Career Guidance For Charities
CAREER LEARNING & DEVELOPMENT (CLD) PROGRAMMES
In January 2020, I began facilitating Blackthorn Trust’s CLD programme, a 12-month pilot project made possible thanks to CXK Limited ‘s SELEP Community Grants Scheme and funding from the European Social Fund (ESF).
This 12-week group- and activity-based programme was delivered to 3 groups of participants between January 2020 and May 2021, with groupwork sessions taking place once a week at Blackthorn Trust.
The programme aimed to build participants’ career resilience and career happiness to enable their career growth (Bassot, Barnes, and Chant, 2014). In pursuit of this aim, each participant was able to access two personal career guidance meetings and ten interactive group work sessions.
IIn 2023, Blackthorn Trust invited me back to facilitate three new cohorts of a revised and updated Next Steps programme for clients with chronic pain and mental health challenges.
The first of these eight-week programmes is currently underway, taking place within the grounds of Blackthorn’s biodynamic garden.
The programme aimed to build participants’ self-awareness, opportunity awareness, and career management skills (through decision-learning and transition learning) (Law and Watts, 1977; Barnes, Bassot and Chant, 2011).
Blackthorn Trust’s CLD programme arose as a result of my Master’s research project.
My research explored the helpfulness of co-constructing a career learning and development (CLD) programme with and for clients of a mental health charity (McGuire, 2019).
Find out more by reading my dissertation.
References:
Barnes, A., Bassot, B. and Chant, A. (2011) An Introduction to Career Learning and Development 11-19: Perspectives, Practice and Possibilities. Oxon: Routledge.
Bassot, B., Barnes, A. and Chant, A. (2014) A Practical Guide to Career Learning and Development: Innovation in Careers Education 11-19. Oxon: Routledge.
Law, B. and Watts, A. G. (1977) Schools. Careers and Community: A Study of some approaches to Careers Education in Schools. London: Church Information Office.
McGuire, L. (2019) ‘Evaluating the helpfulness of a co-construction approach to career learning and development programme design’, Journal of the National Institute for Career Education and Counselling, 43, pp. 11-18. doi: 10.20856/jnicec.4303
