Opening the gates to collective perspectives on career

- moving away from individualisation to a holistic purpose

Abstract

Often the word career is used to mean different things, e.g. as a pathway to a potential position, status in life or politically with a focus on employability and instrumentally where it is articulated as transferable skills. We suggest that these often individualised and instrumental strategies are narrow and impoverished as the individual is also enacting and contextualising ‘career’ throughout their lives. As higher education researchers working with curriculum and career development, we argue that a broader, more holistic approach can be achieved if the focus is instead on what university educators do when they teach. This perspective enhances how we understand and conceptualise careers 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.