Career Development Association of Alberta (CDAA)
Ignite Your Passion 2018
The CDAA is pleased to host Ignite Your Passion 2018, an annual event featuring a full day of quality and affordable professional development in four locations across Alberta: Calgary, Lethbridge, Red Deer, and Edmonton. This year we are pleased to present:
CONNECTING CAREER DEVELOPMENT & MENTAL HEALTH IN PRACTICE, THOUGHT AND CONVERSATION
This topic was specifically requested for two main reasons:
1. Mental health concerns continue to gain prominence in the minds of the public, policy makers and funders, yet we have not effectively made the case that career development interventions ARE mental health interventions! We need to remind ourselves and show others that (and how) career development services contribute to overall wellbeing.
2. Career development concerns and mental health/illness issues cannot be separated. A whole client comes to you for help, and “seeing” the whole person will strengthen your practice.
Connecting your career development services to clients’ mental health concerns, while clearly recognizing ethical concerns and your competence boundaries, will not only improve your career development services, but will broaden your conceptualization of client concerns and strengthen your collaboration with and referral to other healthcare service providers. Of course, spending a day with Dave & Mike, Albertan career development specialists for about 30 years, can’t help but be fun! The workshop will be highly interactive, allowing you to engage with your career development compatriots and learn a lot from each other. It will also be highly informative, drawing upon the latest research on the relationships between career development, work, mental illness and mental health. You will learn practical strategies for ethically considering mental health concerns in your practice, a model that will help you think more clearly about the connections between career development and mental health, and the reasons that having conversations about the impact of your work on wellbeing is so important.
You will leave the session:
- Aware of how mental health concerns manifest themselves in career development practice
- Able to use general assessment tools and strategies
- Understanding ethics related to these issues and the boundaries of competency
- Able to effectively refer to and/or work collaboratively with mental health service providers
- Recognizing a range of career development strategies that support positive mental health
- With a model by which to better understand career development and mental health relationships
- Aware of the distinctions between mental health and mental illness
- Aware of ways in which they can evaluate the mental health impact of their career development services
- Able to use specific strategies to bolster mental health via career development practice, such as teaching clients the mental health - career development connections and responding to client disclosure of mental illness concerns with an ethically-based approach and within one’s boundaries of competence
WORKSHOP OUTLINE
- Overview & Introductions
- Experiences, Expectations and Questions
- This will provide participants the opportunity to discuss their experiences working with mental health/illness issues in career development contexts, the expectations they have of the workshop, and questions they hope the workshop addresses
- The Relationship between Career Development & Mental Health/Mental Illness
- A model connecting career development and mental health/illness (first described at ACDC 2017) will be used to begin addressing participants’ questions and to set the stage for the remaining activities of the workshop
- The Role of the Career Development Practitioner re: Mental Health/Mental Illness (including Ethical Considerations & Boundaries of Competence)
- Here the transition from theory to practice starts with clarifying the practitioner’s role vis-à-vis mental health/illness in terms of competence and ethical considerations
- Integrating Mental Health/Mental Illness Concerns in the Career Development Assessment Process
- Practical ways to treat the client as a whole person, and therefore include concerns of mental health/illness in the assessment process, will be described, demonstrated and practiced
- Tools and Strategies for Supporting Positive Mental Health through Career Development Practice
- Continuing on from the assessment process immediately above, this component will address practical ways in which positive mental health can be promoted and in which progress can be measured
- Wrap-Up
YOUR FACILITATORS
DAVE REDEKOPP
Dave is President of the Life-Role Development Group Ltd. and has been an avid champion of career development since 1988. He has been awarded provincial and national awards in career development and is widely recognized in Canada as a thought leader in the field. He is co-author of the Blueprint for Life/Work Designs, Canada’s career development competency framework; project leader for the development and delivery of the Career Development Competency Program, author of Everyday Career Development, a workshop and guide on integration career development into day-to-day schooling; and the project manager for the development of CAREERinsite, ALIS’s interactive career planning tool. Dave holds a PhD in Educational Psychology from the University of Alberta.
MICHAEL HUSTON
Michael has been involved in the career development field since the early 1990s. He is a Registered Psychologist at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta. His job entails student counselling within the Wellness Services department. Michael has previously taught and counselled at Concordia University College of Alberta, where he developed expertise teaching many counselling skills. Michael’s areas of expertise include career planning, relationship concerns, stress management, anger Management and learning strategies, and he is particularly interested in the various connections between career development, mental health and mental illness. As an Associate of the Group, Michael co-delivers the Career Development Competency Program’s Foundations of Assessment and Assessment: Investing in Strength courses.
