Managing Career Transitions: A New White Paper about a Course for Mid-Career Adults

by Danny Mucinskas

We live in an era of rapid change. Events of the past few years alone have demonstrated that for humanity to proceed with “business as usual” is not only unrealistic but is actually not possible. Climate change, new technologies (such as generative AI), and demographic shifts are set to touch all of our lives, even in the short-term. Economic, political, and social systems are being reshaped by necessity. While it can be easy to forget that we are living through exceptional times, our lives will be altered in concrete ways in the years and decades to come, including at work and in workplaces. According to the Future of Jobs Report 2023, 23% of jobs are expected to change in the next 4 years alone, which will require people to respond by changing roles and even career fields. Well-executed programs and frameworks that will help workers handle transitions in thoughtful ways will be in demand.

Against this backdrop, from 2020 to 2023, a team from Project Zero (PZ) at the Harvard Graduate School of Education developed a course to help working adults process and manage changes in their careers. Made possible by funding from the Singapore Institute of Management (SIM), which collaborated with the PZ team throughout the project, the course is titled “Navigating Changes Successfully at Work.” It brings together insights from both the Learning Innovations Laboratory, under the direction of Marga Biller, and from The Good Project, with contributions led by Danny Mucinskas and Howard Gardner. (See the previous two blog posts that have been written about this effort here and here.) The course has been piloted, refined, and offered iteratively with Singaporean mid-career adult learners thanks to SIM’s connections and partnerships, including with SIM employees, unemployed professionals, and a group of facilitators who have now been trained to teach the course independently.

Based on the activities of this project, PZ has released a new white paper that details the background, creation process, and content of the course, as well as the challenges encountered and possible future directions. The paper is intended for a wide audience, including scholars, learning designers, and policymakers who may be interested in this particular set of ideas and in general professional development opportunities for workers.

As the paper explains, the course is structured as a series of four 3-hour session meetings, during which participants are led through a series of discussion and reflection prompts about the meanings of two core frameworks developed in recent decades at PZ: Unlearning and Good Work. 

Regarding Unlearning, participants explore three different lenses that may uncover ways of thinking and doing that “get in the way” of adapting effectively to change. First, the course looks at Mindsets, or the sets of assumptions and patterns of thinking we have about the world and how it functions. Specifically, the course prompts learners to uncover their values (such as honesty or accomplishment); to map their various identities; and to consider how expertise may help or hinder transitions. Participants then think about how each of these may need to shift. Second, the course covers Habits by analyzing how habit cycles function as patterns of cues or triggers, regular routines, and rewards or goals, and how these cycles may need to shift when our goals change. Third, the final session reviews Systems, zooming out and asking learners to diagram their learning ecosystem and also diagnose their alignment or misalignment with the views and goals of others. 

Throughout the sessions, learners are furthermore asked to consider the relationship between the lenses of Unlearning and the 3 Es of Good Work: Engagement (a sense of connection or enjoyment to work), Excellence (quality, involved in work that is well-done or meets a certain standard), and Ethics (social responsibility related to concerns of right and wrong). Course participants think about their own personal manifestations of Good Work that align with these elements. At-home extension activities completed between sessions allow for application of the concepts to learners’ daily lives and work.

The following video, developed by the course team, provides an overview of how Unlearning and Good Work may be helpful in moments of workplace change and also may interact with one another.

Several learning design principles guided the structure, pace, and activities included in the course, namely:

• Collaboration, to increase participant engagement and to ensure diverse perspectives are shared;

• Learner-centric facilitation, focusing on participants’ personal experiences rather than knowledge of the instructor;

• Relevance to relatable, real-life scenarios; and

• Metacognitive evaluation, in which participants reflect on their learning over time.

Based on the Unlearning and Good Work frameworks from this course, a team at SIM is continuing to design new learning experiences, including a core skills program focused on outcomes like learning agility and self-management. Furthermore, the standalone course will continue to be offered to Singaporean mid-career learners via SIM’s partnership with e2i as well as via SIM’s usual public enrollment and corporate channels.

As we look ahead at the trajectory of this course and its potential to aid adult learners, we recognize that we live in a continuously changing world with concomitant workplace transitions.  The PZ team is therefore considering additional audiences who may benefit from the learning materials, including younger learners (e.g., college seniors) and new cohorts of adult workers (e.g., participants drawn from a single company or organization). Additionally, in order to ensure that the course has maximum impact and staying power, it is important for the ideas to be periodically reinforced. This goal may be realized through additional follow-up workshops or the establishment of a community of learners who continue to discuss their workplace transitions with one another beyond the conclusion of the formal course.

We welcome comments below and look forward to continuing to share updates about the direction of this work in future posts.

Good Work for Brazilian Educators Featured on CNN

Professors Valéria Arantes and Ulisses Araújo of the University of São Paulo have for the past several years been working on an investigation of “good work” with Brazilian educators, part of The Good Project Brasil (link) initiative. Our team has been excited to observe how ideas from The Good Project have been applied in the Brazilian context.

Recently, this work appeared on CNN Brasil in two video features that highlighted ongoing research and implications for teachers, which we share below for our readers. (Note that the videos are in the original Portuguese.)

The first video spotlight described the investigation that Arantes and Araújo have done of “good teaching,” including the 3 Es of good work (excellence, ethics, and engagement). In interviews with 2,000 Brazilian public school teachers, participants were asked about their values and sense of purpose within education. Questions included:

1. What are your goals and plans for the coming years and a brighter future?

2. Tell us about your life purpose, describing in detail your thoughts, feelings, and actions about them.

83% of teachers in the sample described education as central to their vision of life. 88% commented on excellence, while 56% described a commitment to ethics and responsibility. Arantes, Araújo, and their colleagues conclude that teacher trainings should support educators to develop purpose and foster socioemotional skills.

The second feature includes teachers’ responses to a question regarding their “dream school,” with 97% of respondents desiring change from current educational models. Themes discussed by teachers included more democratic and inclusive institutions; active learning pedagogies; and a focus on citizenship.

We congratulate Valéria, Ulisses, and their team for this recognition of their work and look forward to continuing to follow their progress! 

You Told Us, We Listened: New Video Dilemmas!

In our work with educators, we hear it’s become increasingly difficult to engage students in discussions. In a recent conversation, teachers told us that it might be helpful if there were more video dilemmas available on our website to help spark these conversations. Just in time for 2022, we now have two new video dilemmas [link here] available! 

For those working with The Good Project Lesson Plans [link here], these new dilemmas are drawn from Lesson 1.2, which asks students to use a “See, Think, and Wonder” routine to learn how to differentiate and understand the relationship between “good work” and just “work.”

The first dilemma, “The Meaning of Grades [link here],” explores a Professor of Engineering’s relationship with grade inflation and its impact on his students’ future prospects. The second dilemma, “When in Doubt… Make it Excellent [link here],” tells the story of a high school student who turns around his school’s journalism club’s culture of making things up.  

Take some time to review the dilemmas and try engaging in the See-Think-Wonder routine on your own. 

• What do you see in these narratives? What do you notice? How do you see these narratives relating to the 3 Es?

• What do these narratives make you think about? Do they relate at all to your own life? 

• What do these narratives make you wonder? Do you have unanswered questions?

The Good Project Website Video Dilemmas

First Brazilian Conference on Active Learning for K-12 Education

We are pleased to announce that the first Brazilian Conference on Active Learning for K-12 education streamed live on October 11, 2021 . Director Lynn Barendsen gave a talk on Good Work and Good Teaching in 2021 as part of the conference.

You can find the conference in English and Portuguese below:

English version

https://youtu.be/Mlf2HSlEz3Q

Portuguese version

https://youtu.be/NjQ7yBA3i3Y

Announcing The Good Project Fundamental Lessons

We are excited to announce The Good Project Fundamental Lessons, which can be found on our website here. 

This set of 16 lessons organized into 4 units serves as an introduction to the core concepts of The Good Project. Adapted from our longer 45-minute lessons (here), each fundamental lesson is approximately 15-minutes long. They are designed for secondary school students but are adaptable to middle school, and some lessons may well work with younger audiences.

Similar to our longer curriculum, the Fundamental Lessons include introductory material to familiarize teachers with The Good Project’s approach and theory of change. Each individual lesson includes an overarching goal, lists the core concepts covered in the lesson, and indicates any prerequisite lessons. The lesson instructions are detailed and broken down into separate steps with recommended timing in order to help adhere to the 15-minute window. All necessary worksheets and reading materials are also included. 

While we wish all students had the opportunity to delve deeply into the ideas and frameworks related to “good work”, we realize classroom time is at a premium. Our hope is that this abbreviated curriculum sparks interest in both students and educators, and that it provides enough of an overview for students to begin to think about how they might view themselves as “good workers.”

We would like to thank The Argosy Foundation for providing the generous funding that made this work possible. The Good Project has also received significant support from The Saul Zaentz Charitable Foundation, The Endeavour Foundation, and additional anonymous funders. 

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or want to connect as you implement these lessons with your students. We are available via our “contact us” page, which can be found here.