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CHAPTER 10
Career development in later working life: implications for career guidance with older workers 187

actively involved with older people from the beginning of the older years (age
45 plus) to around 70 years, but the potential impact of these decades in
working and learning extends for the rest of the lifespan. This chapter focuses
specifically on the role of careers advisers: those whose primary responsibility
is to help people to make personally satisfying choices about work and
learning at all stages of their lives.
Career guidance refers to services intended to assist people, of any age
and at any point throughout their lives to make educational, training and
occupational choices and to manage their careers. Career guidance helps
people to reflect on their ambitions, interests, qualifications and abilities. It
helps them to understand the labour market and education systems, and to
relate this to what they know about themselves (OECD, 2004, p. 19).
Much policy attention has been focused on the role of the careers adviser
in relation to knowledge and understanding of opportunity structures and
labour-market information, and sometimes perception of the role extends little
beyond this. Hirsch (2005) comments on the UK situation: ʻover the past few
years, the government has promoted provision of guidance to adults, in
particular through the establishment of local information, advice and guidance
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partnerships. As Geoff Ford ( ) spells out, ʻthis has had a limited impact,
particularly for older adults, partly because of low take-up and partly because
such services are better designed to provide relatively low-level advice and
information rather than potentially life-changing guidanceʼ (Hirsch, 2005, p. 8).
Life-changing guidance, as implied too in the OECD description of career
guidance, requires the careers adviser to have considerable understanding
of the individual person, and to support self-reflection undertaken by the
individual. At one level, understanding relies on the skill to unpick the ʻrealʼ
need that underpins the presenting problem. At another level, it is ability to
understand both the presenting and the underlying needs within the
circumstances of the life of that individual.
Considerable literature examines the impact on employment choices of the
social circumstances of the individual (Bates, 1993; Evans, 2002; Roberts,
1971, 2009; Willis, 1977). Most of such work relates to the transitional period,
often quite lengthy, between the end of statutory education and full adulthood
(roughly the ages from 16 to 25 years). Within growing sociological literature
on older people, comparable examination of disengagement from, as opposed
to entry to, the workforce largely confines itself to issues of finance and (ill)

( ) The late Geoff Ford, a pioneer in promoting the career development needs of older people,
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undertook many related studies. Particular reference here is to Am I still needed?ʼ (Ford, 2005).