What’s the point of ageing, if you cannot tell a good story? How to give meaning to your life experience, how to put the essence of your private and/or professional life into words? To capture the thread of our lives from birth until today – either in writing or speaking – is probably something we all humans do at a certain point on our life paths. Usually this happens when we are at a crossroads in life or when an important milestone is approaching us.

My family and friends have started teasing me by asking how I am going to celebrate my 50th birthday in a couple of years. To some of them I have responded that maybe there is no point of celebrating the actual ageing as these days most people in the world reach the age of 50 anyway and I cannot see anything special in that. Maybe I am in denial and I have difficulties in accepting my own ageing, and thus, I do not want to throw an age-is-only-numbers party. To some others I have vaguely hinted that there might be a slight possibility of having “The Round Years Birthday Party”, but that it in that case will be something unique and not solely focusing on the “age factor”.

Isn’t it so that we traditionally associate turning 50 years old with maturity and stability, and we wish to think that we have discovered and fulfilled our life mission to a great extent by then? Internally we wish to be convinced of having attained true serenity and achieved something great in life and the world around us should acknowledge this. At the same time, though, we in many cases try to escape from the perceived unpleasant or banal aspects of ageing by combatting the signs of life in our physical appearance. In our desperate attempt to look forever young, we hysterically even at the age of 50, wish to give a youthful, dynamic and energetic impression.

Nevertheless, in my opinion mature age is underrated in Western societies. The quality that can manifest in adult and senior age is often ignored or disregarded. This is very much the situation in working life that does not sufficiently take advantage of intergenerational learning or of using the real potential of the more mature and older staff members. The big question to me is, how we could overcome age barriers and build cross-generational relationships in the workplace. Perhaps using more storytelling at work could be the key to this as across cultures and throughout generations narratives have been shared for entertainment, education, cultural preservation, and instilling moral values.

The annual conference of the International Association for Educational and Vocational Guidance (IAEVG) was organized in Quebec, Canada, on 4-6 June 2014. The overall conference theme At the intersection of personal, community and work life realities invited scholars and experts to explore guidance and career development from the perspectives of individual, collective and working life as well as to examine the needs, insights and aspirations that may arise and find their source at this crossroads. All in all, some 1200 participants from 33 countries attended this well-organised and professionally enriching event.

I myself was involved in a Finnish team of five presenters at the conference. Jointly we hosted a 90-minute symposium on Career management and employability skills in higher education, where the aim was to showcase the work carried out in Finland on developing career counselling to increase students’ employability during their studies. A lively discussion followed the five presentations, and the audience with experts from Canada, Saudi Arabia, France, Norway, etc., was keen on knowing, among other things, more about the situation of the youth in the Finnish labour market, methods applied to support students’ working life familiarization in Finland, national curricula and how career management skills are embedded in them. The synthesizing conclusion of the symposium could be phrased as “We all have a role in developing the skills and employability of our young”.

My contribution to the above symposium was to briefly present the theoretical framework of my doctoral research on International mobility capital that I have initiated earlier this year. The objective of the research is to explore how working abroad contributes to an individual’s professional development, career management and future employability. The intention is to explore these dimensions from the perspectives of life design (a new career construction theory), identity formation (theories of psychology and sociology) as well as intellectual capital (economic and organizational theories).

The conference served my information needs well as the plenary sessions and workshops explicitly addressed several themes closely linked to my own doctoral research. But as always, the most rewarding thing at the conference was to make new contacts with experts from different countries and hopefully find a way to cooperate with them in the coming months and years.

For those interested: The next IAEVG conference will be held in Japan on 18-21 September 2015.             

The 19th Alumni-clubs.net Conference on Alumni-Management, Career Service and Fundraising was held in Göttingen, Germany, on 9-11 May 2014. This Alumni-clubs.net is a network of higher education institutions and other related stakeholders across the German speaking Europe (incl. Austria, Germany, Switzerland). The main aim of the network is to support exchange of experiences, mutual learning and networking in the areas linked to alumni management, career service, marketing and promotional activities. In the coming years, there is an intention to expand the network to other countries as well.      

I myself had the honour of contributing to this interesting event as an invited speaker by running a 90-minute workshop, in which I introduced the development work on graduate employability in Finnish higher education and briefly presented the European Union policy and strategy framework for education, employment and lifelong guidance. The workshop participants were extremely active and interested in learning about the theoretical foundation underlying employability as well as how guidance and counselling can support the acquisition of career management and employability skills throughout studies in tertiary education.

Moreover, already at the conference and in the discussions following the event I have been informed that a German-coordinated large-scale research study on employability with involvement of several European countries (at least Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland) will be launched soon. The first phase of this research will be conducted in 2014-15.   

The intention is to collect data from students in higher education institutions and to consult employers to get an overview of how the concept of employablity is perceived and interpreted and what elements and/or dimensions are linked to it. The results will hopefully give insights into how higher education institutions can improve their methods and means to help students develop their employability skills while studying, and how closer links between learning and working can be established in the future (i.e. education-business cooperation).    

The website www.alumni-clubs.net (in German) gives additional information on the objectives and activities of the alumni-clubs.net. The 20th network conference will be arranged in Potsdam, Germany, on 8-10 May 2015.