All change

Humans struggle with the reality that uncertainty is inevitable in all our actions, to a greater or lesser degree. We want control and it disturbs us to think that total control is fundamentally unobtainable.

Approaches to career development that emphasise certainty and hold out the promise of providing neat answers are attracted to people confronted by the uncertainties and complexities of their lives.

It is therefore not surprising to discover that clients seek out certainty in career counselling and prefer that counsellors give advice, opinions and answers.

This presents a challenge because we live in a world that is not simple, certain and predictable, and a world that is populated by people who are complex, changing and inherently unpredictable.

The observation that we live in times of exponential change seems to be increasingly accepted. It has been estimated that 95 per cent of what we know about the human brain has been discovered in the past 20 years.

Dramatic change has always been a feature of human experience but the rapid changes in communications have created a more interconnected world where the behaviour of individuals – separated in time and space from others – can have profound, dramatic and unpredictable effects.

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