Amazingly it is 2024 already. As all old people say, the years whizz by faster and faster. As my previous posts have demonstrated I have a chequered history in keeping to my new year’s resolutions. But, I feel that my commitment to reflective practice demands that I at least make some effort to reflect on my life and work and think about how I might change things in the future.

So here are some resolutions for this year. Check back in December to see if I stick with them.

• Stay well. Like everyone else I begin the New Year penitent about my crimes against my body in the previous year. So this year I’m going to eat and drink less and exercise more, sleep eight hours a night and improve my work-life balance. Equally importantly I’m going to try and break (at least to some extent) my social media habit and read more. My capacity for reading non-work stuff has dropped to an all time low in 2023, so I need to re-access that capacity. So, by December, I should have been physically and mentally transformed into a much better person.
• Have a good time all the time. Inspired by the deep philosophy of Viv Savage, and somewhat in tension with my first resolution, I vow to have a good time all the time this year. By this I mean I want to try and focus on what I enjoy and find value in, rather than performing to various institutional and cultural metric and expectations. Some of this is about taking the opportunity to smell the roses when I’m travelling, some of it is about seeing friends and making the time to do things that I enjoy like going to gigs, but it is also about writing the kinds of things that I value (like this blog, which I would really like to re-energise) rather than just churning out academic papers that no one will read. So many things in my professional life conspire to make me feel like my existence is precarious unless I do what I’m told (which are often things of questionable value), but there is also a time for doing what you want and what is actually valuable. So maybe 2024 will be that time.

• Write some books. I’ve just got a book deal to write a new handbook for careers professionals. It will be a bit like The Careers Leader Handbook, but aimed at careers advisers/counsellors/coaches/consultants. I’ll be posting more information about it over the next few weeks and months, but we will hopefully get it out either in late 2024 or early 2025. I’ve also been feeling that I should try and write an academic book. I’ve got a couple of ideas floating around. I don’t think they they will hit the streets in 2024, but I would quite like to have got to book contract stage by the end of the year.
• Influence the policy of the next government. I promised this one last year, and have to admit that there is still some way to go. But, there is almost certainly going to be a general election in 2024. After that we are almost certainly going to have a Labour Government. At the moment the Labour Party seem amazingly devoid of ideas, vision and policy. Hopefully this means that it might be possible to engage them with the importance of thinking about career and career guidance as part of a new settlement on education and employment.
• Scream every time someone tells me that there is ‘no money’. The UK seems to have fallen into a form of magical thinking in which the amount of money available to pay people decently and do things in the public good is endlessly shrinking. One consequence of this is that institutional and national policies have to search for cost free (not just cost-neutral) ways of doing things. Inevitably this means that what is suggested is either completely ineffective, or it is just a rearrangement of existing resources (which can be a good thing, but the costs are rarely tracked as carefully as the benefits). There is a lot more to say about this and I’m going to try and write more about this in relation to career guidance and related subjects, but for now read these articles by Jonathan Portes, Kate Pickett, Daniella Gabor or any of a host of other economists to demonstrate that public debt and public spending are complicated and don’t work in the same way as our bank accounts. For a more fun way to engage with this topic, watch the John Oliver video that follows as this explores the nature of the US national debt and shows that it isn’t what you thought it was (or what politicians or the media often present it as). This is not to say that public spending is limitless, but merely to recognise that the levels, and shape of, public spending, public debt and taxation are political choices not natural laws. If we can’t talk about public spending, we can’t really meaningfully talk about politics at all. So, if, when I suggest something sensible like making workers who have been made redundant into a priority group for the National Careers Service, that this isn’t possible, because ‘there isn’t any money’, then be prepared for the scream. If on the other hand I come to you and ask for a billion pounds to spend on Warren Zevon memorabilia, then you are welcome to tell me that this isn’t a good or appropriate use of public money, but all the time remembering that that is a political choice and not a question of lack of funds.

• Get ‘green guidance’ off the ground floor. I’ve been talking about ‘green guidance’ for ages (including on this blog). It has been impossible not to notice big changes in the weather this year. The Met Office say that 2023 was one of the five warmest, and ten wettest years since records began in the mid-nineteenth century. I will try to exert power as a citizen as best as I can, but within the field of guidance I can hopefully do more. I’ve been thinking a lot about what our field can do about the climate crisis, but I haven’t written a lot of it down yet. Over this year, this is one of the areas that I want to focus on.
• Remember Ronald Sultana. Many of you will have seen that my friend and collaborator Ronald Sultana died at the end of 2023. I’ve co-written an obituary with Rie Thomsen on the career guidance for social justice website. But, there is a lot more to say. So I want to devote some time this year to remembering Ronald and helping to ensure that his legacy is preserved and passed on.

So, that is a lot for me to do. I won’t manage it all, but I will hopefully do some of it. Feel free to give me your thoughts, advice and priorities in the comments.