited a special issue of the NICEC journal looking at new and international voices in career development research (see the editorial).

Technology

I wrote a briefing note on career information and digital technology for myfuture Austrialia and published a paper on young people’s ideas about the gig economy with Esther Galfalvi and Siobhan Neary.

Career management

I’ve also been interested in how individuals pursue their careers in the context of organisations. Cathy Brown, Tracey Wond and I published Building career capital: developing business leaders’ career mobility which proposes a model of career capital based on Cathy’s research within a construction firm.

So that’s what I’ve been up to. Who knows what next year will hold!