Paradoxical career sensemaking among emerging adults

ABSTRACT

Emerging adults, who are late millennials and Gen Z members, question the worth of higher education, especially in preparation for volatile labor markets, careers, and other precarities. We analyzed emerging adults’ sensemaking about this education–career–precarity mix through the constitutive lens of paradox using the applied tensional approach. We identified two main paradoxes centering around feelings of education and career security and vulnerability: (a) students’ beliefs about educational attainment as leading directly to career success (golden ticket) that coexist with understandings that there are no guarantees; and (b) feelings of isolation in the self-managed career (“it’s all up to me”) that share space with desires for social networks but as educational products established by others and consistent with student-as-consumer and neoliberal ideologies. In demystifying these paradoxes, we advocate more-than approaches that position tensions as opportunities, incorporate both career development and critical communication pedagogy, and transcend through quality control interventions.

KEYWORDS:

• careers
• sensemaking
• paradoxes
• communication education
• applied tensional approach

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).