Yesterday I keynoted the Career Development Association of New Zealand conference in Auckland. It was a great first day, and wonderful to be together with such a wide group of committed practitioners from New Zealand and overseas.

I was asked to talk about the idea of investment in career development services. My core message was that money spent on the provision of career development services should be thought of as ‘public investment’ rather than ‘public spending’. I argued that there are a clear and well evidenced fiscal benefits from career development services, but that there are also a range of wider benefit that can’t be easily measured and described in terms of money. All of these reasons make it important for us to invest in career development.

At the conference we had a brilliant visual notetaker called Lauren Woodlands who produced a summary of what I said.

This was the presentation that I gave, which will hopefully give you a bit more insight about the argument that I was trying to make.