A life journal into the future: Development of a storytelling approach for establishing career identity and agency in career counselling

ABSTRACT

This paper describes a creative approach to implementing career counselling and guidance in contemporary higher education. Following a theoretical discussion on the motivational mechanism underlying the career exploration process, the validity of using a storytelling approach to establish undergraduate students’ career identity was examined. A Life Journal into the Future was then finalised, linking career exploration and career management. Methodologically, the career writings of 128 students were examined through a template analysis, which was established by a conceptualisation of 132 participants’ ideal careers. The results showed that undergraduates’ low awareness of personal strengths and lack of motivation for pursuing careers could be mitigated through construction of career identity, career writing and the holistic narrative constitution of a prospective career story.

KEYWORDS:

• Career exploration
• career management
• human agency
• individualised career planning
• narrative identity
• qualitative assessments

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Yang

Peter Yang, PhD, is teaching in the Department of Counseling, National Chiayi University, Taiwan. He received a master’s degree in counselling at the National Taiwan Normal University. After 5 years of practice in counselling, he travelled to the United Kingdom with his family and pursued a doctoral degree in Organizational Psychology at Birkbeck, University of London. This year, he just finished his second PhD in Educational Measurement & Statistics. His main research interests include networking for careers, workplace counselling and social constructivist perspective of counselling in Chinese settings. More recently, social network analysis has frequently been employed in his research into careers. He has involved in the study of a social capital approach to informal career support at work.