Career transformations: How career guidance counselling understands the labour market

Abstract

Career Guidance shapes the labour market by providing advice to school leavers, jobseekers and career changers. While there are a vast variety of approaches within Career Guidance, arguably there are central ideas within the discourse about the labour market reflecting cultural understandings of transition and transformation. To illustrate how Career Guidance understands the labour market, this article traces a genealogy from 19th century cultural ideas about careers from Smiles and Parsons to psychologised accounts from Maslow and Rogers. These imagine career transitions as personal transformations and recommend intensive interviewing to overcome internal barriers and unleash potential. Drawing from 15 interviews with Guidance Counsellors, the contemporary presence of this understanding of the labour market is traced. This emphasis on transformation variously reflects neo-liberal enterprise culture, religious ideas of vocation and modern experiments of the self, all of which emphasise internal potential over structural forces.