Two organisations leading the way on the future of work – FlexCareers, Australia and New Zealand’s #1 platform for flexible jobs, consulting and return-to-work programs, and mwah, a leading consultancy rethinking people and culture – have launched CareerSwitch, an innovative career transition and coaching business reinventing traditional outplacement models.
Headed up by career transition expert Simon Kennedy Jewell, who joins CareerSwitch after almost 18 years with Audrey Page, the new business brings together the very best of FlexCareers’ FlexHub technology and FlexCoach community with mwah’s deep expertise in the people and culture and future of work space.
“CareerSwitch is an independent partnership between FlexCareers and mwah offering flexibility, technology and humanity to deliver a more effective career transition experience for organisations and individuals,” says Rhonda Brighton-Hall FCPHR, CEO, mwah.
“Mwah understands how work works, and how modern-day careers work, and how to give people the confidence to best manage their careers themselves. FlexCareers understands reliable, responsive and agile HR technology and has a fantastic career coaching panel. The missing piece for us was deep career transition experience with a new and creative approach. When Simon approached us, he presented this better way.”
What is CareerSwitch doing different?
Unlike traditional outplacement services that remain largely reactive and are engaged only when redundancies are imminent, CareerSwitch offers a proactive and integrated service model. Simon and his team provide career transition support through all stages of the employment lifecycle.
“FlexCareers and mwah have partnered together, both informally and formally, for the past three years so there’s an incredible level of familiarity and trust between the respective teams,” says Joel McInnes, co-founder, FlexCareers.
“We’ve launched CareerSwitch together to provide better care for the community of professionals in industries disrupted by technological change, and to give them the skills and mobility they need to take back control of their future.
“This starts with helping people understand how the skills they have acquired over a decade or more might be transferred to something new and then explores other opportunities too, like embarking on a portfolio career or continuing professional education. Essentially CareerSwitch is designed to help people decide how they want to live the work part of their lives in a way that’s relevant to today’s world of work.”
With over 20 years’ outplacement and career coaching experience, Simon is also a counsellor, consultant and educator at the Ethics Centre. He appears regularly as a guest on Radio National’s ‘Life Matters’ program in the ‘Too Hard Basket’ segment, discussing the everyday modern dilemmas and complex life choices experienced by ABC listeners.
“It was becoming increasingly clear to me that the work we do as career transition professionals needed to change quickly and radically to adapt to the changing dynamics of the new world of work,” Simon says.
“Backed by FlexCareers’ technology and professional community and leveraging mwah’s deep people and culture expertise, CareerSwitch offers authentic support for people navigating their own unique career change journey. In a world of artificial intelligence and machine learning, the human element is at the heart of everything we do.”
 launch CareerSwitch, a new career transition and coaching startup reinventing traditional outplacement models by bringing technology and humanity together.){kind=link}