Following on from the article Why a social justice informed approach to career guidance matters in the time of coronavirus, Tristam was invited to give an interview to Spanish website Educaweb. The article is available in both English and Spanish.

• The coronavirus is a time when career guidance is desperately needed.
• En tiempos de coronavirus la orientación se necesita desesperadamente

Here is an extract from the article

I have been working with Ronald Sultana and Rie Thomsen for several years now. We have been thinking about how an educational activity like career guidance can be helpful to people in an unequal and unfair world. When the coronavirus started to make its way through the world, we quickly saw that this had the potential to hurt people’s careers and livelihoods and to increase the need for career guidance. We have started to write about this and try to agitate for the importance of career guidance during the pandemic and in its aftermath.
 
The coronavirus is turning our world upside down. It has shown us how fragile so many of our political systems are and how dependent our normal lives are on things that we take for granted like being able to live our houses and travel to work. The enormity of the shock that we have all experienced is bound to make people think deeply about themselves, their values, and the way that they spend their lives. This is where career guidance comes in as, career guidance is essentially a set of tools that help people to think through how they live their lives, manage their work-life balance and so on. The coronavirus is a time when career guidance is desperately needed.
 
Of course, many people will not have the luxury of engaging in the kind of deep reflection that I’ve just described. Many will be engaged in a scrabble for survival. Unemployment is growing very rapidly across the world. The International Labour Organisation says that the crisis is likely to lead to between 5-36 million new unemployed people across the world. We fear that young people, those with ‘low level’ skills, people with disabilities, those who are marginalized and who have been made vulnerable will experienced the worst effects of the crisis. This is another reason why career guidance is going to be so important, because in challenging economic times, people need help and support to find their way.

Read on… in English or Spanish