I was surprised to find Canada in the lower half of these international career management rankings, below countries like Saudi Arabia, and well ahead of USA.

Hello, I’m Jasper Naerger from Germany, and I am doing an internship – with good financial support from my country, by the way – at CareerCycles.com, a career management social enterprise with Associates in Toronto and Vancouver. Practice leader, Mark Franklin, asked me to analyze the self-report results of 3 questions in the 23 country papers submitted to the International Centre for Career Development and Public Policy (ICCDPP) and published on their site.

As part of their submission, country teams evaluated themselves, responding to three specific questions, on a scale from 1 – 5. The questions are:

  1. To what degree are the established career content, programs and services in your country meeting the career needs of the population?
  2. How does career development provided in schools, produce ‘career ready school leavers’ in your country?
  3. What is the strength of the public policy evidence base for career development in your country?

Together with Mark, we reviewed the results and prepared this rankings chart:

ICCDPP-2017-results

Canada ranks 13th of 23 countries, just below the halfway point.

I was surprised that Germany is not among those countries that submitted country papers. I was also surprised the UK ranked so highly. When I lived and worked in the UK – near Bournemouth – I noticed a lot of people were unemployed, especially in winter when tourism slowed.

Another big surprise for me was to find that the USA team had scored themselves so low. They gave themselves failing grades (2 out of 5 across the board). From my European perspective, America seems to imagine themselves as the greatest country in the world. So to see these low results from an American team, shows an unusual amount of honesty and humility, from my perspective.

The ICCDPP aims to facilitate and promote international policy sharing and learning on career development and public policy issues. The purpose of sharing is to improve national and regional policies and systems for career guidance. The Centre collects, analyses, and disseminates policy and systems knowledge [source: http://iccdpp.org/].

On June 18-21, 2017, 23 country teams, including Canada, join the 8th International Symposium. Teams submitted country papers (http://iccdpp2017.org/key-outcomes/country-paper/) in which they describe their career development progress along four themes:

  1. Understanding how work opportunities are changing,
  2. Ensuring that content and delivery of career development programs and services are relevant,
  3. Improving career practitioner training and practice,
  4. Reforming career services in education and labour to focus on career competencies and successful transitions.

Questions for you:

What surprises you about these results?

How accurate do you think all country teams have been in their self-evaluations?

Add your comments to this blog post, or let us know on social media @careercycles

-jn

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