Opening the gates to collective perspectives on career

Moving away from individualisation to a holistic purpose

Resumé

The term 'career' holds various meanings, ranging from a pathway to achieve position or status in life to a political concept focused onemployability and the development of transferable skills. We suggest that these often individualised and instrumental strategies arenarrow and impoverished, given that the individual also enacts and contextualises ‘career’ throughout their lives. As higher educationresearchers working with curriculum and career development, we argue that a broader, more holistic approach can be achieved if thefocus is instead on what university educators do when they teach. This perspective enhances how we understand and conceptualisecareers as embedded in how teaching is practised and how disciplines are articulated - as a future way of being and acting in the world.We seek to open the gates to the collective practices of disciplines and the outcomes they (often) implicitly hope to frame.