Congress 2021 blog edition
The University of Alberta Career Corner’s “Supporting Students’ Career Management” webcast featured strategies supervisors and advisors can employ to best support their students and encourage them to confidently manage their careers.
After acknowledging that the University of Alberta respects the histories, languages and cultures of its peoples, University of Alberta Career Advisors Tyree McCrackin and Mykhaylo Bodnar discussed their wide range of ideas for helping academic advisors during this interactive segment and answered questions from the audience.
McCrackin spoke about how growing up, he believed the word “career” was interchangeable with the word job or vocation. However, that is no longer the case. In order to reflect this change, the Career Centre at the University of Alberta has expanded its views on careers to include work, jobs, vocation, experience paid and unpaid, formal and informal learning and leisure activities.
Another topic McCrackin addressed was changing how we envision careers, as things are no longer as linear as they once were. In his own words, he said, “the idea of a career being linear is a model that we were presented early in our lives and it is something we have to abandon because for most people it does not look like that at all. So many people switch careers and are working in a career that they did not think they would ever end up working in.”
Using the Chaos Theory of Careers, McCrackin compared careers to the weather, which might seem predictable at first but as the time horizon moves, it makes it almost impossible to make accurate predictions. He acknowledged that complex influencers and variables can cause these career disruptions.
He concluded by imploring advisors to adopt planned happenstance, an approach to managing the Chaos Theory of Careers that embraces indecision, recognizes the future is uncertain and unpredictable, and that unexpected events will offer opportunity.