The career development sector has an important role to play in advancing the SDGs, as a key leader in helping Canadians reach their career, employment, and work goals.

In 2022, we asked a group of career development practitioners to consider the impact of their work using the SDGs. Their responses gave us rich insights about the need for an intergenerational approach to shaping the Future of Work and fighting one of the last accepted forms of discrimination: ageism.

Workplace ageism remains rampant, insidious, and stifling

When employees cross an age threshold (often when they enter their 50s), their decades of problem-solving experience and institutional knowledge begin to be discounted. They are overlooked for continuing career development, such as high-performer programs, retraining, and any number of other professional opportunities. As Lisa Taylor explains in The Talent Revolution: Longevity and the Future of Work, employers often and mistakenly consider their older workers to be “high-cost, low-reward employees who are clogging the system and keeping potentially productive workers waiting on the sidelines.”

Funding provided to programs and supports that tackle a range of economic, educational, and social equity issues are often tied to age, and often target youth and early career professionals. Yet adults who face a high risk of job automation tend to be older and lower skilled, and older adults, lower educated adults, and those living in rural areas are less likely to use career services. Better outreach and targeting of services to these groups are needed now to avoid a whole-of-society crisis for our ageing population in the coming years and decades.

But workplace ageism doesn’t only affect older people.

Younger workers are often perceived as not being ready for meaningful roles and instead get relegated to “busy work” or “grunt work.” Younger workers’ opinions are often discounted inside organizations and not taken as seriously as their older or more experienced counterparts. They are also expected to accept working conditions that would not be considered decent work for other age groups, such as unpaid internships and ineligibility for benefits that affect health and well-being.

Career development is a field that focuses on identity, work, and the labour market over the entire lifespan. Valuable methodologies and models exist within it to help individuals, leaders, and organizations understand:

• how both older and younger workers are affected by ageism;
• how people of all different ages are being affected in different ways by the changing world of work; and,
• how we can address challenges and barriers that see people left behind for a number of interrelated reasons, including ageism.

Towards a deeper understanding of why DEI and the SDGs matter in career development

Career development practitioners are an ambitious lot. When we asked a group of them to imagine their work and impact in the future, a number of optimistic “what if” questions steeped in revolutionary change emerged:

• “What if career development was clearly aligned and communicated through the SDGs and ESG human capital theory?”
• “What if organizations actually understood career development and used us to meet these goals?”
• “What if I could bridge students’ employment needs with innovative sustainable solutions for our local communities?”
• “What if there was strong infrastructure to support real equity for all workers?”

The work that career development practitioners do is fundamentally intersectional, and they intend to only keep growing their impact in areas that help workforces and workplaces become more diverse, equitable, and inclusive (see Figure 1). Age is one of several DEI priorities they identify.

When we explored what SDGs career development practitioners impact today and hope to impact in the future, one thing became very clear: career development practitioners want to revolutionize their own field so that their many areas of impact are more integrated with one another and have broader reach (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Career development practitioners envision a much broader reach for their impact.

The top SDG that career development practitioners hope to be impacting by 2032 is Sustainable cities and communities.

Today, many career development practitioners focus on the individual level that addresses basic needs, like helping clients find a job so they can put food on the table and a roof over their head. In 2032, they want to be focusing on the systemic level that addresses higher order needs, like community-based approaches and whole-of-system solutions to career and workforce challenges.

This doesn’t mean career development practitioners don’t want to have individual clients. It means they want the type of work they are doing with clients and the resources available to them to be more effective and robust. The shift from individual to systemic level work also points to how the priority they place on DEI and helping clients overcome barriers positions them to have broad impact across all demographic groups, including Canada’s intergenerational workforce.

Consider these excerpts from the letters that career development practitioners wrote to their present-day selves from the future:

• “I set forth to work with community intermediaries, local champions, and change agents to build the ‘fulfilled city’ of 2032, taking a holistic, humanistic, and balanced perspective so that my city and its citizens thrived.”
• “My focus for my clients in 2032 is on helping them navigate paths to their goals with a more holistic and community-supported approach.”
• “In 2032, we take a holistic view of supporting clients. We look at the world around them and think about all of the elements that impact career decisions, not just helping clients find work…We look at all the social issues that impact well-being.”

This SDG exercise also gave us insight into who career development practitioners want to become as they themselves age, as well as the impact they want to have—and believe they can have—as older workers. They firmly see their older selves as active agents in achieving sustainable development outcomes. Consider these letter excerpts:

• “Dear me, message to myself from the future: Life must be pretty interesting now that I am in my late 60s! I am hopefully retired but still very much active and interested in the world of quality education and Work-Integrated-Learning (WIL).”
• “I am retired! But I volunteer with other older people who continue to work out of choice or need. I work to ensure we are still actively engaged in communities.”
• “I still work with students, but the make-up of students has changed drastically from mostly young adults who are in full-time programs to a variety of ages and stages.”
• “The groups I help are the same—people with barriers, people with disabilities, newcomers to Canada (or other parts of the world), and even more so the older generation who is struggling to find work in a quickly changing world.”

We’ve written elsewhere about integrating DEI into career management. Career services and programs can’t be built on foundations that are not systemically diverse, equitable, and inclusive. Broadening the career development sector’s scope of impact means not only changing the services and programs that are delivered, but also working towards a deeper understanding of why DEI and the SDGs are so integral to the sector’s work—and what purpose-driven impact truly means.

We need widescale recognition of the importance of developing career supports that cross demographics, build community belonging, and leave no one behind. One way to do this is through intergenerational approaches to fighting ageism, for both younger and older Canadians, in workplaces and career services.

Helping older workers doesn’t only help older workers. It also sets paths and patterns for better career services and programs for everybody. If career development practitioners, and the sector as a whole, get really good at helping older workers, they will become equally good at helping younger workers and, in fact, helping Canadians across their entire lifespan.

By addressing neglected demographics, the career development sector will deepen its capacity to positively impact all demographic groups. As urban planner Scott Ball said, “if you can make a community work for kids and for the elderly, it will work for everyone else.”