New perspectives on career counseling and guidance in Europe by Valérie Cohen-Scali Jerome Rossier & Laura Nota

Author:Valérie Cohen-Scali, Jerome Rossier & Laura Nota
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

4 Conclusion

Despite the strange absence of the concept of place in the more common career approaches and career guidance literature, careers emerge from places. Places and their labor markets may offer certain structures for career pathways, but of even more importance, places may offer certain physical, social, cultural, and familial attractions. The choice of where to live and the choice of occupation to pursue are both components of the narratives told about the self and its identity. Places may also impact individuals in terms of deeper cognitive structures, assumptions, values, and their wider habitus.

Career guidance practitioners have always engaged in discussions around places, because it is impossible to avoid discussing geography with a client who is making a career decision. However, in a context where the theoretical literature does not fully address the role of places in career decision-making, practitioners have few resources to draw on when faced with the complex personal and political intersection between mobility decisions and decisions about learning and work. In addition, where young people may perceive leaving as common sense, and where policy and popular narratives may normalize the idea of making place, community, and family secondary to work, then there is a risk that the challenges of leaving, and young people’s ambivalence, may not be fully recognized either by the individual in question or by the career practitioner. Indeed, career practitioners are themselves embedded in fields (of education or of career guidance), and being able to recognize and interrogate their own assumptions may be essential when working with clients who are more fully embedded in other fields. From this perspective, fostering critical and contextual self-reflection becomes a core tool of guidance practice.

Consequently career guidance practitioners need to be sensitive to issues of moving and location and to surface these issues when they are concealed. However, operations dedicated to the individual level fail to address some of the dynamics that we observed in our research. Participants did not make career decisions solely as individuals: They frequently recognized and often welcomed a community component to their career decision-making. If young people follow a putative common-sense path into careers that appear to suit them best (based on their personalities and skills) they could very easily find themselves in careers outside of their communities, with little consideration of the consequences. The emergent community activist perspective that we have described represents one attempt to place the community at the center of career decision-making. Nevertheless, any decision to prioritize support for the local team and its labor market also needs to be handled carefully. Loyalty and obligation are ideological strands that can be employed to keep people in their place both literally and metaphorically. This is a particular issue as our case studies show that individuals are not equally able to move: The location of their immediate families and their economic and personal situations may preclude choices about their location.

To summarize, career guidance practitioners should recognize and make use of people’s geographical context as a key component of career guidance.

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