For nearly 20 years I led staffing organizations that hired talent for some of the most recognizable corporations in Southern California. We hired tens of thousands of workers and gained insights into their career trajectories and their struggles with both managing their careers and achieving career well-being. This exposure to career dissatisfaction experienced by many high wage and high skill technology workers led me to advocate for the development of a career counselling practice integrated as a corporate employee benefit, within human resources, to drive employee engagement and career well-being. This model served more than 15,000 employees, and boosted engagement and merit scores.

My focus shifted to applying our career development learnings into a corporate social responsibility program working with middle school students focused on integrating age appropriate career development with a hands-on STEM learning experience. This idea developed into the Qualcomm Thinkabit Lab, a student enrichment program focused on engineering and world of work exposure that’s served more than 49,000 students since 2014. 

This led me to the opportunity to launch the World of Work Initiative in the Cajon Valley Union School District. This initiative began in 2016 as an idea to develop and integrate a systemic career development framework deployed by classroom teachers in primary grades, integrated with existing curriculum, to build on the successful elements of the Thinkabit Lab experience. My district of 17,000 students, 900 teachers and 27 schools is embracing our vision to develop happy kids, living in healthy relationships, on a path to gainful employment.

Career development is the ultimate relevance maker for students, and I hope that our work will raise the bar for all educational institutions to ensure that careers provision happens for every child, in every grade and every year.

The future of work has many mantras: Industry 4.0; automation; multiple careers; aging workforces; changing employment structures; and the jobs of the future haven’t been invented yet. 

How individuals and economies will thrive in this environment is about how well educators and employers work together to deliver lifelong skills. 

Workplaces, industry training systems, and tertiary education must embrace changing skills to ensure learners and workers acquire the adaptability needed to thrive in the fast-changing world of work. 

Schools play a major role, but can’t be expected to make students ‘employable’ on their own. 

Josh will discuss innovations in New Zealand at the school-work ‘interface’, and will argue that a culture change is required in education institutions and in employers to create pathways and connections into the workforce, and subsequently to support lifelong career development. 

What is required is a significant shift in how we develop soft skills in our youth and set them up for their future. All these factors highlight the critical importance of careers advice and information, as an all-ages service supporting lifelong learning journeys. 

Josh’s presentation will cover

• International trends – what’s promising, what’s working

• Schools and employers – creating connections

• What employers are looking for

• The role of parents and influencers on career decision-making

• The growing role of work-based learning.