Editorial : Renewing career counselling to promote the facilitation of sustainable decent work across the globe

Abstract

According to Krapivin (2018:para. 1) “[m]uch of life over the past century conformed to the three-stage model of study, work, retire. It’s a model that was predicated on reasonably high levels of stability, both in the skills required in the workplace and also the labor market itself.” Hirschi (2018) contends that digitisation and automation (Schwab, 2016) represent key socio-economic developments in the twenty-first century that impact the world of business and the world of work substantially. Hirschi (2018) supports the claims of, for instance, Arntz, Gregory and Zierahn (2016), Hartung and Cadaret (2017), Maree (2018), and Savickas (2015), who maintain that contemporary occupational changes will set in motion the altering or even elimination of many jobs and that many new jobs and industries will emerge and create numerous new occupations and industries but also new ways of work. To address these kinds of occupational phenomena and associated challenges, it will be important to revise and renovate current theoretical perspectives that buttress and guide career counselling’s response to changes in the occupational world (Hartung, 2011; Maree, 2013; Savickas, 2015; Savickas & Porfeli, 2012). Taking into consideration the significant developments in information communication technology (ICT), it has become essential to reflect critically on our research, theory, practice, and policy making in career counselling. Rethinking career counselling models should also relate to and tease out the development and application of critical skills (C’s) such as critical thinking, curiosity, creativity, collaboration, communication, and career agility (Andersen, 2017; Lozanov, 2018; Wolfe, 2017), which are currently beyond the capability of robots and artificial intelligence.