A lucky draw? Theorising how work placements develop diverse university students’ career stories

ABSTRACT

Universities can prepare students for work, and universities can educate increasingly diverse student cohorts, but can they do both concurrently? This question of whether universities can offer equitable and inclusive careers education is increasingly under scrutiny. In this study, we address the largely under-theorised area of work-based placements from the perspective of career identity formation for diverse students. We do so through the adoption of Meijers and Lengelle’s theorisation of ‘career stories’ which position the narrative as the mechanism to understand how students’ have developed their career identities and future professional goals. Drawing on longitudinal interviews with disabled students, we explore university placements as ‘boundary experiences’ which can either enable, or disable, the formation of students’ professional selves. Our findings indicate a troubling amount of variability, and indeed, luck within the placement offering, often unsupported by intentional pedagogical design. This suggests that the current university placement experience does little to support the professional identity formation processes of diverse students. Through this study, we further translate a processual learning theory from career learning to support future intentional pedagogical placement design in the university context for diverse students. The article ends with a consideration of how placement experiences can better align to equity goals of the university, and provide scalable, high-quality learning experiences for all students.

KEYWORDS:

• Work-based placements; career identities; students with disabilities
• graduate employability
• inclusion

Introduction

Recent discourse within, and external to, academia has frequently reflected upon graduate employability as a, if not the, value of higher education (Pitman 2020; Tomlinson and Jackson 2021). That, in essence, the role of universities is to transform students’ identities into those of ‘future-ready graduates’ and contributing members of national and international labour markets (Tomlinson and Nghia 2020; Winterton and Turner 2019). Integral in this goal is the role of the work-based learning placement, often mandated in accredited degrees and highly recommended in others, as a key mechanism to develop students’ career identities (Byrne 2022; Dempsey, Healy, and Linehan 2023; Pham and Jackson 2020). Recent research further espouses an impressive list of potential benefits of placements, including the development of soft skills (Succi and Canovi 2020), student academic performance (Jones, Green, and Higson 2017), greater networking within the profession (Perusso and Wagenaar 2022), and a better understanding of oneself (Jackson and Trede 2020).

Yet along with growing emphasis on graduate employability in the sector, is the phenomenon frequently referred to as ‘massification’. Taking the attainment of higher education from a historically rare and privileged experience to one where far greater numbers of students, and from a far greater multitude of backgrounds, can participate (Evans et al. 2021). With this comes the need to explore not only how universities support students’ career identities and trajectories, but importantly, how universities provide inclusive experiences that support the wide-ranging diverse student cohort. In this study therefore we seek to marry these two dominant purposes of higher education, that of employability and increasing widening participation, to explore how diverse students form, negotiate, the development of their career identities through work-based placements.

Specifically, our cohort includes students with disabilities, often cited as one of the largest equity-deserving cohorts in higher education today, with estimates that as many as one in five students identify with disability and/or mental ill-health (World Health Organisation 2023). We did so not to ‘other’ these students, and indeed we make no claims that many other diverse students (e.g. international, indigenous, first-in-family) would not be exposed to similar challenges in placements, but rather to highlight that the placement experience is yet one example of universities’ ongoing struggle to cater for complexities or nuances that accompany massification and diversification (Nieminen 2023). Our study therefore is not only a study of the disabled, but rather contributes to growing bodies of literature on the need for broader understanding of how universities support inclusion (Collins, Azmat, and Rentschler 2019; Eaton 2022).

Our research approaches the placement experience through a lens of storytelling, where the students’ career identities are developed through the ‘practice of articulating, performing, and negotiating identity positions in the narration of [their] career experiences’ (LaPointe 2010, 1). This means we do not only understand placements as a site for learning, but as an impetus for reflexive practices to develop their career identities. In other words, placements provide opportunities for students to understand themselves as future practitioners and professionals, which will inform lifelong decision-making. Through this lens, we again stress the priority of inclusion and diversity, where placements serve as a valuable opportunity for all students to reflect on: who am I as a professional, rather than work towards only a predetermined set of skills or learning outcomes. In doing so, our work complements large-scale survey-based approaches underscoring the importance of student identity formations (e.g. Fitzgerald et al. 2023; Quinlan and Corbin 2023; Tomlinson and Jackson 2021) through the longitudinal, processual nature of our data (also refer to Holmes 2015). Taking a qualitative approach, we also emphasise the significance of ‘hearing’ the voices of diverse students who tell their stories.

In this article, we first introduce the theoretical framing of ‘career stories’ as the lens of the study, discussed by career learning scholars such as Meijers and Lengelle (2012), and based on a framework of career learning theory (Law 1996). After an outline of the methodological approach and sampling, we then present our data and analysis. We then translate Law’s (1996) original framework of career learning stages to the context of university placements for diverse students. To conclude we stress a need for greater conceptualisation of career development learning and intentional pedagogical design in university placements to ensure high-quality, equitable experiences for diverse students.

Theoretical framing: career stories

In this study, we leverage the rich literature from career learning and career identities on the use of narrative approaches (e.g. Hartung 2013; LaPointe 2010) to explore how individuals develop and negotiate their career identities. In particular, we draw on the work from Meijers and Lengelle (2012) who theorised the career learning process through the lens of ‘career stories’. This work is underpinned both by a staged career learning process developed by Law (1996), as well as Hermans-Konopka and Hubert’s (2010) Dialogical Self Theory, which defines one’s career identit(ies) as a part of a multitude of selves, all of which have a dialogical relationship between them. Meijers and Lengelle’s (2012) theorisation of career stories places further emphasis that by merit of a person’s ability to express their life theme(s) within a specific occupation or career they may have more ability to navigate the complexities of work and gain a greater understanding of their strengths and goals. They write that these stories often take shape when people encounter ‘boundary experiences’ or life challenges and situations which encourage a person to reflect and make meaning. Yet there remain few theoretical frameworks which identify the learning process which occurs within a boundary experience, and how that then subsequently shapes one’s career stories. Thus, their application of Law’s (1996) four-staged model to elucidate the cognitive learning process is valuable. However they and others also caution that while staged processes are helpful in guiding pedagogical design, stages are not necessarily linear, and stages often overlap (Healy 2023).

We frame students’ work-based placements as the boundary experiences that ‘emplots self as a main character in a career-defining story’ (Cochran 1997, 55). We further use the four outlined learning stages of career stories to distinguish between the cognitive development which occurs in placements. Paraphrased and summarised from Law (1996, 33–42) and Meijers and Lengelle (2012, 165–9) these stages include:

1. Sensing: The stage in which information is gathered from various sources, which inform feelings or emotions that direct attention, and potentially interest or learning.

2. Sifting: A sorting process which moves a person towards relationships of causality. During this stage, a person makes connections between their experiences or emotions with those of others, potentially identifying patterns.

3. Focusing: Perceptions about one’s career begin to form but are still fragmented. Like constructing a puzzle, a person attempts to string together the feelings and ideas that have arisen in earlier stages.

4. Understanding: The final stage whereby a learner puts a series of events into sequences and clarifies the who, what, where, when, how and why of what has happened. This process is usually a combination of ordering the material, while articulating the big picture.

The unique benefit therefore of this model is the staged process to conceptualise students’ career identities. This is to place greater emphasis on the ‘how’ of students’ career identity formation over the course of their placement experiences, rather than a binary understanding of yes or no (e.g. they did or did not develop). The stages further help both educators and students alike breakdown the processual nature of narrative identity work to continually reflect on where greater dialogue, reflection or support may be needed. Healy (2023) contends that there is a significant failure to date to link concepts of graduate employability with key learning theories and pedagogical approaches. To spur the field, he offers key principles to understand employability research, including its processual nature, the importance of context, and the relational – and traumatic and/or emancipatory elements which underpin this critical identity work. Dempsey, Healy, and Linehan (2023) have also reached similar conclusions on the need for richer, more learning theory-driven research, as they conceptualise the student placement experience as a recursive negotiation between the self and the setting, while emphasising how students’ identities are continually (re)constructed over time. This discussion therefore adds to existing research by offering a scaffolded, or staged, model in which to frame and explore how students develop their career identities over time, through the lens of diversity.

Research design

This article draws on data from a multi-stage funded research project exploring students with disabilities perceptions and experiences of work-based learning placements (National Career Institute Grant Partnership Grant; number NCIPI000759). In the first stage of our research, we investigated students’ perceptions of the barriers and challenges prior to placement(s) (Dollinger et al. 2023a; 2023b), and in this second phase of the research, we focused on students’ experiences during placements. Guiding this phase of the study were two overarching research questions:

1. According to students’ own narratives/experiences, how do university work-based placements shape their career stories?

2. What role does disability play in influencing students’ development of their career stories while on placement?

The aim of these two guiding research questions is thus to produce a new, contextualised model to understand students’ career identities through the placement experience.

The study design was approved by the university’s high-risk human ethics approval process and meets all ethical criteria and standards including informed consent, voluntary participation, and anonymised data reporting (2022-021). Overall, our study draws on an interpretivist research paradigm, based on the perspective that reality is subjective, multiple, and socially constructed. We were thus less interested in what actually happened in the placements – but in how the students’ own, reconstructed career stories represented their realities. Our research further did not aim to explore the formal learning design or linked assessments of students’ placement experiences.

In this study, we used semi-structured interviews during the student’s placement experience to investigate how the placement experience did/did not inform their career stories. We understand the interviews themselves not as ‘neutral’ situations but as socially situated practices during which we asked students to actively reconstruct their personal, lived career stories. As our study understands these career stories as complex and dynamic, it was necessary for us to interview the students at three timepoints (beginning, middle and end of placement). This way, we could capture the shifting nature of these stories, as constructed, reconstructed, and shaped by our participants.

We chose to conduct semi-structured interviews as we wanted to both use existing theory while constructing our study materials, and leaving substantial room for participants’ own, lived experiences to emerge. The interview protocol was designed according to the framework by Kallio et al. (2016), while using earlier knowledge about career stories and placements as the theoretical background. Yet, despite being semi-structured, the interviews were conversational and informal in nature, with participants often asked to provide a story and/or example of the emotion or feeling they were describing. Interview scheduling aligned within the university’s 13-week trimester structure: (1) in the first 2–4 weeks of the student starting their placement, (2) in the 7–10 week of students’ placement, and (3) 2–4 weeks post-placement. All the interviews took place on Zoom and were recorded and transcribed in accordance with our ethics approval. Interviews varied in duration, ranging from 30 min to over 1 h, depending on students’ interest and availability. All students received a $50 gift voucher for each interview.

The student sample was taken from a large, research-intensive university in Australia, where students were initially recruited through the university disability support centre via an email recruiting any students who planned on taking a work-based placement in the following teaching period. A total of 17 students opted to participate in all three timepoints of the study, all of whom were undergraduate students. Of these students eight came from Health Sciences (Nursing, Allied Health), six came from Education, two came from Law and one came from Commerce. Only one student from commerce was participating in the placement as a voluntary experience, with the student self-sourcing their placement in advance. Importantly, this study also builds from previous research arguing for the adoption of a biopsychosocial model of disability, where disability is not a medical diagnosis, but ‘a series of relational conditions that can potentially disadvantage individuals within environments’ (Dollinger et al. 2023c, 1). Therefore, rather than ask students to share details of their medical diagnosis, we instead explored on how their disability (dis)advantaged them throughout various environments and experiences.

Our data analysis followed the same principle of combining inductive and deductive approaches as our data collection process did. The overall purpose of our analysis was to use the career story framing (Meijers and Lengelle 2012) to analyse our data, while at the same time remaining open to the emerging nuances related to (1) placements and (2) disability. For this purpose, we conducted qualitative content analysis (QCA) (Schreier 2012). Due to the interpretivism paradigm of our work, the QCA process did not aim to quantify and categorise but to understand the socially and culturally located content of our data material. As Schreier (2012) outlines, QCA is excellent for such a purpose as it focuses on understanding latent meaning in lived experiences while remaining contextually sensitive. QCA provided us with systematic yet flexible tools to analyse the vast longitudinal dataset; it also enabled us to focus on the particular aspect of career stories.

We followed Schreier’s (2012) framework for QCA by first dividing the dataset into units of analysis that consisted of a few sentences, constituting one meaningful and coherent unit. Next, we categorised these units by using the career story framework (sensing, sifting, focusing, understanding) as our coding frame. This was done through Excel, where data were coded initially by the first author and then subsequently coded by another member of the team. Any instances of differentiation were then colour-coded and discussed to then develop a modified theoretical model. Once group consensus was achieved, the coding process was then repeated, supported by ongoing discussion as we continued to index the data into the modified version. We also met several times to discuss additional insights from the data. Finally, we collectively discussed the meaning of the coded material under each of the four categories: what did these fragmented stories – as cut and pasted from the participants’ stories by us – tell us about our research questions?

As discussed later in the paper, while the research team generally found the theoretical framing as compatible with the data set, we do suggest modifications in the wording of each stage for the higher education context, as the theory was originally developed for generalist career development.

Findings

Given this study occurred in the novel context of university placements, the nuances of how each phase occurred in the higher education context were unique. To address this in each section also includes discussion of how the stage unfolded in the context of our specific study.

Overall, our findings showcase a significant lack of intentional pedagogical design or scaffolding throughout student’s placement experiences. This resulted not only in considerable variability of placement experiences across the student sample, but far too often, emphasised the randomness in which students’ career stories came to being. For the lucky (and we emphasise chance here as often success factors were out of the students’ control, such as a supportive supervisor), some students still managed, through their placements, to gain a greater sense of their career identity and career goals. But for the unlucky, the lack of pedagogical design and scaffolding resulted in potentially even greater confusion about who they are and who they want to be. Through our study, we urge educators to consider how the stages presented can serve as a basis for purposeful pedagogical design that supports inclusive and high-quality learning opportunities for students during placements.

Sensing

As discussed sensing is the stage in which information is gathered, but specific perspectives are not developed. To illustrate, a person might have an inkling of what careers they might like or be good at, but they haven’t had enough experience or exposure to feel confident in this assumption. In the context of our study, students’ career stories of their pre-placement, or even pre-university study, experiences are often aligned with this stage. Students, for example, spoke of pursuing careers due to their parents’ career paths or based on feedback they had received from family, friends, or teachers. Yet for other students, other factors helped them ‘sense’ what career might be appropriate for them. To illustrate, one student shared:

I didn’t really know what I wanted to do when I first enrolled. As horrible as it sounds, I just picked law because I’ve got the score for it … I don’t hate politics, but I did it and it just wasn’t what I wanted, so I was a bit stressed for a while. I thought, ‘Oh my God. My degree, I’m not going to use it.’ Then I did the family law unit, and I was like, ‘This is absolutely what I want to do.’ Now, I do want to be a lawyer. (Participant 4)

Through the lens of disability, students also shared stories of how they sensed their future career paths mediated through their own conceptualisations of self and ability. One student shared that even before they were diagnosed with a learning ability, the experience of caring for their brother, who had Autism, and their uncle, who was quadriplegic, helped them a gain of sense of themselves, as they shared ‘I was always going down a pathway for caring for people’ (Participant 11). Yet this same student shared that for them the barrier towards a career was always their poor academic performance pre-diagnosis. And that they actually first enrolled in university because they had been enrolled in vocational school but were advised they would receive more study support for their disability in a university setting.

The data collected also highlighted how the phase of sensing, like all the phases in fact, is often a culmination of events or occurrences, rather than an epiphany moment. For example, one participant (Participant 15) shared that in high school they were passionate about woodworking, however, was then diagnosed with back problems, limiting this career path. She then took a psychology class and found it ‘interesting’. Meanwhile, through friends and greater society, she also became interested in LGBTQIA+ rights and issues, slowly building towards advocacy. But it wasn’t until she did a presentation on LGBTQIA+ for a class, and a teacher told her that there were jobs for clients focusing on LGBTQIA+ rights that she considered Youth Advocacy as a potential career path. This highlights a need for sustained, and continuous pedagogical approaches to support multiple spaces and places for students to sense a multitude of career paths.

Sifting

Arising from a person’s sense of potential career identities, is the sifting stage, where a person can begin to explore connections between sensing and identifying patterns. Meijers and Lengelle (2012) also describe this phase where some may no longer feel overwhelmed by ‘infinite choice’. For the participants in our study, the beginning of their work-based placement, situated as a boundary experience, is when sifting first occurred in their overall career story.

Participant 2 explains that during their occupational therapy placement they started considering what areas they could specialise in, for example, aged care or neurology. They shared that as they have a child, they are considering which one could be a better fit as they strive to maintain work and life balance. In another instance, a student shared that because of their disability, they feel they have certain management styles they would thrive better in than others (e.g. supportive, non-hierarchical). They discuss that both the placement, as well as having friends and family who work in healthcare settings, had informed their sifting of what they may like to pursue, sharing, ‘I think you never really know where you’re going to end up, but those little stepping stones are meaningful’ (Participant 6).

For students with disabilities, the sifting stage also included many reflections on the logistical aspects of the career, rather than only students’ interest in the career itself. For example, learning about if the career would likely support working from home or flexible hours. Students often discussed location as well, as for some students, travelling was an additional stressor. Yet important to note is that students often shared during the interviews that they received almost no support from the university to have these informative conversations with their supervisors. To illustrate, one student shared that both the university disability resource centre, the placement team, and their academic lecturer seemed unable to facilitate dialogue about what reasonable adjustments could be made for them during their placement, leaving them to navigate these complexities themselves.

Significantly, the cognitive learning stages themselves should not be labelled through a binary of ‘good’ or ‘bad’. As others have written about both in careers education and disability studies, any experience that informs how a person towards a fulfilling, sustainable career could be useful, even those that are traumatic or harmful at the time (Healy 2023). To illustrate, Participant 8 discussed in the first interview that they wanted to be a nurse in a mental health ward because they liked caring for people and had seen ideas of this career in the movies (sensing). However, as they did their placement, they decided not to pursue further study, as they shared, ‘I find it really difficult to communicate with new patients … there’s a lot of anxiety … the hospital [space] is also a bit too open for me.’ And later, they shared general practice or community health might be options they’d like to explore in upcoming placements. This indicates the importance for educators, through pedagogical design, to support students to ‘sift’ through potential career streams, and reflect on how they intersect with their lives, abilities, and interests.

Focusing

Following the sifting stage, focusing is where students’ career stories take on new meanings, as students grow comfortable with how their abilities and experiences will inform their career goals (Law 1996). In Meijers and Lengelle’s description (2012) for example, one participant shared that the focusing stage is where they started to relax in their new role and ‘really listen to conversations and I heard things in new ways’. It’s also described as the point where people can begin to envision themselves in their chosen career.

To illustrate, one student in our sample described a teaching placement where the children were terrified of her when she first began (Participant 1). Then one day, while running a flashcard activity with the whole class she reflected, ‘this has come a long way from day one where they weren’t even talking to me!’. The student then described a new sense of confidence in themselves, feeling an even greater sense of assurance in her role than her supervising teacher. For example, she told a story about how her supervisor warned her to avoid a parent of a child with a disability as they liked to chat, when she herself, as a person with disability, not only empathised with the parent, but understood that the parent likely just needed someone to talk with.

The focusing stage is also where students foster an acceptance for who they are, and how their skills or individual traits might manifest in future careers. An illustration of this was a student doing a placement with a law firm, who, due to her disability, described herself as a ‘perfectionist’ (Participant 4). She discussed in the interviews that part of what she learned in the placement is that she will likely always take longer than her peers in doing the necessary paperwork of her job, but while that used to frustrate her, she accepts that she ‘ … can’t change it, so I just have to work with it’. But goes on to explain that through the placement she has gained a greater acceptance of this trait, reflecting, ‘Yes, I do belong here, even if I am still learning. I might not make eye contact, but maybe an inclusive employer will think that’s the best letter of advice I’ve ever read … ’.

Yet as previously stressed above, while some students progressed through the learning stages during their placement, not all did. This was rarely (as discerned through our interviews) due to the student, for example, disengaging in the work. Rather, this was often due to a mismatch of the student with a supervisor and/or placement environment. Participant 17, for example, was undergoing a teaching placement in her second year, and was recovering from an eating disorder. Her placement involved a rotation of several schools, some of which matched better than others. In one setting, for example, the school was very strict and regulated, and she felt she had no privacy and quite a lot of pressure, which aggravated her ability to maintain her health. Yet in another setting, she discussed the school was more ‘bit more relaxed academically, the teachers have a lot more breathing room, they’re better balanced’. This in turn led her to have more successful stories there, yet ultimately, the student still decided full-time teaching was not for them.

Understanding

Understanding, as the final learning stage, is where the person can connect the who, what, where, when, and how of their story – to the why. In a summarisation, Meijers and Lengelle (2012) also describe it as the stage where the person becomes the heroine of their own tale. This is not to say that the person will necessarily have it ‘all figured out’, but they will have a story of how their career goals came to form. Perhaps given this, however, it was ultimately quite rare in our sampling that students reached this stage, especially as we noted they lacked intentional pedagogical design to support the boundary experience of their placement.

One example, however, of having reached the understanding stage came from Participant 12, who was undertaking a placement in a school. In her career story, she discussed how she herself was marginalised at school due to her disability, instilling in her a deep passion to become an inclusive educator herself. She reflects on how she is mindful of diverse students in her classroom, so that no one feels ignored. And she further navigates and embraces her own capabilities in the role, reflecting:

If I have to repeat myself eight times because someone can’t hear me, I don’t mind. If I have to speak slower, I don’t mind. If I’ve got to adjust certain things, I don’t mind. Whereas I feel like there are a lot of people that do and get frustrated and don’t want to do those things. I think that’s probably my strengths, as that’s happened to me. As a worker, I can adapt, and I don’t mind if I have to do things over and over. (Participant 12)

And yet, ironically, this same student also noted the placement experience did little to inform her career story, as she already felt strongly about this vocation. But it did shift from something she ‘wanted’ to do, to ‘now more of something I know I can’. What this example again emphasises is that while Law’s (1996) original framework is a useful one to understand how students’ career stories develop over time, there is a significant need for pedagogy that supports students to purposefully develop their stories through the placement experience. In fact, during the interviews with students, students rarely mentioned how the university, of their academic supervisor, supported their development. Instead, they described the experience as a random matching process, where they were sent off, often quite unprepared, to complete a placement. Our contribution of the modified version of this model in the placement experience thus serves as an important launching point for future research to explore specific interventions or designs to ensure that more students have positive, developmental placement experiences.

Translating ‘Career Stories’ for diverse students in the university context

As stated previously, our research leveraged the original career learning framework developed by Law (1996) and later utilised by Meijers and Lengelle (2012) to explore how placements could be situated as ‘boundary experiences’ where students reflect on their career goals and trajectories. And through the study, we found the lens to be suitable for assessing and understanding the impact of students’ placements towards this end. However, as this framework was originally context -specific, we suggest here a translation of the work to specifically relate to placements for diverse students. In doing so, we hope to encourage the use of this framework in future studies to address how universities can provide equitable and inclusive learning opportunities for students.

As discussed in Table 1, our modifications include specific wording in the sensing stage around the importance of prior study, work, or relationships that was missing from the original conceptualisation. We further, given the sample of disabled students in our study, highlight that this stage extends beyond uncritically sensing what careers might be good, to reflecting on these careers through the lens of a person’s capabilities, or perceived capabilities (e.g. societal norms). In the sifting stage we also explicitly link this to the placement experience to situate the model in formal learning settings. While we acknowledge these stages could be spurred by numerous experiences, we stress here that universities must consider what their unique offerings are, and how students can engage in ‘sifting’ through the formal curriculum. In the focusing stage we once more modify the original framework to include how students can negotiate or navigate what they need to succeed in their career, likely also reflecting on available technology or working environment conditions, that still support their contributions. And finally, in the understanding stage, students weave the university placement experience across that of their broader life experiences to draw cohesive conclusions about how they performed and what they would like to pursue next.

Table 1. Four Stages of Career Identity Formation for Inclusive University Work-Based Placements (based on Law 1996).

Stage	Description
Sensing	Stage where students may have ambiguous and/or untested ideas of what careers they may like to pursue or how they can contribute to the labour force (i.e. likely to occur pre-placement). These feelings may be formed from various experiences including prior study, work, or relationships. For diverse students, these are often interpreted already through societal norms and narratives, which have signalled to them what they are capable of, or what is expected (or not) from them.
Sifting	Stage in the placement experience where students begin comparing their career ‘senses’ to a reality or specific working environment. They may also be exposed to aspects or specifics of the career they had not expected, including barriers or obstacles, which may further influence their career stories and goals. Students through this process also begin to clarify their beliefs of what is required in the career and how inclusion is or is not supported.
Focusing	Stage in the placement experience where students reflect on their own skill sets, capabilities, and working preferences within the career. In this stage they begin to negotiate how they may join or operate within the career. Diverse students also recognise specific accommodations and/or factors (e.g. working environment, technology) that may be needed to succeed in the career and balance these with what seems possible in the career or environment.
Understanding	Stage where students begin to draw cohesive conclusions about how they performed in the placement. These reflections form a narrative about who they are, their strengths, and what career(s) they would like to pursue (i.e. their career story). The learning experience is further situated across their broader life experiences which supports a story about how they have, and continue to plan to, contribute to the labour force and society.

Discussion

The primary aim of the present study was to explore how university work-based placements shaped diverse students’ career stories. And despite the wide variation across our sample of how individual students did or did not reach various levels of career identity formation, our analysis does reveal the staged, if not scaffolded, processual nature of this identity work. This implies that both career identities and graduate employability are not simply formed over stock-standard exposure to the world of work. But rather, that they are curated and matured over sustained, and ideally well-supported and inclusive, learning experiences. Next, we explored this lens through the specific experiences of disabled students. The results indicated a need for greater equity-focused support, both in terms of learning design and student support, to ensure that diverse students will benefit from the purported value of such work-based placements.

The findings of this study also suggest several key considerations for future research and practice. First is the importance of early-year, diversified, and multi-mode exposure of careers to support students’ ‘sensing’ of potential career pathways. This extends beyond that of the responsibility of the university, to schools as well, to consider how purposeful formal and co-curricular programmes or interventions can help young people’s seemingly infinite choice of careers. It also suggests that approaches, such as the American general education model in the first year of university, merits greater consideration, especially to unpack how it may support equity students to consider career paths they had not previously been exposed to. This finding also links to work of Billett, Cain, and Le (2018) where survey results indicated students’ preference for more opportunities to ‘gauge and further develop their nascent occupation capacities and readiness’ (1281).

Our findings also speak to the lack of university support or pedagogical design for students to engage in ‘sifting’ or the consideration of how to understand the profession beyond the academic knowledge, into how it manifests in day-to-day life. In fact, aspects such as the logistical nature of the work, the hours, the management culture, the travel time, and so on, are major factors to inform appropriate fit for students. Yet these aspects are far too often overlooked, not only in the formal university curriculum, but in the design of placement experience itself, leading many students down potentially inappropriate, if not destructive, paths. And yet these conversations and reflections are critical for students to reach a ‘focus’ stage, where they can envision themselves in the role and build the confidence that will be needed to ‘understand’ their career stories and future goals. Thus, underscoring the cumulative development of career identities, which through the framework presented here, outline how stages lead and weave into one another, not always in a linear fashion, and yet deeply interrelated, nonetheless. Further, while we stress here that a few students in our sample reached an ‘understanding’ stage of their career stories, perhaps with purposeful pedagogical design more could have. This would have not only enabled students to better understand what they seek, but to also understand what they can contribute, and how to find a suitable career for themselves.

We also note that sustained research has already well-documented the extra challenges that both diverse and disabled students face in their higher education experiences. Amongst these, the pervasive and inequitable burden to self-advocate for themselves, to navigate a system that was quite simply, not made for them. Placement, as our study finds, is unfortunately yet another example of where this burden comes to light. As witnessed through our study, the manifestation of this led to the randomness in which students experienced placements, some lucky, and others not. What stood out amongst this finding was also the question of what exactly are students learning during placements? The fear being that perhaps they are learning that they are different or odd, that the career they thought they could do, is in fact, another closed door. This warrants additional exploration to better understand the impact of ill-supported placements on diverse students’ perceptions of self.

Conclusion

Work-based placements are frequently touted as a cornerstone of the university student experience. These ‘real world’ situations, in theory, support students’ application of their disciplinary knowledge and interpersonal capabilities, as students begin a lifelong process of career and professional identity formation. In theory, these placements further should provide excellent opportunities for diverse students to reflect on career choices and pathways they have been historically excluded from. Yet the current lack of pedagogical design or targeted curriculum aimed to support students’ reflection, challenge the espoused value of such experiences (Ajjawi et al. 2020; Healy 2023) and question their equity alignment. Instead, if taken without any pedagogical concern, placements are more akin to matchmaking, where students and industry are placed together, often for superficial reasons such as location, or availability, with the university’s role to simply hope things work out. Signalling a clear disconnect between the promise of the university to frame placements as a learning experience, and the reality of far too much being left to chance.

Questions of quality over the necessary pedagogical design of work-based placements is arguably most acute for diverse students. Who, as well evidenced by research, face unique challenges and obstacles in their placement experiences, ranging from issues of disclosure to exclusionary built environments, and often inflexible scheduling and assessment design (Thompson and Brewster 2023; Vu et al. 2023). These challenges are further heightened when reflected through the lens of discrimination and stigma that students may face from supervisors or peers, as they might in any potential societal environment (de Bie et al. 2021; Dollinger, Finneran, and Ajjawi 2023b). Yet rather than understand these variables as ‘part of life’, we argue here that at the university, with its inherent role to educate, university staff should be doing more to ensure inclusive learning environments, both within the campus, and through the external opportunities we choose to provide. This begins firstly with greater recognition of the need to design and assess work placements as learning experiences, ones which require conceptualisation, scaffolding, and a focus on inclusion. As contributed through this work, future research therefore needs to adopt models or theorisations, such as the one discussed here, to begin this critical work and move placements away from lucky draws, towards inclusive, sustainable, well-supported learning opportunities.

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Career Institute Grant Partnership Grant [NCIPI000759].