CAREER MANAGEMENT SKILLS DILEMMA?

What happens when AI becomes a standard part of learning infrastructure? This is a key question facing educators and trainers in all disciplines including for career learning. A recent article on the adoption of AI in higher education institution learning infrastructure highlights the role/development of critical thinking as a cross curricular learning aim and outcome. While AI contributes significantly to recalling, summarising, structuring, and generating, it’s us humans who decide the appropriateness and relevance of its outputs. Sure, these outputs can be refined through asking AI the right question, providing detailed context (in themselves skills to be learned!). But critical thinking is required to evaluate the output/answer including challenging the AI system on the output provided. It’s a skill for life and it’s not easy work!

The current discussions concerning the competences required to use AI successfully recall the many debates about career management skills (CMS) – whether these are generic transversal life skills to be taught/learned across the national curricula or whether they are specific learning skills to be taught in specific career learning curricula. Visualising and planning one’s future is a generic life skill as well as key in career learning. Likewise, critical thinking is a generic life skill as well as a key skill in evaluating AI responses in career learning.

National frameworks developed for CMS (e.g. USA, Canada, Australia) are essential for defining aims, outputs, and outcomes of career learning but, in general, been developed apart from national and regional curricula and sometimes described as unnecessary overlays of frameworks and statements with little connection/alignment with national curricula. Indeed, CMS frameworks, as the NZ career development benchmarks remind us, require delivery inputs such as leadership, programme and services delivery, institutional/organisation engagement, and employer and industry engagement for successful implementation. Resources, both human and organisational, drive policy and systems implementation, and dedicated resources for career guidance are scarce or non-existent in many countries.

A more strategic approach may be to examine the national curricula to see whether/how such life skills are mentioned in the curricula, to question curriculum bodies on how these skills are applied to career learning, and to discuss the resources that would be required to implement such learning. It’s back to advocacy and influencing!

AI is providing a new opportunity to ask those hard questions of national/state curricula developers. Time to reach out!