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The Role of Digital Technology in Career

Development
Tristram Hooley & Tom Staunton

This is a pre-publication version of the chapter ‘The Role of Digital Technology in Career
Development’ published in The Oxford Handbook of Career Development. It should be cited as
follows:

Hooley, T. & Staunton, T. (2020). The Role of Digital Technology in Career Development. In
Robertson, P., Hooley, T., & McCash, P. (Eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Career Development. Oxford:
Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190069704.013.22

Abstract
This chapter analyses the role of digital technologies in career development. It argues that digital
technologies change the context for individuals’ careers and the opportunities that exist for the
provision of career support. The implications of digital technologies for career are dependent, in
part, on how technologies are believed to interact with society. They may be thought of as tools, as
shapers of society, or as social practices. For individuals, digital technologies can be understood
through six metaphors: (1) library, (2) media channel, (3) surveillance camera, (4) marketplace, (5)
meeting place, and (6) arena. For career development professionals, the choice is using them to
provide information, automated interactions, or communication. The chapter concludes by arguing
that there are three main pedagogic stances (instrumental, connectivist, or critical) that can guide
career development professionals in the combination of different technologies and in the resolution
of the opportunities and challenges that are presented to individuals in their career building.

Keywords: career development, career guidance, digital technologies, Internet, online, pedagogy

Introduction
Career development has always made use of, responded to, and been influenced by technologies.
For individuals, the development of new technologies has opened up new forms of work, learning,
and living. For the careers profession, it has had an influence on what forms of practice are possible.
In this sense, technology is understood in Bain’s terms as ‘all tools, machines, utensils, weapons,
instruments, housing, clothing, communicating and transporting devices and the skills by which we
produce and use them’ (Bain, 1937, p. 380).

Technologies, from the taming of fire through the conveyor belt and the motor car and on to the
smartphone, have the potential to open some possibilities in our careers and close others down. So,
the creation of the technology of flight and its application to the mass transportation of people had
both direct implications for the new professions of the pilot, cabin crew, and ground crew, but also
unintended consequences for the globalisation of the labour market and the expansion of the
psychosocial horizons of career possibility.

Just as technology has always interacted with individual career development, it has also had a
dynamic relationship with career development interventions. At the inception of the field, Parsons
(1909, p. 165) argued that the new activity of vocational guidance should make use of ‘every facility
that science can devise for the testing of the senses and capacities, and the whole physical,
intellectual, and emotional make-up of the child’. In stating this, he rooted the new field in rational
positivism and placed technology at the heart of the process of career development.

As the nascent career development field grew, it made use of a wide range of technologies and
became increasingly dependent on information and computer technologies. Watts (2002) traced the
development of information and communication technologies within career development
interventions from the 1960s through four phases: mainframe, microcomputer, web, and digital. As
the final two phases unfolded, Watts described a paradigm shift, with individuals increasingly able to
self-serve in their careers in new ways without direct reference to a career development
professional. Although self-service approaches existed before digital technologies, the Internet has
enabled and accelerated this form of career delivery.

As the digital phase has unfolded, there has been an explosion of tools, techniques, and initiatives
that have explored the utility of digital technologies for career development interventions
(CEDEFOP, 2018; Hooley, Shepherd, & Dodd, 2015; Vigurs, Everitt, & Staunton, 2017). This chapter
draws together some of the key findings of the literature and explores what defines digital career
guidance practice, as well as looking at the nature of the digital environment and how it shapes
society and individual careers. The chapter begins by looking at the nature of the digital environment
and asking how it shapes society. It then examines why the Internet is important for individual’s
career development and concludes by exploring how digital technologies can be integrated into
careers work.

What Is the Digital Environment?


The concept of the ‘digital’ literally refers to the ability to represent information in the form of
numerical (often binary) digits. Digital technologies have developed to be able to describe
increasingly complex forms of information: numbers, language, images, audio, video, and even
physical objects. The pairing of this ability to describe information with communication technologies
allows information to be almost instantaneously replicated and disseminated across the world. The
ability to replicate and communicate information at marginal costs is one of the biggest paradigm
shifts associated with digital technologies and underpins a vast array of the social, cultural, and
economic forms that have developed from digital technology, including the World Wide Web, social
media, video streaming technologies, and digital cryptocurrencies.

The range of different ways that digital technologies are used in society means that they are difficult
to ignore in thinking about almost any aspect of society, including career. Some commentators have
argued that we now live in the digital age and that the development of digital technologies
increasingly defines our society. Schwab (2016) has referred to this new social and economic
paradigm as a ‘fourth industrial revolution’, which has been brought about by a ‘digital revolution’.

How Digital Technologies Shape Societies


In this chapter, digital technologies are viewed as being underpinned by historical and sociological
realities. Digital technology is historical in the sense that technologies developed out of historical
processes and did not suddenly come into existence. It is sociological in the sense that the digital
both changes the social world and is acted on and developed out of wider social realities.

There are a variety of ways that the relationship between new technologies and society can be
conceptualised. It is important to explore these different perspectives because they have
implications for how we think about the interaction between digital technologies and career and
career development interventions. The different perspectives are summarized as (1) technology as a
tool, (2) technology as a shaper of society, and (3) technology as a social practice.

The first perspective views digital technologies as a series of tools that can be used by individuals.
Digital technologies can enable individuals and groups to act and interact in ways that they were not
able to before the technologies existed. Such tools allow people to improve their lives—for example,
by improving access to information, facilitating communication, enabling new forms of teaching and
learning, or allowing people to transcend distances.

There are many enthusiastic accounts of the way that digital tools can improve people’s lives in
almost every field, but good examples from the careers field include the promise that the Internet
can help people to find and get a job (Hooley, Bright, & Winter, 2016), to establish their own
business (Paulson, 2017), and to get recognition and respect in the workplace (Adlam, 2018). Of
course, not all tools are used for good. Digital tools can also have a dark side, enabling individuals to
do things that transgress or attack social and moral norms and make their lives or the lives of other
worse, such as in cases of cyberbullying (Whittaker & Kowalski, 2015) or digital crime (Bryant &
Bryant, 2016).

By viewing digital technologies primarily as tools, the focus is on the impact on individuals, rather
than on society. The accumulated impact of individuals’ using such tools might ultimately have an
impact on society, but when technology is viewed as a tool this is not easy to see. In contrast, the
second perspective emphasises the way in which the use of digital technologies shapes and forms
the social world. This view builds on McLuhan’s (1994) analysis that human history is the history of
the development of technologies, which shape society. In this view, the Internet as a medium has
had more impact on society than the content (messages) that are actually carried by the Internet.
Carr (2008) and Keen (2012) concluded that the affordances offered by digital technologies have
reframed social life negatively. They argued that news-feeds, memes, notifications, friend requests,
and selfies lead to a society that is characterised by superficiality, fake news, and social
fragmentation. Others see digital technologies more positively, viewing them as empowering and
levelling. So Shirky (2009) argued that digital technologies can democratise society and extend
access to the public sphere, while writers like Sadler (2010) and Aguilar- Millan, Feeney, Oberg, and
Rudd (2010) argued that new technologies, including digital technologies, will change the political
economy, eradicate scarcity, and open the possibility for meeting human needs more fully. This
perspective suggests that new technologies will have a deterministic effect on society. This reifies
technology and turns it into a social actor in its own right.

The third perspective views technology as a social practice. This recognises that technologies can be
used in a variety of ways (e.g., as tools, as in the first perspective) and that they can change societies
and shift the context in which tools are being used (as in the second perspective), but it also reminds
us that technology is in turn produced by and shaped by society. This perspective challenges the
bifurcation of society and technology, with technology being viewed as part of society rather than
separate from it. So, the technologies developed by Google are not external to society and acting on
it, but are developments that emerged from the social, political, and economic formations
associated with late 20th and early 21st century capitalism, Silicon Valley culture, and American
company, copyright, intellectual property, and labour laws (Whelan, 2019). Technologies are not
neutral or external actors. As Braverman (1974/1998, p. 133) argued they are not ‘an alien force
which subjugates humanity’, but are instruments that emerge from existing power relations and give
power to those who own and control them.
If digital technologies are viewed as a social practice, it is helpful to recognise that they are also a
form of political practice. Politics is understood as the way in which the different, and often
competing, interests of diverse groups within society are managed, addressed, and resolved. The
digital environment provides the space for such contestation, albeit one that authors like Mejias
(2013) and Van Dijck (2013a), echoing Braverman, argued is made up of specific architecture that is
owned by private organisations and is both regulated, and made use of, by governments. So, while
the Internet might look open and democratic, because it is possible for anyone to speak or to listen,
digital technologies are designed by individuals and groups with assumptions about how things
should be organised and with vested interests that they wish to advance. In many cases, this means
that digital technologies are owned by the powerful and are used to preserve and extend that
power. However, because technologies are social practices, they can also, in some cases, be
repurposed to create tools for protest, resistance, and the redistribution of power (Bennett &
Segerberg, 2013; Castells, 2015).

Technology does not just determine our careers, it is also determined by how our careers are framed
and enacted. The individual and collective decisions that people make about how to live their lives
shape the technologies that get conceived, developed, and utilised. In the rest of this chapter, this
third perspective is broadly adopted to show how technologies interact with career and career
development interventions in dynamic ways, and to view their use in career enactment and as part
of career development interventions as a social practice.

Why Are Digital Technologies Important for Individuals’ Career


Development?
Keeping in mind the nature of the digital environment and how it interacts with society more
broadly, we can turn to exploring how this shifts the way that individuals enact their careers.
Because digital technologies are now so embedded in the social world, almost all processes
associated with a career have a digital component. Digital technologies are central to education,
recruitment, work, civic participation, and leisure.

Digital tools are so embedded in social life that it is often difficult to distinguish between digital and
nondigital experience. For example, the use of a YouTube film as part of a lecture places digital
content at the heart of a face-to-face learning experience, while the routine use of tablets and
smartphones in workplace meetings to check on information, and even to involve participants who
are not physically present, creates an often unacknowledged, but deep, integration between
physical and digital ways of gathering information and interacting.

Despite their deep integration in the everyday practices of career enactment, it is still possible to
identify some particular roles that digital technologies play that intersect with the impact of the
‘digital’ on society. We have built on and extended Hooley’s (2012) typology to propose six
metaphors that describe the roles that digital technologies play in individuals’ career enactment: (1)
library, (2) media channel, (3) surveillance camera, (4) marketplace, (5) meeting place, and (6) arena.

Library
Digital technologies provide individuals with access to a wide range of information that they can use
to inform their career thinking. The information that can be found on the Internet is not necessarily
accurate, is always partial, and reflects the aims of those who produced it (Sampson et al., 2018).
Given this, the potential value of digital information as a career resource is strongly mediated by an
individuals’ capacity to interrogate, critique, and assess the value of such information.
Media Channel
Digital technologies allow people to broadcast whatever they want with no requirement for
permission or editing. People can control their self-presentation online and may choose to withhold
their identity or adopt pseudonyms. In the context of career, it is possible for individuals to make use
of this media channel to create, either intentionally or unintentionally, a narrative about themselves
that can variously aid (Batenburg & Bartels, 2017) or hinder their career (Soares, Shenvi, Waller,
Johnson, & Hodgson, 2017).

Surveillance Camera
The flip side of the media channel is how digital technologies open individuals up to surveillance by
everyone, but particularly by those with power. From a career perspective, such surveillance has the
potential of turning every action that is captured online into material that can be used in a selection
(Gandini & Pais, 2018) or management process (Ajunwa, Crawford, & Schultz, 2017). Similarly, data
about students is increasingly captured and used by educational institutions, including career
services. Perhaps even more perniciously, the perception of constant surveillance, even where it is
not real, can shape individuals’ behaviour in ways that encourage them to conform to what they
imagine employers and others would want (Duffy & Chan, 2019; Hooley & Cutts, 2018).

Marketplace
Digital technologies also serve as a marketplace for career opportunities. They create new kinds of
opportunities for individuals to interact with opportunity providers (employers and learning
providers) through various forms of e-recruitment and selection (Holm & Haahr, 2018). They have
also increasingly shaped the way that the labour market operates by allowing individuals to place
themselves permanently ‘on sale’ through tools like Linkedin or to access work directly through
platform-based working, such as on Uber or Task Rabbit.

Meeting Place
Digital technologies create a place for people to ‘meet’ and network. Such conversations can be used
as part of career enactment as individuals converse with each other, share information and contacts,
and build and maintain a career-relevant network (Utz, 2016). This can happen on more explicitly
career-related sites, such as LinkedIn or Twitter, but might also involve individuals’ developing
relationships that impact their careers through more interest-driven sites, such as Reddit or
YouTube.

Arena
Finally, digital technologies create an arena within which struggle can take place between those with
different interests and hegemony and norms can be established or challenged. Such a struggle can
be both individual and collective and can interact with existing power structures in a range of ways.
Law (2012) discussed how the web can move from being a place of play and exploration into a place
of protests and critique. For example, the #MeToo movement raised awareness of how women’s
careers are often characterized by the experience of abuse and sexual exploitation and began a
process of challenging these power relations. This form of hashtag activism (Yang, 2016) uses the
Internet to challenge career norms (Wood & Pasquier, 2018) by allowing people to share
experiences in ways that would not have been possible before, to connect with others, and to use
the crowd as a form of protection. The ability of information to spread, and for individuals to
connect quickly and freely, enables collective forms of action to be taken that challenge career
norms and structures and seek to remake them in radical ways. However, alongside this, the
Internet has also been a site for #MeToo to be contested and debated. The movement has been
criticised from a variety of angles, including assuming victims should always be believed through to
concern that the movement has mainly focused on the experiences of White women in middle-class
occupations. Others have argued that it has been focused too tightly on individuals’ stories rather
than on examining structural conditions (Donegan, 2018; North, 2018; Quart, 2018). The arena
metaphor shows how the Internet both allows space for a movement and at the same time enables
the critics of the movement to organize against it.

Individuals need to navigate their way through these metaphors as they make use of digital
technologies whilst they enact their careers. One response is to encourage individuals to position
themselves strategically to make effective use of the affordances of these technologies whilst
avoiding or minimising the downsides. For career development professionals, this can often be seen
as a call to spend time developing individuals’ digital career management skills or digital career
literacy (Hooley, 2012).

A focus on increasing individual digital career management skills can fall into adopting the kind of
tool-based conception of technology described above. Staunton (2018) argued that we need to view
digital technologies more critically, recognise the limits of what getting good at using the Internet
(developing career management skills) can achieve, and encourage individuals to consider how the
affordances and practices on the Internet might be transformed as well as accommodated. In the
example of #MeToo discussed above, a digital career management skills approach would focus on
how the Internet could be used to research the extent of gender harassment in a particular sector
and successfully find a job that allowed an individual to escape oppression. A more critical approach
highlights the ability of individuals to use the Internet to engage with alternative political narratives
around career, and to work collectively, as is evidenced by #MeToo, towards transforming the
context within which they are pursuing their careers.

Using Technology to Deliver Career Development Support


Digital technologies also offer a range of possibilities and challenges for the delivery of career
development interventions (Harris‐Bowlsbey & Sampson, 2005). There are many advantages to
providing career support through digital technologies. Hooley, Shepherd, and Dodd (2015) argued
that such technologies can potentially be used by careers providers to:

• transcend geography
• provide equality of access to a range of clients
• provide immediacy of access to a range of different levels of service
• offer confidential and discreet services
• allow flexible provision with a greater capacity to manage and respond to peaks in demand
• provide ‘specialist’ services (for example, around the needs of specific sectors, redundancy,
retirement, job change, apprenticeships, or different languages)
• provide campaign support by linking online service provision to national media campaigns
about work and learning
• provide cost savings by making use of self-access, automation, or economies of scale.

Such services can take a variety of forms. As new technologies are developed, the range of
approaches available continues to expand. Hooley, Hutchinson, and Watts (2010) have grouped the
approaches into three main categories: the provision of information, the use of automated
interactions, and the use of the Internet for communication.

The first way in which digital technologies can be used to support people’s career development is
through the provision of information and resources, as described in the library metaphor above.
Such resources may include information about the labour market or education system and advice on
how to address particular issues. Information may be quantitative or qualitative and can include
text, images, and multimedia content. While information has always been used as part of career
development work, the Internet removes the kinds of physical restraints that are associated with
maintaining a traditional careers library. Furthermore, it removes the requirement for the mediation
of this information by a career development professional. Individuals can now self-serve in new ways
developed by digital technology. This brings with it both massive opportunities for increased access
and potential dangers, as professional facilitation is removed and individuals are potentially left to
sift through the morass of online career information alone.

Evidence suggests that the provision of online career information resources has limited efficacy, as
many users are unaware of such resources, choose not to use them, or do not receive much benefit
from using them (Galliott, 2017; Vigurs et al., 2017). As Osborn (2019) pointed out, the provision of
information, or indeed any online career resource, becomes meaningful only when an individual
engages with it and is able to derive some career learning from it. Osborn utilised Sampson, Lenz,
Reardon, and Peterson’s (1999) cognitive information processing approach to explain how such
learning takes place. But, regardless of the learning model deployed, Osborn’s point is well made:
the transmission of information or resources, whether online or otherwise, should not be assumed
to lead to career learning.

Information and resources are static in nature and provide the same content to all users. The second
category of digital career development practice makes use of automated interactions and forms of
artificial intelligence to tailor the provision of information and resources to the individual. This might
include the provision of online assessments and diagnostics that are designed to replicate elements
of traditional advice and guidance services (Harris-Bowlsbey, 2013). Such automated interactions
can also provide experiences like work simulations and online (serious) gaming, which support
career learning in new ways. So, McGuire, Broin, White, and Deevy (2018) described how the use of
a gamified workplace simulation can help develop new opportunities for students to explore
different occupations, to learn what skills they require, and to demonstrate their learning through
simulated recruitment processes. McGuire and colleagues argued that this kind of gamified learning
can increase student motivation to engage with career learning.

Finally, it is possible to use digital tools to facilitate communication and interaction around career
development. Such online communications can increase individuals’ access to career support in ways
that do not necessarily require people to be in the same place or interacting at the same time. Such
approaches may facilitate communication in one-to- one, one-to-many, or many-to-many formats.
This could include placing traditional career counselling interactions online, perhaps by facilitating
them through video conferencing or chat technologies (Bimrose, 2016). Digital technology can also
be used to allow individuals to interact with people who are not career development professionals
but who offer them resources for their career building (Hooley, Hutchinson, & Neary, 2016). This
could include digitally facilitated mentoring relationships, opportunities to ask questions of more
experienced people, and more happenstance forms of career development, such as the building of
online networks through tools like LinkedIn.

Dividing technologies up in this way can lead towards viewing digital technologies as a toolbox from
which careers practitioners can select a tool. However, the development of digital technologies has
been far more transformative. Both practitioners and clients increasingly deploy, combine, and use
the technologies in a wide variety of ways. Vigurs et al. (2017) argued that it is important not to view
digital forms of practice as alternatives to analogue and face-to-face forms of practice, but to see
them as complementary and mutually reinforcing. In practice, a variety of career development
interventions are often integrated (Bakke, Haug, & Hooley, 2018) and bring together digital and
nondigital approaches. Nota, Santilli, and Soresi’s (2016) online life design intervention provides a
good example of this: it combines online digital content with face-to-face facilitation and writing
exercises. Nota et al. reported that this kind of integrated intervention increased students’ career
adaptability, life satisfaction, and aspirations more than conventional face-to-face interventions.

Pedagogy for Digital Career Learning


Individuals’ careers interact with digital technologies in a variety of ways, and the technologies have
also supported the emergence of new forms of career development practice. This section draws on
contemporary thinking in digital pedagogy to propose new ways that the practice of digital or
integrated career development can be conceptualised. This is done by referring to three possible
approaches to linking technological pedagogy to career: instrumental, connectivist, and critical
pedagogies.

Instrumental approaches focus on individual’s career learning needs and ask how they could be met
through technology. Such an approach is informed by the idea of outcomes- based teaching and
learning (Biggs & Tang, 2011), which focuses on aligning learning strategies to specified learning
outcomes, and by Trouche’s (2005) theory of instrumental genesis, which argues that any
technology remains inanimate and passive by itself and needs to be transformed into something
useful through an appropriate pedagogy. Technologies are viewed as tools that can be deployed by
educators to achieve defined ends. Koehler and Mishra (2009) argued that digital technologies have
some important differences from previous kinds of technologies because they are multipurpose,
constantly changing, and often highly opaque in how they work. But, despite this, they remain tools
that skilled educators can deploy to deliver learning if they have sufficient technological knowledge,
pedagogic knowledge, and content knowledge.

Instrumental pedagogy is strongly linked to tool-based conceptions of technologies. For career


development professionals, using such tools is about figuring out where and when they can best be
deployed to advance career learning. In such a conception, the fundamental aims, objectives, and
approaches of career development learning stay constant, but they are delivered through new tools
that require some professional adaptation and discussion of how the tools can be integrated into
existing ethical frameworks (Sampson & Makela, 2014).

The instrumental approach is challenged by connectivist approaches to digital career learning, which
redirect the focus from the professional to the learner. Learners can self- service, visit career
websites, and drive their own learning in digital environments, which do not necessarily accord the
career development professional a special status. So, a learner can access LinkedIn, gather
information, seek mentoring and advice, and engage in career transitions without needing to ever
come into contact with a career development professional.

Connectivist approaches link to the conception of technology as shaper of society. A focus on the
learner highlights the fact that there has been a significant departure from the previous order.
Learners are pursue their careers in different ways, and this requires career development
professionals to embrace the paradigm shift and rethink their role. Wheeler and Gerver (2015),
along with others like Siemens (2005) and Cormier (2008), have described how the Internet
challenges existing repositories of formal knowledge held by institutions like schools, universities,
and libraries and instead allows individuals to freely connect to information and networks in new
ways that will support them in their own learning journeys. They celebrate this ‘connectivism’ and
argue that it empowers the learner and places educators in a supportive and facilitative role.
The connectivists’ focus on the Internet as a transformative space that increases learners’ autonomy
links with career-specific research published by Kettunen and colleagues (Kettunen, Vuorinen, &
Sampson, 2013, 2015), who focused on social media and career practice and looked at the different
ways in which career professionals can respond to changing technologies. After surveying various
ways of using digital technologies for careers work, Kettunen, Sampson, and Vuorinen (2015) argued
that practitioners should recognise that there has been a paradigm change and this necessitates a
new approach, which they describe as ‘co-careering’. This is a form of pedagogy that (i) moves away
from a focus on the delivery of information, (ii) is nonhierarchical and learner-centred, and (iii) is
based on learners’ using digital tools in an autonomous manner, drawing on a range of online
resources for their career. The role imagined for the career development professional in co-
careering is facilitative and developmental, but it is also a role that is shaped by technological
change, rather than one that seeks to shape or critique such technologies.

Critical approaches to online pedagogy link to the third conception of technology, technology as a
social practice. Critical approaches recognise the way in which technologies shape human
behaviours, but they also view these as contestable and subject to change and renegotiation. They
question how far the openness of the Internet is empowering for individuals in the way that the
connectivist co-careering perspectives suggest. Selwyn (2016) raised the concern that calls for
education to be more flexible and personalised assume that individuals have the capacity to make
use of this new form of learning. This overlooks critiques that the digital environment requires
access to technological hardware disproportionately owned by more affluent individuals in society
(Warschauer, 2010); that the competencies required to make effective use of digital tools are not
equally distributed; that participation in these networks requires individuals to give up privacy and,
in doing so, disproportionately benefits individuals who are more socially acceptable (Keen, 2012;
Van Dijck, 2013b); and, finally, that these networks have winning and losing hardwired into them at
a design level and so benefit a minority anyway (Keen, 2012; Mejias, 2013).

These critiques raise important points about the need to consider how individuals actually go about
building their careers in digital environments and what enables and constrains the process. There
can be a danger in adopting an overly optimistic and positive approach to digital environments that
ignores individuals’ social positions. Furthermore, this can overlook how digital technologies carry
with them ideological imperatives to encourage individuals to behave in a certain way (Mejias, 2013)
that encourages individualism, competitiveness, and gamelike behavior (Keen, 2012). The apparent
new frontier of the Internet can mask the way it replicates existing neoliberal tendencies in society
(Van Dijck, 2013a).

Buchanan (2018) raised the concern that, if career development interventions solely seek to help
individuals to adapt to the digital world, they run the risk of socialising individuals into dominant but
oppressive logics. This suggests that there is a need for career development interventions to critique
existing forms of digital career development and encour age individuals to think about how they
might renegotiate their positions within surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019). Law (2012) and
Staunton (2016, 2018) argued that effective digital career development education should help
students to arrive at a critical understanding of technology and a consideration of how it shapes
their careers in both positive and negative ways. In practice, this might involve helping clients debate
the pay-off between advancing their career through social media sites and dealing with the resulting
loss of privacy, or exploring digital platforms that are not dependent on surveillance to create profit,
such as MeWe and Ello.
Conclusion
This chapter explores the complex interrelationships between digital technologies and career
development. The career development profession has increasingly embraced new technologies,
recognising that they both shape the way that individuals pursue their careers and offer new
opportunities for the development of practice. Thinking about the use of digital technologies in
careers practice needs to begin with an understanding of how technologies relate to the societies
within which they operate. We have challenged the idea that technologies are just tools for
individuals to pick up and use, but also the idea that they determine the shape of societies
wholesale. Digital technologies are a dynamic part of a society, both acting on and shaping people’s
careers, but also being shaped by the way that we use such technologies and by the wider political
and economic environment.

For individuals, digital technologies bring new opportunities for career development, but they also
bring challenges. Career development services can use these technologies to help individuals
through the provision of information, by automated interactions, and by facilitating communication
with career development professionals and other forms of support. But important pedagogic
questions remain about how to best use these technologies and to what end they should be
employed. Career professionals can take an instrumental, a connectivist, or a critical stance when
delivering digitally mediated career development education.

We believe that critical approaches ultimately open up the most opportunities for individuals. Such
approaches recognise that digital technologies are not just neutral tools through which career
development can be enacted and career support given. Rather, technologies shape our worlds and
our subjectivities and so the choice of different technologies and the ways that we use them have
both personal and political implications. Given this, it is important that career development
professionals both help individuals recognise the ways in which digital technologies shape the
opportunity structure and foster careful consideration about where it is best to adapt and where it is
best to resist.

Ultimately, we are optimistic about the possibilities for digital technologies in careers work. Learners
now have the opportunity to draw on information about jobs and careers across the world, to build
connections and common cause with others unhampered by geography and time, and to gain
greater control over the learning that they want to do. Nonetheless, we need to also recognise the
dark side of this new digital world and to notice the ways in which it shapes our careers and fosters
the illusion of democracy and empowerment. In such a world, career development professionals, as
providers of insights into the operation of the system and facilitators of critical enquiry, exploration,
and career enactment, continue to be essential.

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