Knowledge-Information-Service Era Changes in Work and Education and the Changing Role of the School Counselor in Career Education

Career Development Quarterly, March, 2001 by Kenneth B. Hoyt, Pat Nellor Wickwire

The Knowledge-Information-Service Era (KIS) is reflecting exponential changes in social, economic, government, career, education, work, and other life systems. Changes in work and workplace present a challenge to education and "educationplace" to provide concentrated attention to career development. Career education is an answer to the challenge. School counselors have a changing role in supporting the needs of students and workers for basic academic skills, productive work habits, work values, and means of relating paid and unpaid work as parts of total lifestyle.

Work and workplace are changing exponentially against the background of the Knowledge-Information-Service (KIS) Era. The KIS Era, with the American penchant for innovation and immediacy, is displaying and inducing change beyond prior expectations. Led in part by advances in electronic and scientific technology and spurred in part by motivations for economic growth and political outreach, rapid and wide-reaching changes are occurring in social, governmental, economic, and other life systems.

Trends toward difference are emerging in areas such as management and leadership structures and processes; communication styles, systems, substance, and tempo; social support, community, and family unit systems, roles, and results; self-in-relation needs and wants; globalization and national and international interdependence; exploration of the universe; and invention and intervention through bioenergy and biogenetics. Changes are also evident in institution-community-populace relationships and conventions; cultural and subcultural information, understandings, and behaviors; form and substance of instrumental and expressive behaviors and actions; means, intensity, and variance in the identification and pursuit of social issues; concerns about environmental, economic, social, and government sustainability; complexity, variety, and context of options in personal, occupational, educational, and social domains; and the significance and influence of science, mathematics, and technology relative to other fields.

Demographics are evolving toward an intermingled culture, with shifting differential and common static factors and dynamic characteristics of individuals and groups, along with consequent convergence and divergence of values, attitudes, behaviors, economic progress, career choice, occupational and educational accomplishment, lifestyle, and other areas. Power and influence are being redistributed cyclically worldwide and population-wide through instruments of wealth, violence, and knowledge. Certain issues are paramount, such as monitoring of the applications of invention; equitable access to knowledge, balance and integration of high-tech and high-touch factors; and the blend of people, processes, structures, and outcomes in change agency and agentry. An incremental shift is occurring toward the creation and dissemination of knowledge throughout KIS Era developments, and movement toward the Experiential Existential-Spiritual Era has already been initiated. This list of changes in the overall framework agains t which work and workplace are positioned can easily be extended (Wickwire, 1993, in press). Clearly, work and workplace are also experiencing new and different developments.

Change in Work and Workplace

Constellations of key words with key connotations can be highlighted to characterize some of the dramatic developments occurring in work and workplace during the transition to the new millennium (Wickwire, 1997). They include the following:

1. Quality and excellence, total quality management, value-added products and services, new and reformed management paradigms, customer expectations, customer satisfaction, change, immediacy, doing more with less, distributed work, mass customization, productivity, return on investment

2. Vision, mission, goals, objectives, delivery, results, outputs, outcomes

3. Learning organization, knowledge-based culture, intellectual capital, workers as assets, high performance, standards, core competencies, skills, multiskilling, multitasking, innovation, virtual organization

4. Lateral integration, teamwork, leadership, shared power and decision making, enabling, coordination, cooperation, repositioning of work, service

5. Skills in adaptability, flexibility, resiliency, employability, transferability, understanding and applying systems and resources, active learning, futures thinking, innovation, proactivity

6. Oral communication, listening, reading, written communication, mathematics, interpersonal, technical skills

7. Feedback, measurement, assessment, evaluation, accountability, continuous improvement, performance improvement, performance improvement interventions

8. Self as employer, self-sufficiency, self-management, portable skills, continuous lifelong learning, serial employment, "dejobbing," transitions, strategic reskilling, contingency work, life-work balance, consolidation of work and family, leisure, different forms ofcommunity and aloneness