Introducing: Career Literature Reviews!

About six weeks ago, I decided that I wanted to make a bigger commitment to being connected to the world of career development research. It’s easy to become complacent around issues such as this – work is busy, after all. Even at times of year when there aren’t as many students booking appointments (and those times are becoming decidedly less frequent), there is no shortage of projects to take on, as in any other job.

So while I didn’t exactly blame myself for not being more intentional about keeping up to date with the research literature relevant to my field, I did decide that this was a priority that I wanted to put more effort into (and have since received a lot of support from coworkers who I’m guessing feel the same way).

In the end, I set a small (SMART) goal for myself: to read and critically reflect on at least one academic journal article in the field of career development every week. To help hold myself accountable to that goal, I would write a summary of each article along with a few of my own thoughts, and send that summary to my coworkers using our staff email listserv. So off I went looking for interesting research articles, and here I am several weeks later.

While I didn’t really think this was that big of a deal (though I felt a tiny bit guilty for what I thought might be an annoying use of the staff listserv), the response I’ve received from many of my colleagues has been really kind and encouraging. My supervisor even recommended that I think about publishing my little email write-ups so that a larger audience could read them.

That brings us to today, and this post – which I’m hoping will be the first of many of its kind. I’ll be sharing my research literature thoughts in this space for the foreseeable future – not with the intention of replacing the kind of content I’ve been posting and will continue to post, but as a supplement to it. Yay! I’ve admired other career bloggers for writing this kind of material in the past, so I hope I can live up to their precedent!

I’ve got about 6 articles already reviewed, so expect to see those posted with a bit more frequency over the next couple of weeks until I catch up to myself.

*Image adapted from this one by Dayna Bateman, courtesy Flickr and Creative Commons.