Unless we embrace the variables, our career will always be on the back foot.

Human beings don't do change very well. We have a tendency on the one hand to tame change into small manageable (and hence predictable) bits, or failing that, to exaggerate wildly the impacts of change.

To begin with the latter, if we believe the self-anointed futurologists, then when Top Gear Australia returns to our screens we should expect to see the new presenter and fruitily svelte jazzman James

Morrison hopping to gigs courtesy of a Jetson's jet pack, or perhaps being beamed up to the mothership a la Star Trek.

Predictions of future technology have been about as accurate as economic forecasts from, well, just about anybody.

Generally the wild exaggerations are of the doom-mongering variety. In my lifetime, my childhood nightmares of nuclear Armageddon brought to you courtesy of a thing called the USSR and good old American know-how, were replaced in the early 1970s by a conviction that we were all to perish in the imminent ice age.

This seemed particularly plausible to a lad shivering through a British winter (or summer). It was also a palatable alternative to yet more works by Gary Glitter and Alvin Stardust.

Now we are in the grip of global warming alarms, a remarkable turnaround in global fortunes in a period of less than 40 years.

The conventional thinking about global warming has been questioned by geologist Ian Plimmer. He argues that our considerations of climatic change are typically too narrow and that we are over-impressed by changes in recent history, especially recent memory. If we look at a more geological time-frame of millions of years, he claims a very different pattern emerges that challenges the received view that humans are the cause of recent global warming.

So what has all this got to do with career development? Well, I was struck by Plimmer's argument that planetary processes are a complex dynamic system comprising many different influences, some of which are chaotic. Careers too emerge from the complex interaction of a large variety of different influences ranging from genes, families, economics, politics, education, health, opportunities, the media, and possibly as The Castle's Dennis Denuto was wont to say, "Mabo and the vibe".

What follows is that careers are unpredictable and, contrary to conventional wisdom, they cannot be managed or predicted solely from a narrow set of variables. Nor are our careers established and set in stone at the age of 16 as Alain de Botton claims. Nor are the changes so dramatic that the gene pool has mutated to produce a wholly new species called Gen Y (yet more convincing peer-reviewed evidence of the non-differences between Gen Ys and human beings by Narelle Hess is about to be published in Career Development International).

Our careers are subject to change. The answer is not to ignore or deny this fact, nor is the answer to exaggerate it and create myths. Rather, we need to do what we can, moment by moment, one eye on the present and one on the future, and both on the past.

We need not plan for a stable future but for future change. What happens next is partly determined by what happened before, partly by what is happening right now, partly by what will happen in the future, partly determined by others and partly by you. We need to get better at change.

Jim Bright is professor of career education and development at ACU National and a partner at Bright and Associates, a career management consultancy. Email ladder@brightandassociates.com.au.