My colleagues at the Inland Norway University have just released a new book called Ikke bare god å snakke med [Not just good to talk to]. It covers all aspects of professional career guidance in Norway and includes two chapters co-written by me.

The book argues that career guidance addresses a range of big and small questions related to life, learning and work. In career guidance, professionals work to develop their students’ or client’s competence to handle the challenges and choices that various career transitions bring with them.

By the way, in Norwegian they have the word ‘veisøker’ which means wayfinder or pathfinder and which they use instead of the clunky ‘students and clients’ that we have to use in English. I like this because it defines the people who career guidance helps in their terms (they are seeking a career path) rather than just in terms of their relationship to us. Perhaps we should start using the term ‘pathfinder’ in English to talk about our students and clients.

The book goes on to explore how career guidance practitioners form guidance relationships to help pathfinders to sort through their experiences, interests, characteristics, wishes, needs and motivation. Career counsellors need to also know and have an understanding of the context in which life is lived: family, working life and society as a whole. And use different theories and method to put all of this together. These are big, big and important challenges within a field that, in Norway at least, is still fairly new.

The book explores issues related to the professionalisation of the career guidance role in the light of the new Norwegian national quality framework for career guidance. The framework’s definitions of core terms such as career, career guidance, career learning, lifelong career guidance and guidance competence are the starting point for all the chapters in this anthology. The authors aim to contribute to deepening thinking in Norway and beyond about what is and what should be the competence of career counsellors.

The book is mainly in Norwegian, although a couple of chapters are in English. So it is probably most accessible to people who speak Nordic languages. For those who can read it, it offers a major contribution to thinking in the field.

Ikke bare god å snakke med