Today, I’ve been writing some new content for our series of webinars aimed at helping careers advisors at schools to provide a better quality of career advice. The webinar has to do with “preparing for change and transitions”. In thinking about it, it strikes me that young adults need to realise that some of the changes  they face are entirely predictable whereas others are far less so. For example, we know for sure that on leaving school, we will either go to University or some form of further study or we will (try to) enter the world of work. These are entirely predictable.

If we look at these examples in more detail, let’s try and identify the essence of the change in each situation. For those young adults entering University, the real change has to do with coping with much greater personal freedom and independence. If we look at what’s required to cope well with this new situation, it comes down mainly to the quality of our decision making and our ability to learn from mistakes.

For those young adults entering the world of work, the challenges presented by this change are very different. I would argue that the biggest challenges have to do with fitting in, complying and figuring out how to make one’s mark.  The skills and attitudes required to make this transition successfully have much more to do with the ability to adopt the appropriate behaviours this new environment requires.  Decision making the learning from mistakes are still important, but not as important as learning and adopting the behaviours required by one’s working environment. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to sit down and figure out the kinds of things that should be done (generically) in order to fit in to a full time work situation.

So predictable change is one thing - unpredictable change is another. I would argue that unpredictable change in itself is becoming more predictable given the pace of change in our lives but also that this change requires a distinct set of change skills. These are largely about awareness (having a good radar), developing a broad range of commercial  and technical skills to improve one’s ability to adapt and having the confidence to act proactively. I’ll make sure to write on this in a future post.

Tags: Changes, Transitions

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 30th, 2010 at 5:36 pm and is filed under Career Counselling, Student Career Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.