NICEC / Cutting Edge Event 2025
At the Cutting Edge: Exploring Career Wellbeing through the lenses of calling and career resonance. (Online)
The CDI and NICEC continue our collaborative Cutting Edge webinar series with our bi-annual seminars. The next seminar will take place on 3rd April 2024, 2pm - 4pm BST.
Free to CDI Members & NICEC Members. You will be asked for your membership number upon booking. (If you are a NICEC member and do not have your number please email, [email protected] to get this information.)
Book here
Exploring Career Wellbeing through the lenses of calling and career resonance
Rationale and purpose of the session
This session aims to explore the topic of career wellbeing and its fundamental importance in underpinning our ability to manage our careers effectively. Wellbeing relates to our productivity at work as well as the prevention of burnout. Taking care of our well-being can also boost our job satisfaction, creativity, relationship-building skills and problem-solving abilities. It is essential to career longevity.
Yet career wellbeing is difficult to define. There may be overlap but also differences between the concepts of wellbeing at work and career wellbeing.
The sessions aims to explore some key questions:
- What are the connections between career and wellbeing?
- How might career wellbeing differ from general wellbeing at work?
- How can individuals manage wellbeing within a career?
- How can the lenses of calling and career resonance help us to shape our understanding of career wellbeing?
- How can we as practitioners manage our career and wellbeing?
This sessions will offer some scene-setting on the concept and definition of career wellbeing and then explore the topic from the novel perspectives of calling and career resonance and to consider how these lenses might to help those we support to build more resilient and sustainable ways of managing their career well-being.
Drawing on the principle of ‘care for the caretaker’ the session will also create space for us to reflect on our own career wellbeing and ways that we can ensure we are in the best possible shape to manage our career wellbeing before we attend to that of others.
This session will be interactive, and will comprise a series of cumulative input sessions, small-group discussions in break-out rooms and whole group sense-making. As hosts of this session, NICEC Fellows Dr Cathy Brown and Kate Mansfield look forward to seeing you there.
| Agenda |
| 2pm Introductions and welcome – Kate Mansfield Overview of session; definitions and scene setting on research that has been done specifically on the topic of career wellbeing. |
| 2.15-2.35pm Career, Calling and wellbeing, Dr Gill Frigerio Gill’s 20 minute presentation will help us consider the connections between our career and our wellbeing, and position calling at the interface. We know that as boundaries blur between work and other aspects of our life, our career can have a significant impact on our wellbeing, and vice versa. In teasing out these impacts, calling (a way of thinking about work as something which gives us meaning and connects us with something beyond ourselves) is a useful conceptual tool. We might think about career, calling and wellbeing from the perspective of ‘what career do I choose?’ Where am I called to work and how will pursuing my calling affect my wellbeing? But calling can help us think about how we develop our career too: how we are called to try new things, change and adapt or respond to change around us. This idea of ongoing career development, as we craft a way towards a calling, also has a particular bearing on wellbeing. Calling can pose both benefits and risks to our career and our wellbeing. From here we will discuss: - How our own wellbeing as career development practitioners helps us understand this area more fully? - How wellbeing issues present in career development work, and how we work with them? |
| 2:35-2.45pm Break-out room discussions |
| 2.45-2.55pm Plenary discussion |
| 2.55-3.00pm Comfort Break |
| 3.00-3.20pm Career Resonance and Wellbeing, Dr Cathy Brown and Rita Buhl In this twenty-minute input session, Rita and Cathy will take an individual and psychological perspective and explore how career resonance provides a useful lens through which to explore career wellbeing and to address personal burnout. Initially, Rita will help to set the scene by introducing Rosa’s Theory of Resonance and outlining why this holds such increasing relevance in today’s world. To bring this alive, we will explore what it means to experience (and be devoid of) resonance and how it impacts our physical and psychological well-being. We will come to understand how burnout is indeed the opposite of resonance. From here, Cathy will continue the conversation and share some of the science behind resonance, building further our collective appreciation. Following this, we will focus in and explore this theory of resonance within the work context. Having examined what we mean by this newly proposed idea of career resonance, we will pause and reflect upon where it fits within the career’s professional field. Having done this, we will build towards exploring how we can help all of our clients to foster career resonance, and also what the implications are for us as career practitioners in our careers practice. After this input session, we will move into break out groups, where we develop further our understanding and will explore the following three questions: 1. How does what we hear resonant (or not) with us? 2. How could we work with our clients to foster career resonance? 3. What are some of the implications for us as career practitioners? |
| 3:25pm Break-out room discussions |
| 3.35pm How we can introduce these principles into our practice? Q&A – Whole group Discussion This session will culminate in a group discussion, where we share and make sense of our collective responses. Finally, we will move into a wider discussion, exploring how what we have heard connects with career calling and how, as career practitioners, we many foster our own career wellbeing. |
| 3.50-4pm Bringing to a close – Kate Mansfield and Cathy Brown We will conclude by looking ahead to our next At the Cutting Edge Event and also consider what our main take-away is from this event. |
NICEC Biographies
Dr Gill Frigerio, Chair of NICEC
Dr Gill Frigerio is an Associate Professor who leads on the Centre's qualifications in Career Studies and Coaching. She is module leader on a number of modules within the programmes on Career Development and Coaching Studies (CDCS) and Career Education, Information and Guidance in Higher Education (CEIGHE) and supervises dissertation students.
Gill leads the team which runs the programmes in Career Studies and Coaching in CLL. Prior to joining the Centre in August 2010, Gill worked in career development practice and management, and most recently was Head of Careers in the Centre for Student Careers and Skills at Warwick.
Gill's teaching interests cover theory and practice in career coaching; vocation and calling; practitioner and action research in career development settings, theoretical perspectives on employability and implications for policy and practice; placement design and management of higher education career and employability services. She has research interests in women's career development, working with marginalised communities and supporting practitioners as researchers.
Gill is the Chair of NICEC. She has recently completed a Doctorate in Education looking at a 'calling-informed' framework for career development practice and particularly focusing on women's experiences of work and faith.
Kate Mansfield, NICEC Fellow
Kate is a qualified Career Coach, trained by CCS & with an MSc in Organisational Behaviour & Postgraduate Certificate in Career & Talent Management from Kingston University. She is also a qualified Career Coach Supervisor with Oxford Brookes, and Lead Tutor on CCS's Accredited Career Coach Training.
She coaches clients individually, with a particular interest in the career paths of women. Many of her individual clients are mid to senior level female professionals wishing to construct their careers successfully on their own terms. Typical focus includes how to identify and leverage strengths at work; overcoming issues of impostor syndrome; how to build personal brands in ways more aligned to values; career development goals and career planning. Her earlier career included 13 years in executive level HR Recruitment and Interim Management recruitment. Kate became a Fellow of NICEC in 2024.
Cathy Brown, NICEC Fellow
Cathy is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist, career practitioner and writer. Over the last 20 years she has run her own consultancy business, Evolve, where she has supported individuals, teams and organisations through transitions and change.
Cathy completed her MSc Occupational Psychology at Birkbeck College, University of London, and her MBA from European School of Management in Paris. More latterly, she completed her PhD explore organisational mobility at University of Derby. Cathy is a guest lecturer on Masters programmes at several UK universities. She speaks at seminars, and has been featured in the media for her work including Radio 4, Leadership Today, Career Matters, People Management and Career Development International. She writes and publishes practical guides to support individuals through life transitions, under the brand: Testing the Water®. These are available on www.amazon.co.uk, Waterstones and other leading book sellers.
Cathy’s client list includes, amongst many others: Akzo-Nobel, Avis, BBC, Boots, Career Development Institute, Co-operative Bank, Co-operative Food, Costain, John Lewis, Lincolnshire County Council, Loughborough University, NHS, PepsiCo, Saint-Gobain, Shell, Travelodge, United Nations High Commission for Refugees, University of Nottingham. Cathy is a NICEC Fellow.
Rita Buhl
Rita Buhl is a former associate professor at VIA University College in Aarhus, Denmark, and an external associate professor at Aarhus University. She has taught in career guidance programs, conducted research, and written several books and articles in the field of career guidance.
More details about Rita’s professional background can be found on her LinkedIn profile @ritabuhl.
