Dr Emma Bolger

I am an interdisciplinary academic, careers expert, and researcher based in Scotland. 

My Blog contains updates on my work. In Portfolio you can find a record of my appearances and publications. 

If you work in the careers sector, you can access my curated lists of free-to-access career development tools and professional resources directly via the Resources tab.

Please do connect with me. You can find me online elsewhere via my ðŸ”—Linktree:  /emmabolger 

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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