Negotiating professional and personal biographies in a liquid world: creating space for reflexive innovation in career counselling

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the constraints to innovative, creative and reflexive careers counselling in an uncertain neo-liberal world. We draw on previously reported research into practitioners’ use of a narrative model for career counselling interviews in England and a Europe-wide auto/biographical narrative study of non-traditional learners in universities. The latter draws on a number of narrative interviews with an asylum seeker, to debate whether such a way of working with people, ‘in a clinical style’, offers contextualised insight into people's struggles to construct a career and a methodology for doing so. The paper also examines the difficulties of creating a ‘good enough’ professional, psychosocial space for experimentation with creative approaches in a marketised guidance world, where more is expected from less.

KEYWORDS:

• Career development
• auto/biographical
• narrative career counselling
• creativity
• reflexivity
• psychosocial

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Hazel Reid is Professor of Education and Career Development and the Director of Research in the Faculty of Education at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. She researches in the area of career and guidance theory and practice and offers workshops on narrative career counselling. She also supervises students undertaking Doctoral research and works with the Auto/biography and Narrative Research & KE Theme Group in the Faculty of Education. She is involved in European projects related to the work of career guidance counsellors (in the network ‘NICE’. Her latest book, An Introduction to Career Counselling and Coaching for Sage Publications is available from October 2015.

Linden West is Professor of Education at Canterbury Christ Church University where he directs the M.Phil/PhD programme. He has an international reputation as a writer on educational processes, formal and informal, lifewide and lifelong, using interdisciplinary, auto/biographical and narrative research. Linden co-coordinates a European Life History and Biography research network and his books include Beyond Fragments, adults, motivation and higher education, and a biographical analysis. He co-authored Using biographical methods in social research, and co-edited Psychoanalysis and Education and most recently Researching Critical Reflection, published by Routledge. His latest book, Distress in the City: racism, fundamentalism and a democratic education is published by Trentham in February 2016. He is also a psychoanalytic psychotherapist.

Notes

1. RANLHE Access and retention: experiences of non-traditional learners in HE. Project title: Transitions and leaner identity: the play of outer and inner worlds. Project code: 135230-LLP-1-2007-1-UK-KA1-KA ISCR.