What is Livelihood Planning?
Career and livelihood are often viewed as distinct.
Livelihood is commonly associated with survival, lower-income groups, rural occupations such as farming, vending, artisan work and skilled trades, and traditional forms of skills transmission.
Career, by contrast, is associated with urban settings, formal education, higher social status, better opportunities and income, and greater prestige.
This distinction can encourage people to abandon rural livelihoods for perceived urban opportunities.
The livelihood planning approach recognises that career and livelihood take different forms across contexts.
In one context career guidance may involve helping an individual specialise in an occupation. In another context it might mean helping a community strengthen traditional occupations through modern skills and sustainable practices.
What is the role of contemporary career guidance?
Would career guidance be relevant to the farmer, the cobbler, the silk worm producer, the weaver, the traditional toy maker, the basket maker, the potter, the fisherman, the traditional healer and the shepherd? Or to their children?
Such questions have a bearing on the contemporary practice of career guidance. Should career guidance be offered at all to the practitioners of traditional occupations, and more importantly to their children?
Does career guidance become relevant only when economic development is such that non traditional, non livelihood oriented occupations begin to appear within that economy? Is career guidance a replacement for traditional mechanisms of occupational role allocation?
Finally, does career guidance in these contexts imply replacing livelihood with career? It is here that the notion of livelihood planning and a livelihood planning approach to career guidance could be discussed further.
Culture and Work
In the past, the allocation of work roles seems to have been characterised across cultures by a high degree of automaticity. Skills and trades ran in families or within groups and expertise related to a particular profession was transmitted from the adult to the young within the family or through apprenticeships offered through guilds of professionals.
The modern idea of career reflects a shift away from the traditional notion of livelihood.
Within The Promise Foundation’s framework, livelihood planning applies career guidance principles to help individuals adapt traditional forms of work to contemporary contexts, while fostering bidirectionality between tradition and contemporary forms of work.
Within such a system would be a livelihood counsellor: a career counsellor who has the skills to allow the context to define the meaning of career along with the capability to understand and optimize traditional occupational structures for modern work environments.
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