The Case for Career Planning in Government Funded Employment Programs

To present a case for placing the emphasis on strategic short, medium and long-term individual career planning in government funded employment programs, rather than the current focus on immediate employment only. This paper intends to make the case that an emphasis on teaching unemployed individuals how to plan will achieve even greater short-term results than the current, traditional approach applied by most programs

 advantage to some Canadians who are competing against other Canadians for jobs in a limited labour market.  Any employment opportunity found by these agencies for their clients would have been filled whether or not the agency existed therefore leaving one to question the fiscal responsibility to the taxpayer and the sustainability of the program.

These results ended the concern that ICS may be too ‘long-term’ with its emphasis on planning. 78% of those putting together a long-term plan, based on a work-purpose, were employed or doing productive work (schooling or training) within 4 months as compared to 31% who had received the Standard Job Services programs. The study also indicated that  ICS participants would continue to plan their careers and be unlikely to return to Income Assistance. ("ICS clients appear to have remained at high levels of self-awareness and self-efficacy from program entry to follow-up… while SJS clients show a decline in their level of self-awareness and self-efficacy over the course of the program intervention.”)²

A SOLUTION THAT IS YET TO BE APPLIED
The Cambie Group study was intended to determine whether the Province of BC should include this level of planning within its programming.  Although the results were conclusive, determining that  it would be beneficial for both clients and taxpayers, a resistance from employment agencies who feared it would cut back on their funding or interfere with the control they had over their clients in meeting placement goals derailed the results of the study moving forward.

A subsequent study was arranged in the United Kingdom by Working Links, a large non-profit organization. The study was designed to have a group of Working Links clients participate in a 5-day version of ICS while another group participated in a 5-day version of their Standard Job Services. The 2nd phase would do the same, 2 groups receiving  different programs but this time over 3 days as opposed to 5.  This was done in an attempt to measure how the different lengths of the workshop would impact the results.

The study fell apart when the groups would meet at the end of the day and compare what they were receiving. The group receiving Standard Job Services insisted that they receive ICS and not be used as ‘guinea pigs’ for the sake of the study. The manager of the program agreed, and we amalgamated the groups into one.

Working Links was able to compare the ICS results with their own results in certain areas however:

Once again it became clear that  putting the emphasis on purpose and planning provided substantial results within the program.  The decision was made  to provide ICS in Working Links programming. Unfortunately,   as they were preparing to implement the changes, a change in government occurred  and Working Links lost their contract to provide these services.

The effectiveness of the ICS approach and the fact that it does not fit in with current government mandates is evident in the following testimonial from Open Door Group, an employment agency in Kamloops BC. They delivered the program in 2013-14 got better than expected results (clients writing comprehensive plans, becoming motivated, taking action, 98% satisfaction rate, etc.) but could not convince the provincial government to provide funding as it did not meet their job search or essential skills requirements (see VSF explanation at bottom of the testimonial)

OVERVIEW:
Implicit Career Search (ICS) is a career decision making and planning program designed to have Clients define their career goals and cause them to be accountable for seeking out the specific support services they require to execute that plan. The program consists of 6 – 3-hour modules that can be delivered over 3 days. Clients are directed through the modules by a broad spectrum of specifically defined exercises, which includes scientific assessments, lecturettes, movement and guided imagery exercises and small and large group interactions. Each module is focused in its objective and is designed to help Client’s produce an effective and achievable career plan, similar to that of an Action Plan, and to be accountable for the implementation of the steps necessary to achieve economic independence. As this plan is developed by the Individual, based on values and competencies they’ve identified themselves through this process, the level of engagement and motivation is significantly higher to follow through and achieve their career goal.

Open Door Group began piloting ICS in June 2013 as part of our EPBC Internal Delivery Model. Not only are we seeing increased levels of Client engagement and motivation, but we are also experiencing efficiencies in the development of individualized Action Plans due to the group based facilitation factor.

Open Door Group is achieving a 98% ‘excellent’ satisfaction rate at this point in our Pilot. Some of the comments received from Participants are noted below.

Open Door Group has broken down each Module of ICS and attached a ‘bundle’ of related ESS Topics (11 in total) and 2 Additional Assessment Topics (2.2.2) that compliment the content covered in ICS. To confirm that the Ministry supports the parallel between Service ID’s identified to be billed as part of the delivery for ICS; a Remedy ticket was forwarded by our CAPA – see response below:

"As you may know, there is an Employment Counselling Resources and Assessment Tools Inventory available on the Extranet, but the Ministry has been very careful to add a waiver: " 

Resources listed in the inventory are not recommended or endorsed by the Province of British Columbia.

The same waiver would apply to Implicit Career Search (ICS). I have seen promotional material on this tool in the past, but I have no personal experience of it and I would not in any way recommend or endorse it. However, based on my understanding of the material, I believe Naomi* is correct in assessing that it is best suited to assisting Clients to "prepare" for job search and work.
For ESS bundling purposes (either group workshops or individual sessions), the VSF Service ID's that Naomi* has identified all fall within the "prepare" for job search and work or Essential Skills categories, which is appropriate.

*Naomi Bullock – Senior Program Director for Open Door Group

Contact: 1-866-377-3670 / naomi.bullock@opendoorgroup.org

The purpose of this study is not to promote my own program as much as it is to present a case for including a strategic approach to career planning for individuals participating in government employment programs.

An effective career plan would look very much like a good business strategic plan. The Implicit Career Search has captured this in 6 modules:

Before making a career decision it is worth examining how we go about making decisions in general. How much, and how effectively, do we listen to others? How influenced are we by our culture and/or upbringing? How aware are we of the unconscious payoffs we seek from some decisions? How much choice do we have and want over the direction of our lives? How well are our current career beliefs working for us?

Flexibility in behaviours, feelings and self-concept are crucial to career success in the 21st Century. No longer can we get away with the limitations of our personality. A narrow perception of life will limit our options. We have all developed rigidities in behaviour (“I don’t do groups.” “I like others to take charge.” “I don’t allow my feelings to affect my decisions.”). And we have allowed ourselves to be limited by labels (Introvert/Extrovert; Perfectionist; Imposter; Loser; Victim; Type A personality; Type B personality; Nice person; etc. etc.) By cleaning the lens of our perception we can see whether or not these labels are accurate and, most importantly, helpful.

Now that we have a clearer understanding of ourselves we can express who we want to be as a person? How do we want to relate to, not only work, but relationships, money, pleasure, and other aspects of our lives? Who do we intend to be?

Having defined who we want to be we can now tackle what we want to do for work. Where do we want to make a difference? What needs fixed? What would we like to see improved? The Work Purpose is not a job title. Someone who wants to provide safe housing for low income families may deliver that work purpose by becoming a carpenter, or an administrator of a non-profit, or a politician. The Work Purpose Statement defines the contribution. The career is the vehicle that delivers the work purpose.

Once a work purpose is declared it is time to identify the skills necessary to deliver it. What skills do we already have that will serve that purpose? What skills do we require? How do we get them? How do we survive in the meantime? It is important to realize that, no matter what we do, we get paid for our skills. We do not get paid for the quality of our resume or marketing techniques, they help us get paid for the skills we have developed. It is at this stage that the actual career path is decided upon.

Now we write down our plan to deliver the work purpose. This involves Vision Stages, with Implementation Steps and Contingency Plans. It addresses our immediate needs and identifies how we intend to progress in our careers, and what we will do if things don’t go as planned (they won’t!). This plan provides both the motivation and the security to achieve our dreams. One achievable step at a time.

The Implicit Career Search views career planning as a heroic journey (Joseph Campbell) involving an internal journey which requires declaring what we want to contribute to the world and an external journey to strategically deliver this contribution in the form of a career. The internal, self-reflective modules of the program are designed to increase participants’ self-awareness, self-esteem and self-efficacy. Making a career plan without including these qualities would simply result in participants making the same mistakes that led them to the position they find themselves in now; or, as often happens in current employment programs, they are provided with short-term assistance for the current situation but soon find themselves with the same problems once the assistance is removed.

The effect of increasing self-awareness in individuals on their ability to cope with societal problems was studied by Dr. David Hawkins (1927-2012), Medical Director of the North Nassau Mental Health Center (1956–1980) and Director of Research at Brunswick Hospital (1968–1979) on Long Island. His findings clearly explain the benefits of even a small increase in self-awareness in individuals.

*LOC (Level of Consciousness) is a scale of self-awareness developed by Dr. Hawkins that measures self-awareness on a logarithmic scale from 0 (low) to 1000 (high)The ‘tipping point’ can be seen when LOC moves to 200. The basic requirement of Level 200 is the understanding of ‘self-perception’ which is a major focus of all Implicit Career Search based programs. According to Hawkins’ research there is a drastic shift in the rate of unemployment from 50% to 8% when the level of consciousness (or self-awareness) moves above 200. These figures correspond with the results of studies of The Implicit Career Search.

An online version of The Implicit Career Search (Career Hero) was developed in 2018 and delivered through various career agencies in the Calgary region. This involved training career counsellors to guide their clients through the program. Several in-depth discussions were held during these sessions on the topics presented in this paper. The feedback  received was that the Employment Agencies do not encourage their clients to plan, because their funding is based on getting their clients into work as quickly as possible. As discussed throughout this paper, at first blush this mandate seems reasonable – the government is funding programs to get people to work in order to reduce unemployment. Upon further investigation, however, this does not make sense: the government funding is helping certain people to get jobs that would have been filled whether or not the assistance was provided.

The career counsellors involved in these discussions unanimously agreed that placing the emphasis on planning, as described in this paper,  would help make their jobs make more sense to them, especially with the evidence showing this emphasis provides even better short-term results than does their current approach.

 At present Alberta is experiencing an unemployment rate of 17% , while there are over 100,000 jobs available. Although this evidently seems contradictory, statistics like these are not uncommon.  Thirty years ago when employment agencies first came into being, it seemed to make sense to have them place suitable people into those jobs. Unfortunately this has not worked for a number of reasons. Some of the jobs do not pay enough to lift  individuals with families out of poverty, some require specific skill sets and, others, involve large relocation costs. Governments have made a valiant attempt at providing funding to overcome these issues but the gap still exists and there is a large turnover rate involving clients referred to jobs such as these.

What I have experienced when the emphasis is placed on long-term planning, is that individuals will put this type of job into their plan and  they will see the benefit of taking work immediately because they know where it will lead them in the future. We refer to this as a ‘seed’ job, one that gets the plan off to a start, not one that you are expected to remain in for life.

Brentwood Bay Resort (appendix) is an example of this. High staff turnover is an accepted part of the hospitality industry but the general manager of the resort decided to tackle it by providing staff with The Implicit Career Search workshop,  encouraging them to set long-term plans based on a work purpose and using their current position at the resort as their seed job. The results were definitive as, in over a three-year period the turnover rate went from 72% - 47% to an unheard of 7%. Staff were making career plans to eventually move on from the resort and, as the study also shows, were highly motivated to work while there.

There is no ‘field’ of career planning at this time, unlike the sciences of biology and chemistry or even psychology and philosophy. What is being offered is a selection of ad hoc responses to the industrial age concept of ‘job’. These usually involve areas such as current interests, personalities, skills and values all intended to help the individual identify what jobs they would ‘fit’ into. This approach pays no heed to what the job is delivering. Is it making the world a better or worse place to be in? Does the job make the difference that I want to play a part in delivering?

The concept of ‘a job’ took hold in the industrial age when it was a useful method for people to work in teams to accomplish goals that could not be achieved by individuals. Little knowledge was available about the eventual harm that would result from these advances in technology  ie: pollution and global warming and  now we also have Artificial Intelligence to factor into the equation. Estimates are showing that western countries could be facing an unemployment rate of 50-70% as  AI replaces many jobs. If we carry on with the same, industrial age view of jobs, these numbers will continue to rise. Planning to contribute would take the career counselling field out of the Industrial age, right through the Information age and into our current age of Imagination.  Instead of trying to find someone to pay us to help accomplish their goals we will be learning how to sell our contribution to the world .As a byproduct of this innovative approach the world will see new ideas advanced to solve complex challenges all the while an individual’s satisfaction of contribution is being met.  The Implicit Career Search uses a hierarchical approach to career development that encourages individuals to: first and foremost  decide upon the contribution they want to make; then develop the skills necessary to deliver that; and finally learn how to sell those skills. Once these steps are in place, leadership and expertise will emerge and eventually the creative level that will be required to turn this bleak situation around.

The good news here is that the original Implicit Career Search study showed that the vast majority of individuals want to participate in such an approach.

Current career planning approaches often make the assumption that different ‘types’ of people - Youths/Seniors/Disabled/Indigenous/Millennials, etc. etc. need different types of career assistance. This is not the case with a strategic planning approach that, no matter how you are defined by others, simply asks:  “What are you going to contribute and how are you going to get paid for doing it?” It is still advisable for outside sources, such as government, to provide assistance to minority and disadvantaged groups, but the individual career plan is based on “What Can I Do?” rather than “What Can I Get”.

28 years of research and development has conclusively proven that the most effective way to motivate individuals is to encourage them to develop a plan to deliver work that has a purpose to it. This purpose is self-identified. One person may see working in the oil field as contributing to the positive evolution of the planet, where another may see that as destructive. Another may feel that improving others self-esteem by providing them with excellent service in a hair salon is a contribution, someone else may see that as frivolous. The key is not to ‘tell’ people what they should do but to provide them with an effective method to make this decision by themselves.

As stated earlier, the overriding hope of this paper is not to ‘sell’ The Implicit Career Search but to encourage leaders in government programming to consider having planning of this sort as the main emphasis of their programming. Experience has shown that, once this is put in place, the other programs (Standard Job Services) become even more effective as the participants see how these programs will be of benefit to them in the long run as well as the short term. This process has been proven to complement the programs already in place.

Steve Miller
6001B Hammond Bay Rd
Nanaimo, BC, V9T 5M5
250 751 1427
sma@shaw.ca

Programs:

ICS = Implicit Career Search developed by Steve Miller.

SJS -  Standard Job Search- a variety of activities provided by MoEST, and its agencies in the Kelowna District, ie. Starting Points, Vocational Skills Assessment, 2-week Job Club, Resume writing, Personal Development Workshops (Stress & Time Management, Problem Solving, LMI, interpersonal and team building skills)

Participants were directed to either ICS or SJS depending upon the date in which they applied for Income Assistance.  No other criteria was used to direct them.

Excerpts from page iii of the study:

"ICS clients participated in the 5-day Implicit Career Search Workshop, with 6 - 8 weeks of follow-up support, while the SJS Clients received a variety of other services, based on their need and choice.

"Ninety percent of the ICS clients participated in the post-program interviews and the follow-up survey, while only 33%  of the SJS clients could be persuaded to participate in the program follow-up survey.  While 95% of the ICS clients participated fully in the 5-day employment seeking workshop, only 65% of the SJS clients chose to be engaged in any ongoing job employment assistance services following the initial orientation at the Registration Centre.

"When participants were asked what they learned about themselves during the review phase of the workshop, almost half (44.4%) said they learned "lots" and another 25.0% said it acted as a refresher course for them.  Asked what they liked about the workshop, many agreed that it had given them things to think about.

Also all (96.0%) of the ICS clients said they felt either "definitely" or "somewhat" more confident as a result of the workshop, and 94.4% said they would refer a friend to the program.

"ICS client attitudes toward their program were very positive and it was apparent that strong attachments had been established between the clients and the program facilitators.

ICS Results (excerpts from Page iv)

"Assessment of ICS clients at follow-up revealed change across some of the psycho-social dimensions:

"High levels of satisfaction with the program were reported in the interviews with the ICS clients.

"ICS clients appear to have remained at high levels of self-awareness and self-efficacy from program entry to follow-up… while SJS clients show a decline in their level of self-awareness and self-efficacy over the course of the program intervention. 

Evaluation Excerpts produced by Tricia Archambault-Bowler, Transition Training, White Rock, BC. 

APPENDIX 2

1. WORKSKILLS STUDY

“ICS scored higher than the EP in all areas measured and was found to be twice as effective in the areas of: likelihood of sustaining employment and increasing self-esteem.

“ICS participants showed highly significant increases in job seeking attitudes, behaviours and cognitive skills compared to the EP participants.”

“The average client rating at beginning and end of ICS workshop: Monday 5.5 Friday 8.7”

2. MAX BURGERS RESTAURANTS

“Max wants to expand not only in Sweden but also in the rest of the world. But to do that we have developed exceptional leaders. That’s when we got in touch with the ICS program.”

“The most important change we are seeing is the drive and ambition that people attending the program are showing us. They have, under a few days, come to realize that “I am the one and only person responsible for my own development”. And that makes a world of difference.”