Phillip S. Jarvis
Career Conversations:
Antidote to economic uncertainty
Focus: Embedding career conversations in
K-12 to graduate life-ready world-changers
PHIL JARVIS
Chief Education Reimagineer
Hi, I'm Phil Jarvis.
Canada ranks among the world's leading countries in academic performance according to the OECD PISA assessment. However, for the first time, the OECD has included career readiness in its assessment, and Canada ranks significantly lower on this scale. See the Career Readiness Dashboard. The report shows that across OECD countries, students are now expressing very high levels of career uncertainty and confusion. Job expectations have changed little since 2000 and bear little relationship to actual patterns of labour market demand, including in working areas of high strategic importance. Here's the OECD's Report on Teenage Career Readiness.
Career Conversations
"Something special happens when students engage with people in work. It is a form of social capital. Students gain the opportunity to access information and advice about the world of work in ways that are especially trustworthy and relevant. It enables young people to envision new potential futures for themselves and to challenge stereotypical ideas about the types of people suited for different professions. As the saying goes, if you can’t see it, you can’t be it. Employer engagement also provides students with opportunities to develop new long-term relationships, leading to recommendations or job offers. Effective guidance demands extensive student engagement with workplaces and people in work." Andreas Schleicher, OECD Director for Education and Skills.
These days, I'm focused on:
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Career Conversations. Ontario is investing up to $14 million in 2024-25 to provide career conversations with adults working in in-demand jobs in their region to all Grade 9 and 10 students. The Ministry of Education selected the Halton Industry Education Council to coordinate this unprecedented initiative through Ontario Career Lab. As an honourary HIEC team member, I'm helping strategize how career coaches working in high-demand economic sectors will complement the work of guidance teacher-counsellors, community organizations, and parents for 315,000 students.
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Co-hosting and curating HIEC's Parents as Career Coaches Podcast. Throughout my career, educators have lamented the difficulty of getting parents engaged in their children's education and career development. With inspiring and engaging guests and free online resources, we provide parents with the motivation and practical tools to engage more with their children in purposeful career conversations.
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I recently launched Career Callings, a free online resource to help youth and adults discover their purpose by exploring ways they are called to make the world better, using the UN Global Goals. I encourage you to try it and share the link with your networks. "Callings are urgings from the deep self that tell us what it will take to make our lives literally 'come true.” They point us toward awakenings, course corrections, and powerful authenticity." Gregg Levoy, Callings
EMPOWERING STUDENTS
TO CREATE A BETTER WORLD
Every child possesses the most remarkable, renewable, expandable, natural resource on the planet – a human brain – with limitless capacity for wonder, imagination, creativity, empathy, and love.
Children haven’t yet fully accepted boundaries of convention, convenience, prejudice, hate, or inertia to which many adults have surrendered. Once they find their purpose, every child has the potential for prodigious accomplishments in any field she or he cares deeply enough about.
Rather than marks and grades, if public education focused on igniting and channeling students’ sense of purpose, wonder, innocence, justice, creativity, hope, and unbounded potential, in less than a generation the world will be kinder, more equitable, and healthier in every sense.
We face big challenges in today’s world: poverty, hunger, inequality, species extinction, homelessness, tribalism, and climate change are just some of the issues we need to address urgently.
Big challenges need bold action, and that is where the Global Goals come in. They are agreed to by all world leaders to build a greener, fairer, better world, and we all have a role to play in achieving them.
There are 17 Goals and many positive actions you can take. So which should you focus on? Here's a quiz to help you discover that three Goals that are most important to and things you can start doing today to make a difference.
All Videos
All Videos
Responding to questions from Raza Abbas
Thoughtexchange Virtual Event. Helping Students Find Their WHY.
Thoughtexchange Virtual Event. Reimagining Education.
Kind Words
"There is an interesting limitation with Linked-In's recommendation system: I had a hard time selecting the "role" Phil was in when we worked together. That is simply because I have connected with Phil in most of his roles - at least those since 1989. And, although he might not remember, it goes back even further, to when I provided database updates for the CHOICES computerized career guidance system back in 1986. So, I have known Phil and his work for a very long time.
Phil is a legend in Canadian - and world - career development circles. He has been working to give people, and especially young people, solid information, planning help and connection to the workforce since - well since forever. He has a clear vision for practical and community-infused approaches to helping young people to not only imagine but to enact preferred futures. It would be impossible to describe his incredibly long list of achievements, commitments and contributions to career development within this space, but he is in my Top 5 Most Trusted Career people on the planet (and I am known as a very tough marker)."
Kris Magnusson,
Dean, Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University
