Communities

Along with my thinking about moving to London or whether to stay here in Glasgow, I have also been looking for jobs in which to fund either of these decisions after finishing University in May, and this got me thinking about communities and guidance.
It seems that every job which I look for, which centres around giving guidance in a careers context always seems to suggest that they would ‘prefer/or it would be desirable’ that the applicant have knowledge of the area which they will be working in.

I can understand on the face of it why this would be- having an understanding of local issues, being able to relate with the local communities.
However, for someone coming out of a University course where we have been told that jobs in the Career Guidance sector wont be easy to come by and that we should consider relocating, then it is a further hurdle to learn that you would be looked down upon in your application if you did not come from the area.

Can it be possible to learn enough and integrate yourself enough into a new community in order to give the best guidance that you can to people affected by the local issues in the local area? Could enough research be done beforehand to function within this new community? These may be the many questions which worry an interview panel.

I feel that your role within your (new) job would be your small-knit community, where you could integrate fully eventually and learn the inside and outsides of how it works, functions and interacts with the wider community (your clients)?

Surely working within a job which deals directly with the public and social issues that it faces, you would quite quickly grow and learn the community as a whole and how you yourself can work within it and achieve the targets of your job for the benefit of the community’s members?

I realise the importance of community and understanding the community in which you work as it will form belief systems, ways of life for an individual, even for some people a way of thinking.
My granddad often used the phrase ‘small town mentality’ and what he meant, and quite harshly, was that people from small industrial towns where there was little work and little to do had the mentality that this was the way life was, that they couldn’t do anything about it; there was no jobs in their local area, and so for them benefits and unemployment was the way that they lived and would continue to live.
In this case it can be important to know the ‘mentality’ of a community. Bill Law (1981) stated that;’ the way in which who does what in society is decided is the product of a plurality of interpersonal transactions conducted in local settings, and on the basis of interaction within and between groups of which the individual is a member- the “community”.’ This suggests that the ‘mentality’ of a community can be passed down through the generations and can be difficult to get out of, in this way communities allowed to exist without intervention could be dangerous and stagnant.

In this case, I have realised right here and now through typing this out, that maybe the answer is to actually have guidance workers who are not from the area to break this cycle and to bring a new ‘mentality’ to members of the community- hopefully this could change the communities thinking in the long term and benefit the community as a whole.

….I wonder if it would be possible to convince an interview panel that not knowing about the community you were going to be working within was a good thingJ!!!

Kidd, J.M. (2006) Understanding Career Counselling. Theory, Research and Practice. London, SAGE Publications