Who are career story practitioners and what do they do?

Everyone has a story. In fact we have many; we are rich with stories, but how do we tell our stories in an interesting way? How do we make our stories meaningful - to us, to others? How do we apply our stories?

When making a career change, many people now realise the value of employing a career development practitioner to help them sort through the chaos. There is so much information to take in, it is hard to know what is most relevant. Careers become muddled through many changes, often forced and made with short notice, leaving us with no time to reflect on what we have learned along the way. We no longer know what kind of career is 'right' for us (if in fact we ever did), or else the career we really want is unavailable for some reason or another.

Over the past century, the main way people 'discovered' their true career identity was to do an assessment - these include personality assessments such as the MBTI, interest assessments like Holland's Self-Directed Search (SDS) or the more sophisticated Strong Interest Inventory (SII). There are many others as well, but these are the standards that have stood the test of time.

With the change of century (almost a decade ago now!), clients and practitioners alike have been noticing that the traditional assessments and matching of the results objectively to occupations no longer work. There are many reasons for this - the ever-changing jobs market, global influences, occupations coming and going rapidly, our lives generally becoming more complex, to name a few.

The ancient art of storytelling appears to be providing us with some answers to this dilemma. We all know that careers are now highly individualised; even within occupations there is less likely to be a 'standard' career path. We all have lifestyles of choice, working in diverse organisations and with many different types of personal, family and community arrangements. To cater for individual needs, we need to focus on individuals - this is best done through storytelling. Maybe this way we will even find some commonalities between us all, some common bonds, that we did not know existed.

In the twenty-first century, career practitioners who want their clients to achieve career success need to be story practitioners. This acknowledges that individuals are the experts in their own lives, and the story practitioner acts as a specialised facilitator. This in turn acknowledges that stories about and told by real people are neither simple nor easy to relate; they are full of layers, each one providing its own insights. Through developing specialised 'story' skills we can guide our clients as they develop their life narratives, helping them to delve deeper as appropriate to get to the 'gold' that lies within.

As yet, while many career practitioners are essentially story practitioners, we do not have a framework for describing what this actually is. We do know that this technique provides the necessary flexibility for building a meaningful career within the current fragmented world in which we live.