Career Centers of the Future

In the future, you may take career advice from holographic projections of comic strip characters. At least, that’s part of a scenario envisioned by professional counselor David Borchard.
Writing in the May/June issue of The Futurist, he notes that there have been major shifts in the field of career counseling over the last several decades. Not so long ago, counselors focused mostly on young people recently graduated from high school and college, but now they’re often focused on the career needs of experienced professionals. Another shift has been the one away from a “corporate-managed, career-ladder system” to one in which employees are urged to take responsibility for their own career development.
To help people manage their careers better, some companies have created new types of high-tech career centers. One of these is Talent Alliance (TA), which delivers its services exclusively via the Internet. TA was begun by AT&T and has grown to include about 30 major corporations such as DuPont and Johnson & Johnson. Harvard Business Review reports, “It started as a kind of sophisticated job bank during the era of downsizing and high unemployment. Companies that had to lay off skilled workers could market them to other employers that might be looking for such skills.”
Since then, TA has expanded its services to include 12 programs, which employees of member companies can explore at their own pace. For example, there’s the Career Planning Center, where users can assess their “personal competencies,” and the Opportunity Center, where they learn to identify opportunities for professional development. As Workforce magazine reports, TA gives employees considerable control over the continuous learning process. Of course, TA can be seen as part of a much larger trend toward using the Internet to provide valuable employee self-service programs.
But not all online career centers are driven by corporations. For example, the Public Broadcasting Service is in the midst of developing Project Access. Supported through a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, the project’s team “proposes to design, develop, establish, and operate at PBS an interactive Internet/Web-based student decision-making and advising system that gives students information about colleges, distance learning programs, and curricula,” according to the PBS Web site. The user-friendly information-brokering center will provide a suite of services that help students explore career options and set goals. The project is largely aimed at adult learners.
Other career centers are starting to combine online services with more traditional forms of counseling. These trends may be part of an evolution toward a generation of full-service, high-tech career centers that enable corporations to outsource or augment some of their employee development needs. Borchard envisions options such as virtual reality conference rooms where holographic characters (some looking like famous fictional characters) interact with people to help them think as creatively as possible about their career opportunities. In such a setting, not only would users be able to chat about new career moves, they would be able to engage in computer-generated simulations of the work in which they’re interested. The idea is to use new technologies to change what has historically been seen as an unpleasant, stressful task into one that is both more enjoyable and more effective.
Although highly futuristic, Borchard’s scenario is largely just an extension of current trends. Of course, it may be a while before we get effective career advice from a holographic Dilbert, but for now the increased use of the Internet for helping employees manage their careers is a trend well worth watching.
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For more information about Talent Alliance, see
http://www.talentalliance.org/
For information about Project Access, go to
http://www.pbs.org/als/access/grant.htm
Other related sites include:
Career Development Services
Career Action Center
HRI has multiple reports dealing with today's training/education trends and strategies. Three recently published comprehensive reports include:
Training and Development
Skill Level of the Workforce
Challenges Facing Higher Education.
The homepage of The Futurist is at
http://www.wfs.org/futurist.htm