Podcast

I was recently invited by Dr Anjali Raj Westwood to appear on the Career Chronicles podcast, discussing maternity leave, returning to work and life as a working mother. I cover policies, pragmatism and the need for a wide variety of options to support working parents. 

The podcast is available on Spotify and on other platforms via Anjali's website.

Popular posts from this blog

Why would someone choose to be a careers adviser?

One of the modules I’m teaching this trimester at UWS is Career Development Theory, examining the theories that explain how and why people make career decisions. A career decision I often wonder about is “Why would someone choose to be a careers adviser?” I’m not being flippant; I see few reasons why the media representation of the role would influence anyone to become one. From the outside, it’s not a job that gets good press. There is a heck of a lot of bad-mouthing of the careers profession and its purpose, the occasional high-profile media story (nobody mention  Mary Poppins ) and then there’s the section in every celebrity life story ever: “They told me to/not to do it, the clueless adviser, and they were so, so wrong.” We know that high profile TV programmes boost the profile of certain careers.  CSI  led to a raft of wannabe forensic scientists.  Call the Midwife  and  One Born Every Minute  respectively give young people a dramatised and f...
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Veilederforum, Guest Editor

I have again been working closely with colleagues in Norway, delivering training and recording resources and a podcast for the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills. The resources and podcast will be published later in 2023. I am also the current guest editor for Veilederforum , for whom I have been commissioning new articles by experts in career guidance and development. Two articles have been published to date (at the end of the articles linked below, you will find a link to the English language translation).  Dr Laura Lebec and Dr Louise Ritchie: Career guidance through the lifespan: Working with clients with dementia Gill Frigerio: Practitioner Wellbeing Two further articles are forthcoming, a piece focusing on career guidance work with refugees/asylum seekers and migrants, authored by Dr Deirdre Hughes & Prof. Füsun Akkök, and another on client mental health wellbeing authored by Dr Deirdre Hughes, Chris Percy & Liane Hambly.   I will be writi...
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No toddler-juggling allowed: university library access for student-parents

In early November 2014, I attempted to visit the library of a Scottish university with my 11 month old son. I was told by a security guard at the gate that due to the library’s rules on children I couldn’t access any area other than the ground floor, where there were only student access PCs and some study desks. There was no mention that during staffed hours a member of staff could retrieve materials for me to use on the ground floor (which in the process of collecting information for this extended blog post I discovered may be the case). So for starters, there was possibly an internal communications issue, but I want to put that aside for the moment and unpick the entire matter of library access for student-parents. This issue was highlighted in the Nuffield Foundation’s research (2012) into student-parent support within in English higher education institutions which concluded: …students with children are not getting the support they need to succeed in higher education. Whil...
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