Students graduating from high school this year and next are moving into a world where mid-life career-change options that did not exist for my generation, and certainly did not exist for the generation previous to mine, have become increasingly common.
Initial career decisions and the preparation for those first career choices may simply be precursors to alternative career decisions made later in life.
Job-market watchers have been saying for years that modern workers will pursue more than one career over the course of a working life, and there are complex reasons why this may be more true now than ever.
One of the most common reasons people change careers mid-life is that they want to leave a positive impact — they need to feel that they are making a difference and want a career that offers that possibility.
A 2019 report by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario — “Lifelong Learning in Ontario: Improved Options for Mid-career, Underserved Learners” — identifies adult learners, especially change-oriented mid-career learners looking for new career opportunities, as an underserved and potentially lucrative market for post-secondary institutions.
A CBC report, also from 2019, points out that labour-market experts say that with Canada’s projected jobless rate of 4.3% as of January 2023, changing careers at mid-life may be more feasible and desirable than it’s ever been.
For those working in the halls of higher education, it has become apparent that the wider expectations and availability of career-development options will likely mean the development of programs that recognize that new career directions during an individual’s work life will be deeply intertwined with access to a new and more accessible post-secondary education.
That will require shifts from the traditional assumptions about how individuals prepare for a second career, or even for lateral moves within an existing career.
To this end, the Ontario report recommends that colleges and universities develop non-traditional programs that are short, flexible and lead to recognized credentials that are both portable among institutions and accepted by employers. It also suggests that post-secondary institutions introduce competency-based education (CBE) programs, which are particularly suited to meet the needs of adult learners with family and work responsibilities. CBE programs award credentials based on skills mastery rather than time spent in a classroom. The intention here is to enable students with related prior learning and work experience to apply that experience and progress quickly through programs that are usually offered online.
Access to new career-related knowledge would also be designed to allow students to learn at their own pace, providing a flexible and cost-effective alternative to traditional semester or term-long programs.
And there’s more to it than people deciding to change careers in mid-life.
This year’s high school grads will likely find that, as MIT economist David Autor points out, the labour market is effectively splitting in two — jobs are increasingly either high-skill and high-paying or low-skill and low-paying.
Part of the problem with relatively low-skill, low-paying jobs is that, thanks to technology, such jobs have become precarious. A long lineup at the cashier’s station? Use the self-checkout, which has been happily provided by the retail employer — no wages, no benefits and the customer does the work.
Even what in the past has been regarded as the middle range of labour-market opportunities requiring mid-level skills is disappearing and being replaced by technology, which excels at routine tasks with specified and limited results where computers can substitute for humans.
But in the future, Autor suggests, there will still be many high-education professional and managerial jobs that involve abstract thinking and creative problem solving.
Such jobs will also require complex communication skills, including knowing “the appropriate channels for getting things done,” through negotiating, influencing without authority and team-building skills — a whole new curriculum for post-secondary institutions trying to stay relevant.
Both the increasing prevalence of lateral changes within an existing career and complete redirection of career choices will require some fleet-footedness on the part of educators and adaptability on the part of today’s students at any point in their career journey.
The B.C. government study “Training for What,” which led to the development of the non-traditional, job-market-oriented Royal Roads University in 1995, noted tumultuous change in the workplace and emphasized that “many existing workers will need to be retrained into completely different occupations,” because work done by their parents and grandparents no longer exists.
gfjohnson4@shaw.ca
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
