Socioeconomic disadvantage, poverty, and career development

This webinar is part of the CICA Series, Empowering Futures: The Role of Career Development in Advancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. All sessions in the series are free to attend. Be sure to check out our other webinars in the series running each week in February 2025.

For decades, work and employment, through jobs in a wider career, has been touted as the solution to overcoming socioeconomic disadvantage. Yet today, across the world of work, working poverty and precarity have become more the norm than the exception.  Combatting that exception, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (or SDGs) have been encouraging us to reframe poverty as poverties of opportunity across 17 different life, and quality-of-life domains. These range from poverties of food and nutrition to socioeconomic exclusion by inequality and discrimination, to lack of access to clean water and air.  Work and career still sit at the very heart of these SDGs (opportunities-for-greater-inclusion), in the form of a universal access to decent work conditions.  However, the SDGs also invite us to think about diversity, equity and inclusion in a multi-faceted way, under the umbrella concept of Sustainability.           

Sustainability in the world of careers implies improving access to sustainable livelihoods. Worldwide research, especially with younger generations, shows that the transition from school to work, and precarious work to sustainable work, is uppermost in people’s minds when they look for a career. Research is also showing that vocational interest has gained in salience from pre- to post-pandemic, at predicting work success.  In response to the climate emergency in particular, policymakers are flagging the issue of Just Transitions, from carbon-dependent to carbon-neutral, or regenerative, forms of work and career. Whilst this issue of just transition tends to be framed environmentally, it is become increasingly clear that people want, and need, a far wider perspective - one that takes in not only planetary protection but also pays the bills, addresses inequality, supports the livelihoods of future generations, and in general speaks to all 17 of the SDGs.                  

Against this broader backdrop to the world of work, and what it needs to deliver for people, career development takes on an even broader and deeper significance than ever before. One response to that challenge – and opportunity - is to expand the concept of Just Transitions, from socioeconomic disadvantage and poverties of opportunity to sustainable livelihoods. This presentation reviews some of the newer elements that may be useful not only to students and workers in transition, but also to key career counsellors and advisors who are at the front line of career development services. Included for instance are indexes of sustainable livelihoods, enterprise development training, and multi-collared approaches to building livelihoods that are sustainable.

Presenter - Stuart C. Carr (Stu)

Holder of the UNESCO Chair on Sustainable Livelihoods, Stuart C. Carr (Stu) is also a Professor of Psychology, Industrial and Organizational (I/O) Psychology Program, at Massey University, New Zealand. He co-founded Humanitarian Work Psychology, which focuses on transitions from precarious labor, via decent work, to Sustainable Livelihoods.  Prosecuting that goal, he co-founded Projects G.L.O.W. (Global Living Organizational Wage), S.L.A.T.E. (Sustainable Livelihoods And The Ecosystem), and Cloud S.L.I.C. (Sustainable Livelihoods Collaboration). Stu’s research, service, and teaching are conducted under the aegis of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), principally eradicating poverty (SDG-1), through partnerships (SDG-17) for Sustainable Livelihoods (SDG-8), which embody Climate Action (SDG-13). Stu’s professional collar as a Humanitarian Work Psychology has included co-founding and co-leading a Global Task Force for Humanitarian Work Psychology.  Stu is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand (RSNZ), Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP), and New Zealand Psychological Society (NZPS).