Career Guidance and the Changing World of Work: Contesting Responsibilising Notions of the Future

Does the changing world of professional work need a new approach to accounting education?

“…Relevant WE (work experience) includes WIL (workintegrated learninglikely full-time) and WRL (work-related learning -part-or full-time work). Movement between the line from t 0 to t 1 depicts a conjectured reduction in employer-led graduate training programmes as responsibility for training is moved to students (Hooley, 2018).…”

“…Our first insight into the potential impacts of this 'new world of work' (Hooley, 2018) for accounting education came in 2009 during an interview with a very senior accounting executive within Oilco (name disguised), one of the world's largest companies. As the head of Oilco's SSC network, he explained how overseas graduates were hungry for good quality work in prestigious companies, adding, 'they are prepared to work any shifts I offer them to get their work passport stamped at a world-class company'.…”

The ‘Idea of Career’ and ‘A Welfare State of Mind’

“…At the same time however, the Nordic countries' high scores on various international measures of life quality, equality and welfare combined with a steady growth in GDP, gives other writers reason to conclude that generous and comprehensive welfare regimes are still viable, the proof of this is self-evident by their continued existence in neoliberal times (Dølvik, 2007). A similar point can be made about the future of work, how the power of continuity and slow change, combined with human hesitation because of undeclared ethical questions and lack of resources to implement radical changes slows the process down (Hooley, 2018). In other words, discussing career issues related to the context at hand and being cautiously prepared for change could be argued to be a fruitful approach.…”

“…There is a worry that automation will replace low skilled jobs, and that the future of work and employment belongs to the highly educated, flexible, resourceful and innovative worker, creating further distance between those who do well and those who do not. There is also a worry that career guidance will exacerbate these differences by responsibilising career actors (Hooley, 2018). These prospects are unsettling, and as the Nordic model is dependent on a high level of participation in the work force, the systems will struggle to sustain themselves if employment drops -even if the ideology of the Nordic model continues to withstand the pressures of neoliberalism.…”

Technological Unemployment and Its Educational Discontents

“…According to our research, the notion of educational discontent with technological unemployment and its sources is far too nebulous to be addressed directly. This is why employment strategies produce meagre results at their best (Peters, Jandrić & Hayes 2018;Hooley 2019), and this is where our breakdown of educational discontent with technological unemployment might be of use for rethinking and developing new forms of resistance. In the struggle against neoliberal (higher education) policies, we need to seriously take into account their relationships to technological unemployment; while we grapple with educational unemployment, we do need to understand its many faces, including but far from limited to, the human cost spelled out in dehumanization debates.…”