Peter J. Robertson – författare

The Oxford Handbook of Career Development provides a comprehensive overview of the career development field. It features contributions from 42 leading scholars, addressing the context, theory, and practice of career development in the contemporary world. The volume defines career development as an inclusive term that relates to all individuals regardless of class, gender, sexuality, ability, geography, or ethnicity. It contains cutting edge research, theory, and thinking which approach career development as a transdisciplinary field, drawing from sociology, psychology, education, and organizational studies as well as other areas. Chapters explore what personal, political, societal, economic, and cultural factors influence our careers and how a diverse range of theoretical traditions has sought to account for the phenomenon of career. It also addresses what can be done to improve and enhance people's careers through a range of educational, counselling, and employment interventions.

‘This is an amazing book which explores careers from an extremely original perspective and does it in a very readable way ... I learnt a huge amount while reading it and was enormously impressed with the way that it draws such diverse influences together into a coherent whole.’Professor Tristram HooleyThis is a book about career theory; it addresses concepts to describe people’s careers. Significantly, it enhances career development practice to support individuals to make informed choices and further their lives. It is inspired by the Capability Approach, a moral framework developed by Nobel Laureate, Amartya Sen, which addresses issues of social justice, freedom and wellbeing.   Professor Robertson draws on systems thinking and innovatively applies it to career development. He develops a way of thinking that promotes a ‘big picture’ overview of careers, which, in turn, facilitates an understanding of the full range of helping strategies open to practitioners.  The result is a theory designed to support practitioners’ understanding; not an approach that exists solely to further academic discourse. Additional insights and perspectives from the disciplines of economics, philosophy and politics will ensure that this becomes a foundational text and will provide a major and long-lasting contribution to scholarship in this field.