Clear Trusted Career Advice for West Australian Students
Give students a copy of this poster and get them to fill it out at the start of the year.
It is a great way to get to know your students and it is a terrific way to get the kids to reflect on their own lives at the start of the year.
At the end of the term, semester or year get the students to check out their poster to see how they have changed.
Infocus Careers is an independent organisation which is solely supported by insanely great subscribers who share information with me, support each other and help me to pay my bills.
I can talk about careers under water so if you would like to chat about how I can help you to improve your career or the services you deliver, give me a ring on 0434056412 or email me at Bev.J@infocus-careers.com.au
This has been an amazing year for career practice in Western Australia.
We have:
Check out details on how far we have come at WA Career Education was a Tipping Point Year in 2022
In 2023 we need to consolidate the role of career practitioners so that they become a permanent robust force that delivers guidance, hope and optimism to West Australians. Try these three practical steps to make 2023 brilliant.
COVID isn’t going to disappear and teacher shortages are going to get worse in 2023. Here are some practical steps to fix your workplace.
In July the WA government released a new Code of Practice for Psychosocial Hazards under the OH&S legislation that says workplaces can’t continue to make you stressed, fatigued and burnt out. It covers things like:
In August the government introduced a Code for Dealing with Violence and Aggression at Work which specifically identifies lecturers, teachers and teacher aides as being vulnerable targets for this sort of behaviour from students. It also identifies strategies for making your workplace better.
Practical Action
The Code of Practice for Psychosocial Hazards in the Workplace identifies strategies for making your workplace better.
2.1 Professional Development for Career Practice
You need to consolidate your knowledge and skills as a career practitioner by going to the:
Practical Action
Get in early. Make sure your boss understands that knowledge of opportunities emerging outside the school is critical to your work. Book early if professional opportunities require time out of school.
2.2 Professional Development for YOUR Career
There is no career path for career practitioners within schools. After a few years, you will be able to take your professional knowledge and skills into new roles.
You need to look to where you want to be next, check out what you need for those jobs and start building those skills.
Practical Action
We tell kids to go for awards, competitions and scholarships. We need to take our own advice.
Practical Action
We are on a roll in WA.
We have made such amazing progress in 2022 but our work needs to be consolidated through conscious and deliberate action to build a robust career industry in WA.
Together we can do great things in 2023
Subscribe to the only careers newsletter in Australia, designed to enlighten educators about local trends, ideas and new approaches to the career challenges for school students.
Bev Johnson Director, In Focus Careers
This is the information that I gave in my Grad Cert talk.
I use a double-diamond strategy when I do career counselling.
My one-on-one sessions last over two hours with a break in the middle.
The “problem” doesn’t have to be specific. You can start with a general notion about “what to do next”.
The first part of my session is counselling.
Based on all this information, we then narrow it down so that we can define the problem more specifically.
For example:
To find a path out of school that is helping people, that allows me to do my sport, where I can use social media communications.
Break
4. We go for a walk. We will be tired, the counselling is draining.
Everything about counselling must be about trust so there is no contrived agenda during the walk. We just relax, but often the client will reveal information that helps me to identify solutions.
5. This part is easier. It is a discussion about opportunities generated from my knowledge of courses, employment and networks that could support the overarching goal. This is the information that I deliver every month through In Focus Careers News.
We then narrow down the opportunities to a specific goal:
To find a social media course that would help me to work in the disabled sport industry.
At the end of the session, I undertake to get their personal career plan to them that day. They commit to doing at least two of the actions within a few days.
Hope that helps.
We started on a high, and the year just got better.
There were 2 big career education initiatives from WA Government in 2022 that were the biggest thing since the launch of the Jobs and Skills centres:
These initiatives have stretched workers to breaking point.
Here is a month-by-month summary of the big career events for 2022 and some predictions for 2023
70 New Career Educators in WA Government Schools
To paraphrase Tom Peters:
when you look back at a project you can always see what you could have done better.
The Career Practitioner initiative that the Ed Dept launched in schools at the start of the year, was like a juggernaut.
Once it got rolling, it couldn’t be stopped by pandemics, lack of know-how, COVID-driven relief classes or resistance from rusted-on traditional school systems.
EVERY new career practitioner struggled.
Many considered leaving.
Some left.
Congratulations to those who survived. You are the leaders who join West Australian career practitioners who are leading new approaches to the career challenges of today and tomorrow.
Career Connect Conference
We went ahead with the Notre Dame/CDAA Career Connect conference despite COVID concerns because career practitioners rely on it to hear what is new and emerging for the year.
We opened the big glass doors, which made the PowerPoints hard to read and we didn’t share microphones, which made people hard to hear.
Uni Rankings
NERO and JEDI
NERO and JEDI online services were launched. I initially criticised the ridiculous strangled acronyms that the National Careers Commission created to describe:
I still think the acronyms are crazy, but both services provide fantastic information that helps career practitioners do their job better.
VET staggers under booming numbers
By March VET numbers in WA were up over 30% on 2021 figures and female VET students had increased by 40%.
VET providers were having a hard time finding enough lecturers and the students must have been hanging from the rafters.
Unis
All of the unis brought their open days forward from August to April/May to capture students as they applied for early offers.
Borders Opened
After restricting entry to WA for a couple of years, we opened our borders. COVID starts to hit WA hard and the skills shortage doesn’t change.
Career Conversations Start Touring
The Dept of Education started touring the state with its Career Conversations for parents.
Gender barriers start to break down
The shortage of workers in traditional male industries resulted in a surge in strategies to attract women into STEM, building and resource industry jobs.
We started getting photos of real women who don’t look like they are out of a Barbarella movie ad.
Job ad numbers are up again
Job vacancies continued to soar in WA and our economy continued to boom.
Gap Year programs emerge from hibernation
The gap year programs started up again after two years of COVID lockdown. There seem to be more of them and they are more diverse.
Uni Outreach Programs
Was there an upturn in the number of school outreach programs that universities were running? When the pandemic hit unis closed down many programs and put off staff, like Kim Flintoff who used to run the biggest uni outreach programs in WA. In April I started to see more opportunities for schools to engage with unis.
May 2022
May was a big month for me so I lost the career focus a bit:
July 2022
August 2022
New Federal Government Departments
The government separated the work done by the Department of Education, Skills and Employment into:
SkillsWest Expo
Half of the stalls seemed to be associated with the resources industry. There were also lots of stalls for people with special needs.
Not many stalls were just a person with a brochure this year. They had all upped their game like the Turf Management people had a hole-in-one competition. It was great.
Predictions for 2023: Consolidation
“Lethargy” hits workers
Career practitioners from other states are reporting what they are calling “lethargy” as workers choose NOT to put work as their #1 priority. They are no longer focusing on productivity outcomes achieved through paid work.
Workers are ignoring the pleas of employers and kicking back, refusing promotions, not doing overtime and leaving their jobs. They are focusing on their relationships, saving the environment, fitness, learning and creativity.
Strategies employed by career practitioners may need to refocus.
Employers become engaged with school education
As the worker shortage hit, 2022 saw growth in employer awareness of their need to be good employers.
2023 will see more employers engaging with schools and supporting the development of students’ awareness of the world of work.
Barriers between school, work and community will become more porous as education becomes more holistic.
Online education improves
On Q&A in August this year author Johan Hari said:
Online sex is okay but it isn’t as good as the real thing.
I feel the same about online learning. It can’t capture the richness of the physical world.
But, online learning allows us to engage with different opportunities, so we will get better at it. We will break away from hard corporate presentations and attempt to make them more human by introducing warm data wherever possible.
Green Careers Surge
Peter Dutton famously derided Pacific Islander complaints about Australia’s response to global warming by asking:
How long can they tread water?
The east coast of Australia is being hit so hard by floods that green careers will get more attention than they already have from this government.
Watch for job titles that you have never seen before, and micro-credential that rapidly add green technical skills to existing qualifications.
Micro-Credentials
The VET Sector can introduce new developments by updating one unit of competency and qualified workers can quickly take that recognised unit.
In 2023 Universities will come up with micro-credential standards that give them more flexibility to support change.
Career Product Vendors in WA
The boom in career services in WA has stimulated a boom in the number of companies coming to WA with their career development products. Virtual reality products are the most common and they are popular because students can explore workplaces without the need for the rigours of excursion bureaucracy.
Many vendors are harvesting personal data. See Data is the new oil.
I hope In Focus Careers continues to be the #1 Career Product in your workplace. 
Jobs on offer are both operational and administrative.
Yuval Noah Harari 21 Lessons for the 21st century.
We do buckets of online personality tests, career quizzes and psychometric tests as we sift through our options for the best, brilliant future that we love.
The more tests we do, the more test owners can build their information about us into a personal profile. They link their data with data collected by others and build your profile. The older you get, the more they know about you. You become a commodity to be manipulated and used to their advantage.
Handing over our information to strangers online is like giving our house keys to strangers and letting them in.
Don’t hand over personal information online without knowing:
It’s the law. There are 13 rules (principles) that guide privacy in Australia. You can find the principles in the Australian Privacy law HERE.
This Download This Show podcast warns:
Data is the new oil. Companies want our information. The company that owns our data and can analyze it and make sense of it, owns the future.
Manal al-Sharif, Tech4evil podcast on Download this Show @ 8m17sec
Companies are not in the business of giving stuff away. They have to get something out of it. Most companies offering “free” services do not have strict rules about how they are going to use the information that you hand over. If they are not being straight with you about what they are going to do with your information once they have it, don’t hand it over.
You need all the help you can get to unearth your best path through life.
When you start looking for quizzes go for government sites like MyFuture which have strict rules about what information they collect and how they use it. Check their privacy policy as an example of what is okay.
It is long.
It needs to be.
You can check out these sites and be reasonably sure they will not be using your information to harm you or try to sell you something. But don’t assume they have great privacy and security to protect your personal information. I bet every organisation is revising its privacy and security strategies after the Optus debacle.
If you are unsure, ask me bev.J@infocus-careers.com.au. I won’t be able to see their security regime but I will be able to check to see if they are complying with the Privacy Law.
Schools have not been great in 2022.
We are not the only ones struggling to cope with staff shortages, systems breaking and clients needing more. The oil, gas, health, aged care, child care, agriculture and maritime industries are in the same boat and schools around Australia are struggling to create systems to help teachers to cope so that they can help students to thrive.
COVID is showing up cracks that had been papered over in good times by people going beyond their job descriptions to make the systems work.
Sound familiar?
This morning I had breakfast with Jen Sheridan, Danielle Kabilio and Dr Sherrilyn Mills at Social Manna in Vic Park. They are all consultants who are working with organisations to stop COVID-delivered workplace crises.
Sherrilyn is a psychosocial, occupational health, and wellbeing specialist.
Danielle works on psychosocial health, helping stressed people and stressed workplaces.
Jen is an executive coach who is working with education departments in other states.
They are experts in developing strategies to create better-functioning workplaces. The new West Australian Occupational Health and Safety Psychological Hazards in the Workplace Code of Practice is now guiding workplaces on what they should aim for. Schools in 2022 aren’t coming close. Things are probably much worse now than they were three years ago.
I have heard of principals bringing the new Code of Practice to meetings, and showing it to staff. I haven’t heard of any school that has developed a strategy to comply with this new requirement. Schools have been too busy doing crisis management.
Schools are going to have to comply with the West Australian Code. It isn’t a “nice to have” bonus.
If you are trying to find ways through this really tough year in the workplace, you could try contacting one of these experts. They may be able to set you in the right direction. It may be possible for a group of schools to collaborate with these consultants to create better workplaces by 2023 rather than facing another year of crisis management.
Subscribe to In Focus Careers News to help your students to thrive.
Most of the green jobs seem to be in conservation and land management, but this will change.
Last week the Clean Energy Council ran a webinar where they talked about:
There are some big volunteer sites where you can find opportunities in many different industries:
This map of Green Volunteering opportunities may help students easily find and explore ways to engage in green careers.
There are 30 medical schools across Australia and New Zealand. You can apply to as many as you like. In Western Australia Curtin, UWA and Notre Dame universities all offer medical degree courses and UWA also offers dentistry.
All universities have career counsellors to provide information and support to students. This is a free service and you don’t have to enrol at the university after you have met with the counsellor.
Thousands of students apply for medicine each year. They all have good scores on ATAR or the equivalent test in whatever State or country they are from. Most don’t get in.
Find more information at Getting Into Medicine WA for 2023 AND So you want to be a doctor.