Popular Decade After High School guide to be updated

CERIC is pleased to announce funding for an update of The Decade After High School: A Professional’s Guide. Led by researcher Cathy Campbell, the project will undertake a substantive revision of the popular guidebook that is targeted primarily at career development professionals and educators who work with young people.

The revised book, called Career Crafting the Decade After High School, outlines in more detail the context in which young people’s career journeys are unfolding and the strategies they use to find a career-related place. It also introduces eight “career crafting” techniques that can help career professionals integrate traditional career counselling practice with chaos-oriented approaches that emphasize the change and uncertainty of most young people’s career development.

Themes that are explored in the new edition include:

• The considerable distance between young peoples’ expectations about how the school-to-work transition would unfold and how it occurs for most in the decade after high school graduation

• Dispelling the “career myth” that young people should follow a linear, predictable route from secondary school to post-secondary training, and then on to a permanent, full-time job

• Reducing anxiety and normalizing unpredictability by acknowledging the existence of a range of factors that can change a young person’s educational and occupational pathways

Cathy Campbell has over 20 years’ experience as a researcher, career counsellor, program developer and manager in school, community college, university and government settings. Campbell recently completed a PhD and was the co-investigator for the Stories of Transition research project that was conducted by Dalhousie University in partnership with CERIC.

The new guidebook will be launched at Cannexus in January 2015. It will be available in print and ebook at a low cost or the pdf can be downloaded for free.