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Not retiring: Why older people need good careers advice
Careers advice may conjure up visions of school or college leavers, but older people need good advice too, to move sideways as well as up or down.
Do you need careers advice? Not the kind of thing you got – or didn’t – at school, but proper help to help you back to work, help you transition to a new sector or just to help you rethink what it is you want to do? With the world of work changing so fast due to technological transformation and many jobs seeming virtually unrecognisable from what they were 10 or even two years ago, many of us are struggling to keep up. And it’s even harder if you’ve taken a career break.
A new report out this week from Demos and Phoenix Insights calls on the Government to guarantee that all citizens can access careers advice to address the UK’s low employment rate. It says introducing an ‘Employment Advice Guarantee’ as an underlying design principle for the new national jobs and careers service promised in Labour’s manifesto is vital.
The report outlines key target groups for advice. They include working parents needing greater work life balance, people looking for good work, many of whom have health conditions, and those who are open to change, but cautious.
There’s a lot of different initiatives out there, for instance, for those with health issues, but they can be hard to find. There are also a lot of coaches, many of whom do excellent work, but if you’re out of work or in a low paid job, it can be hard to afford them.
Demos recommends the different initiatives sit behind a ‘digital front door’ that brings everything together, making it easier to locate. The other issue is getting people, particularly older people, to understand that a careers site is for them and not just for school leavers. Demos says its research showed many people still associate the term careers advice with educational institutions. Many may also have had bad experiences with school careers advice services when they were younger.
Yet, as we work longer there will be more room and need for career change. Older people might be more likely to stick with a job they don’t particularly like for fear of trying to make the switch and because many jobs are changing so fast that they don’t recognise themselves in the job ads, even if they are currently doing something very similar to what is being advertised. It’s not just that they will not get through to interview; they won’t even apply.
There’s also a crossover with the working parent issue. Many will have changed jobs or taken a step back when their children were small. They might be raring to go in their 50s, but find it hard to accelerate. There is a lot of talk about transferable skills, but quite a lot of job adverts seem to want very specific things.
Demos is suggesting that the Government should do some brand testing for their new ‘national jobs and careers service’ to try to work out the best name so that it’s a service people understand and actually want to use. And then we need a general awareness campaign with people of all ages showing how it helps them.
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