GCCA | Graduate Careers Council of Australia

Graduate Careers Australia

ergo - Number 91 June 2003

“Switched On Careers”: The 2003 AACC National Conference

The 12th National Conference of the Australian Association of Career Counsellors (AACC), titled “Switched On Careers”, was held in Adelaide from 14 – 16 April 2003. The theme was taken literally by AACC conference committee members, who could be easily identified by the flashing lights atop their conference caps; the committee busied themselves directing the 300 or so delegates around the conference venue in the pleasant surrounds of Prince Alfred College in Kent Town.

I had an early start on the Monday morning as the materials for our gradlink information stall had arrived and were awaiting assembly in the Trade Fair annex; it was in here that Jackie Vidot and I would spend a significant amount of our time, fielding questions and suggestions about our products and services from the large variety of delegates who came to visit us outside. After what was by all accounts a highly entertaining opening keynote address from US careers expert Howard Figler which unusually involved singing and dancing, I caught the second speaker for the day, Roderick Wilkins from EDS Credit Services, who gave us an insight into various management issues.

After a workshop about initiatives in an area I’d not been aware of prior to this conference, namely career/life skill development for elite athletes, we adjourned for lunch in an outside quadrangle surrounded by classrooms – inspiring a surge of pleasant nostalgia in me for my schooldays. My afternoon began with another interesting keynote on “career resilience” from Liz Harris-Tuck and finished with another workshop session – this time I learned about a proposed new careers tool, the Employability Quotient (EmQ), which sought to quantify job-seeker skill-sets with a numerical grading.

Some rain overnight had left the grounds a little soggy at Prince Alfred College, but this didn’t deter the delegates who filled out the auditorium on day two for Jason Kuchel’s opening address on the growth of the Electronics Industry Association in South Australia, where it is hoped a “Silicon Valley in the Southern Hemisphere” will be developed. Today’s workshop for me was “Building The Future” and focused on training secondary school students to act as strategic business consultants, a concept which perhaps surprisingly has lead to a number of initiatives being fully taken up by the pertinent organisations.

After lunch I spent more time staffing our trade stall and catching up with our new executive director Cindy Tilbrook, and before I knew it the time had come to head to the Adelaide Zoo for the Conference Dinner. A rousing time was had by all, evidenced by the exuberant dancing which occurred in front of the band at the close of the evening!

The last day began with an address from Dr Diana Day on the importance of external/global influences to careers counselling, followed by the final workshop session, where I learned more about “opportunity-focused job hunting”, a very practical method to seek employment which takes into account serendipity and life circumstances. After lunch – another opportunity for networking while sampling the very hospitable spread put on by the conference organisers, it was time to pack up the trade stall to send it back to Melbourne. Thus I headed off to the airport with a range of new-found perspectives on the practice of career counselling.

For more information about the AACC and the conference details, visit www.aacc.org.au