Revitalizing (career) counseling in education to help all people who are able and willing to work redesign their career-lives and find sustainable decent work

Abstract

Fundamental changes in the world of work are leaving many workers insecure and uncertain about their future. The situation is aggravated by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has resulted in billions of job losses globally (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020). According to the International Labor Organization (ILO, 2020), approximately 1.6 billion people in the informal sector are among those who have lost their jobs. This has led to greater uncertainty in occupational contexts, which have already been unsettled by increasing job changes (Hooley et al., 2020; Kelly, 2020). Work environments are no longer able to ‘hold’ (Winnicott, 1965) workers, leaving them insecure, traumatized, and without any sense of meaning and purpose in their work-lives. Numerous changes in the workplace (largely the effect of technological advances) have compelled workers to reconsider, reconstruct, and redesign their lives to improve their chances of finding sustainable, decent work (Di Fabio & Maree, 2016; Duarte & Cardoso, 2015; Guichard, 2018; Hartung, 2016, 2018, 2019; Ribeiro, 2016; Rossier, 2015a, 2015b; Savickas, 2007, 2019; Savickas & Savickas, 2020; UN, 2016).