Article relevant to CEG

Bill Law published a Cegs Occasional Paper called 'New Thinking for Connexions and Citizenship' in 2001.

If you are looking for accessible material on recent thinking in career development, this is the one for you. Written by Bill Law, although published as an Occasional Paper, it reads more like a hand book. If I say it is not a weighty tome, that is a compliment. I have found it very easy to dip into out of interest, and to interrogate about careers education.

The paper, as its title implies, considers the state of thinking on career development in the light of Connexions and education for citizenship, but reads more like a handbook than a conventional academic paper.

Suggested uses (p3) include staff development and action research to look at careers work, and the material included lends itself easily to a range of contexts within which career work is undertaken.

Law starts off by considering 'Theory and Your Work' (p4) and makes a convincing case for embracing theory in practice, and points out the parallel development in policy and theory (p6). He reprises the DOTS model (which considers Self; Opportunities; Decisions and Transition) and updates it with the new SeSiFu dimension: of Sensing; Sifting; Focusing and Understanding. If DOTS is the coverage of what is learned, SeSiFu sets out the learning process: 'how people learn, not what they learn' (p16).

It has a useful appendix which plots the development of career theory from 1900 to the present day. This offers an 'at-a-glance' overview which I have found useful for jogging memories - not least my own!

Bill Law has his own website the career learning cafe