Using Gamification to engage clients...The U-Cube

14/02/18

Carolyn Alchin is the chair of the Learning and Development Committee of the CDAA, in addition to being a Career Development Practitioner at QUT, an educator and a mother of 2. She has a passion for developing Career Education resources, and a strong interest in career related research and supporting social equity and building human capital. In this article, she shares her engaging and effective career counselling tool, the U-Cube.

My clients often fidget, and so do I. I am a chronic fidgeter, and when I am thinking, I often find I need something with which to fidget with. So, as a passionate career development practitioner and sympathetic fidgeter, I designed the U-Cube as it gave fidgeting a career purpose and could possibly help me to create a robust career dialogue with my clients. A tool that allowed a client to consider Career related content, whilst fidgeting/ playing a game and then to share their findings and initiate a conversation.

This U-Cube provides clients with the opportunity to pick from six faces (modelled on the famed Rubik’s cube, no I could not complete it- please don’t judge me). The faces of the U-Cube cover the areas of people, environment, strengths, values, skills, and interests. The U-cube’s development attempted to facilitate a process leading to a more holistic perspective on career, trying to define how to use constructivism in practice within a Systems Theory Framework (Patton & McMahon, 2014). The U-cube was designed to allow individuals to use it to help them construct their career influences prior to working with a practitioner or support person and to introduce career influence literacy to initiate their thought processes around career. 

Using the U-Cube

The tools purpose is to help clients to focus on their career influences. When working with a new client, I would ask the client to have a seat, provide them with a U-Cube and ask them to choose four things on the cube that were relevant to them in their lives. I would give the client five minutes for this task.

I recently wrote a chapter describing and evaluating the U-Cube, with the ever academic Dr Peter McIlveen, for the book Psychology of career adaptability, employability and resilience. We described how the U-Cube can be used and why gamification in this space can be useful. We describe a case study, and the reasoning behind the U-Cube. I have found the cube particularly useful in building rapport with clients, not through the weather, or through a comment on their awesome sunglasses, but instead through career influences, and language that is relevant to their needs.

Feel free to contact me with any questions related to the U-cube or its use. Engaging resources for Career Development is a great passion of mine, I would love to hear your thoughts!

[email protected]
https://twitter.com/Careermumcaro
https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolynalchin/

References:

Alchin, C., & McIlveen, P. (2017). Using the u-cube for career counselling with adolescents to develop career conversations. In K. Maree (Ed.), Psychology of career adaptability, employability and resilience (pp. 161-170). Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66954-0

tton, W., & McMahon, M. (2014). Career development and systems theory: Connecting theory and practice. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: SensePublishers.