Struggling for space: narrative methods and the crisis of professionalism in career guidance in England

Abstract

We report in this article on the second phase of an in-depth project examining practitioners’ use of a narrative model for 1-1 career guidance interviews in England, derived from the work of Mark Savickas. Using biographical narrative interviews, we explored the impact and constraints experienced by eight practitioner participants when engaging with a new model, and their struggles to learn, reflexively, from the experience. Further, in-depth interviews were conducted with four practitioners who ‘risked’ engaging with narrative methods to enhance practice, and achieved some success, but not without struggle and difficulty, professionally and personally. The narratives were analysed using protocols developed in previous research. The results illuminate the difficulties of creating space for experiment within a hard economic environment, dominated by outcomes and targets, as part of what can be seen as the ‘technicising’ of the guidance profession. Although drawing on all the interviews, we focus in this article on two participants’ narratives which are particularly evocative of the need for creative space, in contexts where professionalism appears to have diminished. The research itself provided space to think and imagine career guidance in more holistic ways.

Keywords:

• career guidance
• narrative approaches
• professionalisation
• qualitative methods
• research