Career transformations: How career guidance counselling understands the labour market

Abstract

Career Guidance shapes the labour market by providing advice to school leavers, jobseekers and career changers. While there are a vast variety of approaches within Career Guidance, arguably there are central ideas within the discourse about the labour market reflecting cultural understandings of transition and transformation. To illustrate how Career Guidance understands the labour market, this article traces a genealogy from 19th century cultural ideas about careers from Smiles and Parsons to psychologised accounts from Maslow and Rogers. These imagine career transitions as personal transformations and recommend intensive interviewing to overcome internal barriers and unleash potential. Drawing from 15 interviews with Guidance Counsellors, the contemporary presence of this understanding of the labour market is traced. This emphasis on transformation variously reflects neo-liberal enterprise culture, religious ideas of vocation and modern experiments of the self, all of which emphasise internal potential over structural forces.

Introduction

Before his interview even started, one adult Guidance Counsellor showed me a diagram of an iceberg on a photocopied sheet which offered a metaphor for individuals, showing their apparent surface and hidden depths. Evidently, this was also shared with clients, to explain that they might have untapped skills and experiences which could be useful for careers. Looking within to discover these was something that he could help them with. During the interview, he went on to reference several expert approaches to Guidance Counselling, particularly a ‘narrative method’ he preferred. I left the interview with not just a recording, but a reading list.

While this interviewee was particularly explicit about the disciplinary knowledge underpinning his practice, throughout 15 interviews with a variety of Career Guidance Counsellors (CGC herein), a specific perspective emerged; that skilled interviewing could enable career and personal transformation. Theoretical versions of this were more pronounced among university-based practitioners, who perhaps reacted to being interviewed by a sociologist by referring to key theorists in their training, with Maslow and Rogers most prominent. However, even a retired CGC who had undertaken a brief training course several decades ago and a young graduate who had been employed in adult guidance counselling without any specific training articulated the central idea: Finding a job was not just a matter of matching skills with openings, but appeared as a transition involving personal transformation through self-reflection guided by a counsellor. Understanding this emphasis on transition and transformation which emerges from CGC, both historically and in contemporary discourse, is the focus herein.

Herein ‘Career Guidance Counsellor’ is a category that is defined by usage—all interviewees referred to themselves using that term, or as ‘teacher’ or ‘advisor’ rather than counselling. How such professionals think about work, personhood and careers matters practically, in that schools, universities and a plethora of public and private services provide interviews, which may subtly shape how jobseekers and career-changers approach the labour market. That such advice might be emancipatory or ideological is a long-standing critical debate (Besley, 2010; Hooley et al., 2017). Moreover, the discourses and practices of CGCs provide a window into wider cultural models of the labour market. While critical social policy studies trace how policy makers, think tanks and academics understand these questions (Hansen, 2019; Wacquant, 2022), and there is a growing corpus of studies on the experience of unemployment (Dwyer, 2019; Whelan, 2022), neither of these should be taken as the single or even dominant way in which the labour market is imagined. CGCs may or may not explicitly expound a theory or perspective, but as demonstrated herein, there is a remarkable consistency to their discourse and practice. The prevalence and consistency of the ‘transformative’ theory of Career Guidance in both historical and contemporary practice is remarkable and these empirical sources are mutually illuminating and therefore discussed together herein.

Herein I examine a corpus of interviews which illustrate how CGCs understand the labour market, often from a particular disciplinary perspective. Expertise in CGC has grown enormously over the past half century, yet, rather than untangle this complex of theories and models, the experience of these interviews suggests a wider cultural model of the labour market as a nexus of personal transformation. Generally, CGC emphasises transformation; ‘…the developmental notion of career choice’ (Jayasinghe, 2001: 12). Therefore, before analysing the qualitative data, historical texts are examined, particularly Maslow and Rogers, but also precursors, Smiles and Parsons. Firstly, we must consider how discourses constitute the ‘labour market’.

Theoretical framework

Career Guidance is largely under-researched within the sociology of work and unemployment, ubiquitous yet routine, with perhaps minimal impact on the labour market. Some scholarship indicates that career as a category disciplines workers (Grey, 1994), or legitimises precarity (Fleming, 2017). Career Guidance is generally a patchwork of services, at the intersection of education and the labour market, mediating between employers and workers, serving school-leavers, jobseekers and career changers. It is a disparate discourse with a plethora of approaches, reflecting various strands of academic disciplines, particularly psy-sciences. Within the field, theorists react to these critiques but also defend the practice; ‘…we recognise these limits to individual agency but believe that the idea of offering people more agency in their lives, which is central to the ideology of career guidance, remains an emancipatory idea’ (Hooley et al., 2018: 2).

Thus, Career Guidance is a fruitful site for investigating how the Labour Market is theorised. Its in-between, mediating activity renders it a translator of academic ideas to practical situations, providing models of ‘career’ and the ‘job-market’ to society generally. While there are a plethora of different versions of the discourse and specific practices in actuality, a genealogical approach which identifies key elements of these discourses can provide insight into how the labour market is generally understood (Foucault, 1977). For Callon (2021), markets do not simply exist, but multiple actors ‘make markets’ continuously—indeed, career guidance reconstitutes ‘jobseekers’ as careerists (Gershon, 2019). Following Latour's (2009) actor-network theory, abstractions such as ‘the labour market’ are composed of multitudes of actors and agents arrayed in a complex skein of relationships. Thus, the perspectives of specific actors should not be considered as ideologies or still less delusions, but everyday social theories which have consequences (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006).

Rather than advance an alternative ‘theory of the labour market’, what matters here is understanding how CGC theorises the labour market, attending closely to how practitioners ‘pose the problem’ of finding a job (Bacchi, 2015). How-to-guides and interviews with Career advisors are as useful as explicit ‘theories’ by scholars or other high-profile experts. In Latour's (2009) words ‘Without economics there are no economies, without sociology there is no society’ (p. 257). The labour market is not a pre-existing ‘thing’ waiting to be discovered, studied and described, but an assemblage of practices which is continuously re-constituted by discourses (Boland and Griffin, 2021). It is both real and constructed, cannot be simply dispelled by critique, and has complex social consequences (Hacking, 1999). Such ideas should not be simply characterised as an ‘ideology’, indeed CGC is self-critical, reflexive and recursively self-reconstituting, as well as being impacted by structural and organisational changes—but also serves to shape the ‘labour market’.

For Callon (2021), markets are performed, both in the sense that they are enacted in time and space following various scripts which recompose the relations of actors into the form of markets, and in the sense of a ‘performative speech act’, wherein complex ensembles are described and thereby shaped as markets. Rather than a mere ‘interface’ where supply meets demand, Callon foregrounds ‘agencement’, how actors create a market in situated, scripted, structured but agentic manner. Historically, the invention of ‘economics’ by Adam Smith, Ricardo and others provided a mode of understanding the flux of trade relations which re-defined them, made them an arena of governmental inquiry and management, and prompted the deliberate cultivation of market-relations (Foucault, 2008). Broadly conceived, the discourse of ‘economics’ emerges slowly and changes continuously, incessantly redefining situations through its primary metaphor of markets, extending in the 19th century to make the labour market (Callon, 2021).

Pressure for labour market success and ‘self-actualisation’ can have many consequences, including their opposite; inactivity, discouragement and depression rather than success (Petersen, 2011). Assessing these consequences is beyond the limits of my approach here, which is ‘nominalist’, suspending the question of whether discourses adequately describe ‘reality’ or ‘experiences’ (Bacchi, 2015). This builds on Foucault's (1972) archaeological approach, taking the position that ‘…discourses systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (p. 57). However, this does not exclude the possibility of critiquing CGC as governmentalising, subjectifying school-leavers and job-changers as careerists (Ball, 2009).

Career Advisors are participants in the labour market with careers of their own, yet act from its margins, providing advice to individuals or groups within educational or welfare institutions, but also upon the ‘open market’ for advice, as freelance consultants. Broadly, CGC as a discourse addresses the ‘person’ about their ‘career’ in an arena described as the ‘jobs market’ or ‘the economy’ in a wider gesture. In colloquial terms the ‘labour market’ is ‘out-there’; spaces and places where jobs can be found. These ordinary terms are joined by a plethora of others, such as ‘work’, ‘ambition’ and ‘life’ or more technical concepts like ‘trajectory’, ‘transition’ and ‘development’. Following Bacchi (2015), such terms are not neutral but ‘pose the problem’, a post-structuralist approach which interrogates rather than defines basic terms. Perhaps the keywords are those which are almost unremarked (Moran, 2021); ‘person’, ‘career’ and ‘jobs market’.

CGC is addressed to the ‘person’, the individual who receives consultation and advice in the task of managing their ‘career’. Such ‘persons’ are considered as unique—‘everyone is different’ was a constant refrain in interviews. While partly considered as the product of their experiences (Wierzbicka, 2010), the person is considered as unique, and self-forming through their choices—the mark of the ‘entrepreneur of the self (Rose, 1992). Indeed, choices about careers were generally considered as exemplary evidence about ‘personality’. Strikingly, ‘personhood’ is something to be fathomed, through various tests provided by psy-science to career advisors, but crucially through conversation and understanding, combining confession and self-expression (Foucault, 2014). Normatively, ‘persons’ are linked to ‘careers’, with years of education or work being interpreted as a ‘career’—life is not ‘…just one thing after another’. The subtle elision of life as a social activity of connection and belonging in favour of a conception of life as a trajectory of accumulating economic effort is significant here. While the past is reassembled by CGC discourse as a ‘trajectory’, the future is particularly posited as a ‘career’, a series of choices wherein potential may be realised.

Careers are pursued in the ‘job-market’, supported by education, training and other services, including career advice. By contrast to the more distanced conception of the ‘labour market’ as constructed by economics, the ‘job-market’ is imagined from the perspective of the ‘person’ cultivating their ‘career’. Matters such as aggregate unemployment rates or welfare policy matter less than the more tangible existence of openings and opportunities, so that hiring employers are prominent and society becomes rendered as a ‘network’ which might provide tips or connections which could lead to a job. This ‘job-market’ looms large for school-leavers, becomes urgent for the unemployed, or is surveyed cautiously by career-changers. Occasionally, careers become enterprises, which changes the picture considerably, so that a generalised ‘market’ for goods and services appears. Evidently, the ‘job-market’ is acknowledged as competitive, with others contesting for jobs, but centrally, it is a realm wherein choices and actions undertaken by the person are tested. Employers evaluate applications and interviews and their decisions stand as the primary mode of veridiction which reveal the reality of a ‘career’.

A genealogy of career advice

Typically, histories of Career Advice emphasise how the practice arose as a response to the complexity of the labour market since the turn of the 20th century (Jayasinghe, 2001). A longer history might span advice books on conduct to young courtiers (Elias, 2000), or advice about how to govern self, family and enterprise emerging in the 17th century (Foucault, 2008). By contrast to neat narratives or origin stories Foucauldian genealogy targets the present, disrupting settled categories, such as ‘career’, ‘choice’ or ‘individual’, and recognising the longer history of discourses. Rather than present a singular history, genealogy seeks to interrogate contemporary discourses by examining multiple historical texts, exploring the tensions between them, showing how the present is animated by the past and recognising the contingency of historical emergences. To interrogate contemporary CGC discourse herein I initially examine Smiles’ Self-help and Parson's Choosing a Vocation [1909]. These are recognisably Career Advice, but in the post WWII context, psy-sciences recomposed the approach of CGC. Innumerable influences contributed, but the two most prominent are Maslow's self-actualisation and Roger's Client-Centred Counselling.

These texts exist within the wider context of subject-formation literature, generating a self-restraining, accountable, choosing person (Elias, 2000). Crucial to the formation of this self are practices of ‘truth-telling’ and ‘self-transformation’, with distant antecedents, from Hellenic philosophical exercises to Christian practices of confession (Foucault, 2014). Instantiated in public avowals in the early Church, monastic discipline and institutionalised sacraments of confession, Christian modes of self-formation emphasise revealing sins and altering conduct (Boland, 2021). Such practices are adapted and adopted into psy-sciences and other forms of counselling in modernity, yet there is more at play than confession within career guidance (Besley, 2005).

Whereas confession involves subordinating one's will to a pastor, career advisors attempt to identify desires and inclinations ‘within’ their clients, and facilitate their expression and realisation. Genealogy highlights the hybridity of contemporary practices and discourses. Career Guidance fuses two modalities; firstly, confessional self-purification, the rejection of stereotypes or limiting expectations derived from society or culture, considered as an impediment to personal development, and secondly, conversion and vocation, romantic self-expression and the discovery of ‘inner potential’.

While self-help today is widely critiqued as an individualistic ideology (Rimke, 2000), Smiles’ later preface argues Self-help should not be conflated with selfishness—with moral character central. ‘For riches are no proof whatever of moral worth… riches are oftener an impediment than a stimulus to action’ (Smiles, 1889: 191). Much like Weber's example of Franklin, Smiles extolls virtues of frugality and diligent work. This is undertaken both for personal advancement and the formation of character. Smiles advocates ‘action, conduct, self-culture, self-control, all that tends to discipline a man truly’ (Smiles, 1889: 23), encouraging his readers toward patient, courageous work:

‘The battle of life is, in most cases, fought up hill. […] The school of difficulty is the best school of moral discipline.’ (p. 209)

Readers are encouraged to put themselves to the test, less in self-evaluation than by taking on endeavours, humbly but ambitiously. Undergoing struggles is posited as potentially transformative. Smiles’ ideal man—he discusses men almost exclusively—is not an aristocrat or inheritor of wealth, but acquires success through enterprise. Numerous examples are presented as overcoming difficulties, exhibiting good character, which is developed through their work and life.

Broadly, Smiles prescription for success is self-help, developing ‘character’, deliberately, through hard work and self-examination. He offers a social psychological account of learning through models: ‘Example is one of the most potent of instructors, though it teaches without a tongue.’ (p. 218) or ‘The education of character is very much a question of models’ (p. 221). Both deliberate and inadvertent imitation are implied, with emphasis on the home and parental example as sources and illustrations of good conduct. Potted biographies festoon each chapter, as models which underline Smiles’ point that work leads to success, including social mobility, but ‘The crown and glory of life is character.’ … ‘It is moral order embodied in the individual.’ (p. 231). This conception of character is less sociological than providential; the ennobled individual emerges from the liberal constellation of multiple actors, responsible for their choices, but attaining a cultural ideal (Taylor, 2018). Unsurprisingly, ‘good character’ involves traditional moral virtues of integrity, honesty, generosity and so forth. Importantly, this ‘character’ is not fixed, but mutable through deliberate choices and emulating worthwhile models.

Perhaps the first recognisable guide to CGC, Parson's Choosing a Vocation was published in 1909. Parsons was a social reformer and attempted to provide direct and pragmatic advice for others working in similar situations. He focuses on guiding school leavers in choosing vocational work. His book is a guide for guides, providing a conceptualisation of career, choice, transition, advice and personhood. For Parsons, choosing a vocation is second in consequence only to choosing a spouse—likened to managing a million dollars. People must do the work they love or become ‘a fraction of the man he ought to be’ (Parsons, 1909: 3, 13). Beyond the personal, this decision is significant for employers and the public at large. Parsons emphasises the necessity of finding a good fit between person and job, by matching personal characteristics with workplace demands. The sense of a singular life-time decision is present, and the presumption that people have relatively fixed characteristics which must be recognised and evaluated through career interviews.

For Parsons, good choices depend on self-knowledge, knowledge about the world and harmonising these two. He outlines a series of questions which the Guidance Counsellor should put to their client to know and understand them, or send them home to read, review and answer. Such self-knowledge is combined with knowledge about specific jobs and industries. However, the emphasis is upon the testimony of self-understanding. Clients are incited to self-reflection: ‘stand off and look at yourself as though you were another individual’ (Parsons, 1909: 6). Seeing oneself through the eyes of society generally and prospective employers particularly is crucial. Simultaneously, the Counsellor is considered to have a special hermeneutic understanding ‘For a careful counsellor can read between the lines.’ (Parsons, 1909: 7). All of this takes place within an interview of fifteen to sixty minutes.

Parsons emphasises that ‘the sole condition of this interview is that we be perfectly frank with each other’ (Parsons, 1909: 16, 17), which is later asserted to be ‘absolutely essential to the best results’ (Parsons, 1909: 27). This resembles confession; true speech is required and made the index of the speaker's subjectivity (Foucault, 2014). However, the main aim is to dispel confusion and understand the interviewee's character, considered as relatively stable. No reference is made to the purging of negative characteristics, except perhaps uncertainty or poor self-knowledge, which are to be replaced by clarity.

A central tension here is how these texts conceptualise character. For Parsons, each client is a type, more or less fitted to one trade or another; the key task of the counsellor being to discern this character and orient them toward a vocation. For Smiles, even work which fails for whatever reason can be beneficial in terms of the development of character. Yet, each book nonetheless posits ‘character’ as a metonym, composed of various attributes, aptitudes and conduct in general. Poor conduct is to be avoided, bad habits are to be purified, but ‘character’ is something to be cultivated and developed through close self-observation and examination, brought to fruition through activity and choices. This tension between the malleable and fixed notion of character is a leitmotif of modern thought about the self (Elias, 2000). With or without a counsellor, the individual must both discover and shape their character, by self-examination, jobseeking, work or enterprise. This prefigures the practice of counselling in general, and CGC in particular, whereby the self is examined but also tested through the labour market, in job-applications and work experience. These ideas of character in transition and career as transformative can be seen in the widely influential works of Maslow and Rogers.

Maslow's work draws on psychology but has greater influence within management and organisation, where his emphasis on work resonated strongly (Boland, 2021). Maslow suggests that human existence is characterised by desires and needs, which must be fulfilled for the individual to flourish. These range from basic survival through desires for esteem to ‘self-actualisation’ in a ‘hierarchy of needs’, often rendered as a pyramid by latter commentators. While needs for shelter, food and security are more basic, for Maslow, subsequent needs are ‘higher’, culminating in ‘self-actualisation’—not just success and status, but becoming, self-developing, unfolding what one can become. This is distinct from confessional purification or simply monitoring conduct for self-improvement: ‘Man has his future within him, dynamically active in this present moment’ (Maslow, 1968: 15). Only through effort, including struggle and difficulty can a person become themselves, perhaps in tension with ‘social expectations’—figured negatively as impediments to individual self-actualisation. For Maslow, potentialities located ‘within’ the individual must be acted out: ‘What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualisation’ (Maslow, 1998: 261—italics in original). This challenge is not just voluntarily undergone, but implicitly confronts anybody: ‘One's deepest nature cannot be altogether denied’ (Maslow, 1998: 315). Quite where this potential resides is unclear, be it DNA or ‘personality’, but self-actualisation is known only through its realisation, a version of a performative act.

For Maslow, self-actualisation can only occur through confronting the contingent context and circumstances of life, especially work and the labour market. ‘If work is meaningless then life comes close to being meaningless’ (Maslow, 2000: 39). Work here is not just a vocation or a duty, but a matter of a life-project for which the individual is responsible: ‘Life is a continual series of choices’ (Maslow, 2000: 35). The structural conditions of the economy or arbitrary decisions of the labour market are de-emphasised in this account of individual becoming. Indeed, the external world of education, work, markets and so forth exists as a sort of canvas upon which the individual self-actualises. Situations appear as opportunities and even difficulties appear as tests or trials through which the individual can hone their abilities and discover themselves (Boland, 2021). The highly self-actualising person becomes fused with their task, dedicated to performing excellently, in concert with others, whose self-actualisation they mentor: Essentially, work becomes a vocation, not just a project, a quest for self-transformation.

Occasionally, Maslow drifts into quasi-religious language: ‘One must permit oneself to be chosen’ (Maslow, 2000: 14). Finding a fitting line of work or a vocation is the key to self-actualisation, which requires self-scrutiny, careful choices and dedicated work. The labour market is not a random or contingent assembly for Maslow, but a sorting system for finding our destiny; ‘we are all called to a particular task for which our nature fits us’ (Maslow, 2000: 316). As individuals identify with their work, they express their being in that task, achieving self-actualisation—yet, as noted earlier, this is an interminable pursuit, no form of success can complete the ‘career’.

Carl Rogers came to prominence during the 1940s and 1950s with his widely influential Client-Centred Therapy (CCT). This approach requires ‘unconditional positive regard’, not only meaning that the counsellor should respect and evaluate their client positively but empathising with them and ‘adopting the client's frame of reference’ (Rogers, 1951: 34). By contrast to Freudian suspicion of client, Rogers (1951) proceeds on ‘…the hypothesis that the individual has a sufficient capacity to deal constructively with all those aspects of his life which can potentially come to conscious awareness’ (p. 24). Rather than providing a cure, intervention or even advice, CCT helps to clarify experiences and self-perception. The solution to problems lies within the client, whose self-understanding is improved by the process of talk-therapy.

Here the counsellor acts as a catalyst for change, through tentative steps perhaps, but with considerable ambition, a change described by Rogers as ‘remodelling of personality’. While not confessional in the sense familiar from Christianity or psychoanalysis, CCT does proceed upon a metaphor of depth, for instance, the ‘discovery of denied attributes’. So, while the counsellor exhibits ‘unconditional positive regard’ they also challenge their client: ‘inconsistencies in self are recognised, faced, re-examined, and the self is altered in ways which bring about consistency’ (Rogers, 1951: 77). This process is described by Rogers (1995) as ‘becoming a person’, with ‘the raw, unsteady “newborn” feeling which accompanies personality change’ (p. 129). Thus, the process of CCT is implicitly transformative.

What sort of transformation? There is certainly an emphasis on clarification, increased insight, more coherent behaviour and an alignment of self and ideal. Despite Roger's reticence, clients frequently employed the concept of the ‘real self’. Through therapy, this self appears as more worthy, experiences the world more fully and recognises themselves as the agent of interpretation, establishing a circuit of ‘self-actualisation’ in Maslow's terms. Perhaps most centrally, CCT works to ‘change the valuing process during therapy’ (Rogers, 1951: 157). So, for CGC, the approach of CCT—and its numerous inheritors—can be used to help school-leavers and jobseekers understand themselves afresh, as worthy agents who are responsible for their own choices and capable of achieving self-directed change.

Like Maslow, the work of Rogers has been extraordinarily influential. What is striking in both cases is how casework, the experience of counselling clients, is used as primary data. Rogers particularly used his case histories to argue against Freud and rival approaches. His conversations with clients were taken as experiments, gradually refined and through ‘trial and error’ proving the feasibility and validity of certain approaches. While for some these approaches might appear as emancipatory aid and for others as complex disciplinary deployments of expertise, they are inescapably cultural discourses, expressing relatively unsurprising models of the self—consonant with the approaches of Smiles and Parsons. Rather than a ‘scientific experiment’ which develops falsifiable knowledge, these approaches should perhaps be better understood as cultural scripts which rely on the ‘authority of experience’ (Scott, 1991), which despite diversity, tends to approximate socially recognisable discourses around transition and transformation.

Every genealogy is necessarily partial and truncated, omitting many important thinkers and ideas. Nonetheless, what emerges is the conception of the self as a choosing, self-generating individual whose encounters with the labour market and work, as a specific, contingent cultural model. Rather than take Maslow or Rogers as ‘theorists’ to follow or critique, they are positioned here as crystallisations of very general ideas, which, as we shall see, inform and even determine the discourse of practicing CGCs today.

Method and data

Fifteen qualitative interviews were completed in-person and via video call, with school, university and adult guidance counsellors in late 2022 and 2023. Ethics approval for this research was granted in 2022, with anonymity a special concern, and references to specific workplaces or to specific clients have been avoided herein. The sample was generated by responses to an appeal in the newsletter of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors, and by additional snowballing thereafter. They were distributed evenly between adult, university and school guidance counsellors, but split unevenly regarding gender with just 2 men and 13 women—detailed below.

CGC

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

M/F

M

F

F

F

F

F

F

F

F

F

M

F

F

F

F

Adult/ School / Uni

S

A

U

U

A

U

S

S

U

U

A

S

A

U

S

Age approx.

60s

30s

40s

50s

50s

40s

60s

40s

40s

40s

30s

40s

20s

40s

60s

Interviews were qualitative and open-ended, with indicative questions provided in advance focusing on work-practices, experience and the career of the interviewee. These were provided at the request of CGCs, who were curious as to the purpose of the research but emphasised that they were exceptionally busy and implicitly sought assurance that they were participating in a worthwhile project. Deliberate care was taken in the design of the questions to focus on ordinary work routines and interviewee's self-presentation, avoiding any leading questions. Presumably this shaped the interview in advance, guiding CGCs to focus on their work routines, practices, career and so forth—these questions are listed below in an Appendix. Interviews lasted from 40 to 70 min, with in-person interviews tending to be longer. After initial questions, the interviews followed the interviewee's lead, being open-ended and exploratory, but mainly focused on counselling practices. After the interview closed, the discussion generally turned to recommendations for further interviews but also to recommendations of books, websites and authors within Guidance Counselling. These were taken as anthropological vignettes, as per the introduction of this article, and often veered into discussions of the purpose of the research.

Interviews were transcribed and then analysed interpretatively, both shortly after the interview and as a full corpus, without recourse to software or specific methodological techniques. Following the theoretical approach outlined earlier, this approximates discourse analysis of how CGCs ‘pose the problem’ of the labour market (Bacchi, 2015). While 15 may seem a small sample, something like ‘saturation’ was swiftly reached in terms of the discourses encountered. A central feature of the interviews was that they articulated and recapitulated discourses about personal transformation in labour market transitions in consonance with the historical texts reviewed earlier.

Interview findings

Interviewees began with a brief discussion of their careers, often having gone to university but found their course unappealing or narrow. Many school-based CGCs had taught for several years but found their work repetitive or unfulfilling. Through postgraduate training they upskilled and became Guidance Counsellors, presented as a development of their character sometimes ‘I’d always been interested in how people became what they became. That's what drew me to career guidance counselling’. When probed, many related along the lines that they had ‘always been a people-watcher’ or long harboured a ‘curiosity about what makes people tick’. Another said that ‘counsellors are problem people’, indicating that they had experienced and overcome problems in their own life.

Each interviewee went into some detail on their present work, focusing initially on their conditions of work, including over-work and the drift from career-focused work into more general counselling. Pressures of time, demands by organisations, increased needs of clients and cost-of-living pressures all featured strongly. Prompted by the interviewer to explain how they interacted with clients, each elaborated on various routines, some including the use of standardised aptitude tests, Briggs-Meyer and other instruments, although most made clear that they did not rely on these, but used them as a heuristic or a prop for discussion. Practical activities of working with clients on their CVs, finding educational or training opportunities and supporting them in job-application were discussed. For those working in schools, making choices for colleges and considering future career options predominated. A strong commitment to ideas of ‘social mobility’ through individual effort emerged from most interviews (Ingram and Allen, 2019).

However, each CGC insisted that their work was far from routine and emphasised personal conversation and communication as vital. Something beyond simple selection between options or developing strategies was required. As one school-based practitioner stated: ‘If they’re going to leave school and miss it, or if they’re going to leave school and burn their uniform afterwards, that's what I’m much more interested in’ underlining the importance of students’ feelings and experiences. One CGC who particularly worked with ethnic minorities emphasised that while she did prepare people for job-applications, after several weeks of unsuccessful searching, it was necessary for people to ‘really look at themselves’. So, while assessment in terms of ‘job-matching’ or ‘career-compatibility’ could be sufficient in simple cases or was a good preliminary, the real work of guidance involved a specific sort of conversation.

One younger CGC who was working with a state-provided service and had as yet undertaken no formal training claimed that her organisation worked particularly well because it allowed for several long undirected conversations. She related how these allowed people to become ‘comfortable’ and to be ‘vulnerable’—in contemporary parlance. However, she emphasised that she had no special knowledge, and certainly didn’t pretend to be capable of ‘fixing’ her clients. Overall, her practice just involved giving them ‘space to talk’ about themselves, their educational, workplace and domestic experiences, and from that, they would discover their own direction.

Several interviewees, particularly those working in universities and adult-guidance counselling referenced theorists and approaches, most prominently Maslow and Rogers—and these ideas can be seen emerging almost spontaneously from the aforementioned younger CGC's discourse. However, beyond invoking a theorist or professional terms such as narrative interviewing, each CGC offered a rich description of the special quality of this form of conversation. One adult Guidance Counsellor even described it as being a ‘sort of magic’, which was almost inexplicable. A school-based Counsellor emphasised that for some students, this was the first or only time they got to speak openly to an adult about themselves, without the pressures of parental expectation or the student–teacher relationship based on authority.

What kind of conversation? As per the general contours of Roger's approach, it was non-directed and characterised by unconditional positive regard, with active listening and intermittently reflecting client's words back to them. Consider this from a relatively untrained adult-guidance counsellor.

‘I always relied heavily on the conversation for guidance. And sometimes I would be afraid to go somewhere … […] …I got more competent and more confident - I could read…[the client] When you have a good guidance conversation it's almost like a dance’.

Many used psychological metaphors: ‘I am convinced still … that it's the conversation that unfolds, it's like almost like digging a garden, you don’t have to dig very deep into somebody's psyche’. Technical terms like ‘intrinsic motivation’ were occasionally used, or more colloquial phrases like, ‘it has to come from the client’ (or student), or ‘it has to come from within’ were frequently used. The notion of ‘character’ or some essentialised substance to the self emerges here (Taylor, 2018).

In various ways, the CGCs indicated that their clients were undergoing a ‘transition’—either moving from school to college or from college to the workplace, or between jobs. Being unemployed or stuck in an unsatisfying job were also taken as transitional states, to be escaped by looking within the self. Uncertainty and anxiety about the future were identified, leading to inner turmoil, which CGCs could help resolve through clarifying conversations, which enabled ‘finding the right ladder’. Indeed, one university-based counsellor described her sessions as a ‘wake-up call’ for doctorate holders who were ‘living in a bubble’ and needed to face the ‘real world’. Generally, the CGCs represented themselves as supportive enablers of conversations which helped people through these transitions. They achieved this practically through suggesting ‘stepping-stones’ or by reassuring people that career change is ‘not that big a deal’, but also by facilitating self-examination and personal transformation.

Many of the interviewees emphasised the difficulty of change and transition, whereby a career decision was daunting:

‘They’re afraid of their lives of that decision’. (School Guidance counsellor)

‘Some people just need direction they come in they’ve been doing this that and the other, and they’re looking for direction, they’re looking for change … and change is hard’. (Adult Guidance Counsellor)

Whether leaving school, unemployed or just looking to change a job, the client of CGC was presented as facing existential difficulties in the form of a consequential career choice. The expertise of the CGC was partly in providing information about training opportunities, labour market openings or personality tests, but above all, their service was presented as deepening self-reflection and expanding thinking:

So they might go away and think about that, and come back and say, I had a think about that, and there's something else which was buried at the back of my mind, so they go a little bit deeper, they might say they didn’t have the nerve, or that was outside of my comfort zone. (Adult Guidance Counsellor)

The combination here of repeated conversations, delving into ideas which clients are initially reticent to even articulate, which eventually leads to a better self-understanding and a new career direction appears as a transition navigated through catalytic conversations. Whether presented in emotionally warm terms, or as a ‘reality check’ as one University Guidance counsellor put it, conversation served to transform people's self-understanding, attitude to the labour market, and career trajectory.

Occasionally, some CGCs described ‘challenging’ people about negative or limiting perceptions of themselves, but primarily they were conduits or catalysts for something more. Partly, these transformations were described as rejecting past or present aspects of the self, for instance, an identity which was fixed on one job or career mode—often figured as overcoming ‘hurdles’—internalised social and cultural expectations. However, beyond surpassing limits or jettisoning past self-images, akin to ‘confession’, CGCs emphasised growth, development, or in Maslow's phrase ‘self-actualisation’. Potentials and capabilities within the self were the key to following a new career or even getting a job. Following Rogers’ CCT style methods of active listening, reflecting back and unconditional positive regard, the interviewees depicted themselves as facilitating a process of ‘becoming’.

While CGCs occasionally mentioned Maslow, Rogers and others by name, a generalised practice and discourse was adopted, adapted and naturalised within these interviews. For instance, some interviewees presented their practice as simply natural or human, with phrases like ‘I just treat people as people’ or ‘you have to take everyone as an individual’. When describing ‘what I do with people’ many of the CGCs would give examples of recent successful cases, but oftentimes resorted to describing the process as ineffable, dependent on a kind of connection, whether people ‘click’ or not. Giving clients space to tell their story was presented as transformative, releasing them to act freely, giving them confidence and allowing them to align their will and desire with plans and actions.

Subsequent outcomes for clients within the labour market were also discussed, mainly in terms of success stories, even if these were unexpected turns in careers. Some reported encountering clients who remembered them fondly and said: ‘you’ll never believe where I am now’. Continuous challenges in finding work were sometimes reported, leading to further work on CVs, interview technique, and overall attitude; refusing to ‘take ‘no’ for an answer’. However, the need for more sessions was generally identified by the CGCs as the best remedy, who criticised existing services for their patchiness. External factors were also recognised—precarious work, cost-of-living pressures and suchlike—but never considered insuperable obstacles if clients could only realise their internal potential.

Analysis

After several interviews the consonance between Guidance Counsellors’ ideas and the theories of Maslow and Rogers was unmissable. These were not simply the most frequently invoked names or concepts, but ideas which permeated the discourse of practitioners—and theorists (Hooley et al., 2017). Initially, this provoked self-doubt: Was I imposing a frame on the data? Was I conflating real voices and text-book approaches by neglecting the ‘art of listening’? (Back, 2007). Nonetheless, subsequent interviews confirmed and expanded this initial reading. However, rather than take Maslow and Rogers as ‘grand theorists’ who dominate the field, they are posited here as recognisable and frequently articulated versions of widespread ideas about the labour market. Rather than standing as ‘theorists’ whose perspectives are used to explain the practices of CGCs, ideas about self-actualisation and transformative conversations are approached herein as elements of culture which need to be unpacked.

Rather than describing these ideas as ‘common-sense’ or ‘ideology’, herein the term discourse is preferred, avoiding the implication that these ideas are simply justifications of neo-liberalism (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005). Furthermore, discourses are historical, reflecting how practices such as Career Guidance move from advice books such as Smiles to amateur practitioners like Parsons, and gradually become re-envisaged by disciplines such as psychology and management. The contemporary landscape of Career Guidance is festooned with ‘theories’, many of which elaborate new vocabularies and concepts, but largely tend to reiterate relatively settled ideas about personality or character, career, networks and the labour market. This is ‘disciplinary knowledge’ in Foucault's sense, spanning academic theory and institutional practice. It re-poses the personal concern for career as a therapeutic, managerial or governmental problem (Bacchi, 2015).

Broadly, CGC asserts that people can succeed in labour market transitions through personal transformations, guided by the ‘pastoral power’ of counselling and advice. This discourse is not only elaborated by academics and implemented by practitioners, but widely shared by ‘clients’ or those undergoing labour market transitions (Whelan, 2022). Within these relatively common-sensical terms there is an elaborate perspective which requires further interpretation. Conceptualising a career as the realisation of inner potentials approaches a naturalistic fallacy, not quite ‘what is, ought to be’, but assuming what emerges within the person through labour market activities was implicitly their potential—waiting to be discovered within, rather than a contingent event. Success in the labour market was considered a result of individual effort, effectively ‘social magic’ whereby the luck of having higher cultural capital in the labour market is taken as reflecting inner qualities (Ingram and Gamsu, 2022).

One interpretative approach here is ‘economic theology’ (Schwarzkopf, 2020), which identifies the persistence of religious models of thought and practice within supposedly secular society. How modernity conceives broad categories like markets, states and polities or more specific elements like debt, prosperity and welfare is based upon unrecognised cultural models (Boland and Griffin, 2021). A classic precursor is Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism which demonstrates how both enterprise and the search for regular work in a vocation correspond to the religious notion of a ‘calling’. In Christianity generally, the world appears as a ‘trial’ to be overcome in the search for salvation, and within predestination, finding worldly signifiers of being ‘chosen’ was reassuring, leading to a psychological pressure to succeed. Thus, finding a job, moving out of transitory phases of insecure work into a genuine vocation is not just economically prudent but subjectively meaningful.

Foucault's (2014) analysis of confession offers a persuasive reading of contemporary self-culture, from therapy to life-long learning (Fejes and Dahlstedt, 2013). Implicitly, clients are encouraged to transform themselves through self-examination wherein limiting subjective or cultural self-understandings should be excised. These quasi-confessional exhortations are premised on the assumption that internal potentials are being disguised or blocked. Rather than transforming the self by stripping away layers of inhibition, socialisation or culture, CGC proceeds on the assumption that there are hidden depths and potentialities to each person which can be realised, unfolded, or ‘actualised’. Indeed, the Gospel story of the ‘talents’ which are given to stewards by a departing king which must be invested and multiplied, identified within Weber's Protestant Ethic, seems a closer fit here than the model of confession. A version of the Mathew principle emerges from CGC—those who transform themselves through labour market transitions reap rewards.

Thus, CGC is not simply oriented to discovering inner attributes as fixed elements within a person—rather the person's career emerges in response to specific situational challenges. Here the sociology of tests can be useful (Marres and Stark, 2020): Clients are given ‘personality tests’, but these are considered as very limited instruments by practitioners. Rather, the potential of the self is plumbed through conversation, bringing desire and will to light through exploratory discussion—the aspiration to excel emerges through examination and is proven by the ordeal of jobseeking (Dean and Zamora, 2021). Such conversations are not interrogations, being conducted with Rogers-esque ‘unconditional positive regard’, but they are testing nonetheless. The client must occasionally be challenged within the conversations which somehow fathom their hidden depths, provoking them to unfold these untapped qualities in their career.

Encounters with any CGC occur against the backdrop of the labour market, with a transition to further education or work the presumptive focus of the conversation. School and university counsellors generally made reference to academic achievement and skills attained, invoking the educational tests their clients undergo. More generally, past work-experience was highlighted, essentially a reflection on how clients have negotiated the labour market, which itself is considered as evaluating workers’ worth (Skeggs, 2014). Indeed, the market is generally taken as a ‘mode of veridiction’ (Foucault, 2008), basically a way of deciding the worth of commodities in price and the competitiveness of workers. Beyond worth in price, character or personality is fathomed through the experience of seeking work, education and training; if these are successful and especially if they transform subjects, then something of the ‘truth’ is revealed. Whether someone is a team-player, highly motivated or inventive is verified through these experiences—quasi experiments.

Thus, transitions and transformations occur within the crucible of tests and trials. From ‘difficult conversations’ to ‘challenging experiences’, the labour market is not simply figured as where supply and demand meet with imperfect information, but as a space wherein people unfold their potential through careers. Broadly, this seems consonant with the approach of ‘economic theology’, with the labour market as a providential test of faith, negotiated by pilgrims seeking for the salvation of a vocation (Boland, 2021). However, there are other valances to this language of tests, trials, transitions and transformations.

Following Wierzbicka (2010), the meaning of ‘experience’ shifts during the seventeenth century from meaning acquired practical wisdom to designating any subjective sensation. This happens alongside changing notions of ‘experiment’ within the scientific revolution (Wooton, 2018), which becomes a formalised means of acquiring knowledge, building from trial and error to the scientific method of repeated action in controlled conditions to test specific variables. Thus, it initially appears that scientific experiment produces testable, public knowledge, but subjective experience creates irreducibly private impressions. Yet ‘experience’ is more complex than that, taken as politically important and invoked even for the purposes of social policy debates (McIntosh and Wright, 2019).

For Wierzbicka (2006), the language of British Empiricism has so transformed ordinary English since the 18th century that culturally or semiotically, speakers effectively take the position of a scientist with regard to their own experiences. Rather than make straight-forward assertions, qualifiers such as ‘I think’ or ‘I feel like’ are added before any proposition. Therefore, opinions are offered less as convictions than hypotheses based on limited evidence. Furthermore, empirical reasoning, drawing inductively from observation is foregrounded. Rather than declare what is clearly ‘evident’ on logical grounds, speakers tend to sift ‘evidence’ as data to be interrogated as forensically as possible (Felski, 2015). Both in cautious couching of hypotheses and gathering data scrupulously, a quasi-scientific attitude to ordinary life emerges. Indeed, jobseeking is often described as a difficult process of following clues, finding openings, intensive networking, multiple applications and inscrutable interviews—the labour market often appears a trial (Boland, 2021). However, CGCs must encourage jobseekers and school-leavers to face the labour market resolutely, and if they have previously experienced difficulty, to search within themselves for hidden potential.

Experimental self-creation is arguably constitutive of modernity (Peters, 2005). Beyond creative lifestyle politics, this is mirrored in contemporary parlance ‘discover who you are’ and so forth. If the labour market is figured as an experiment for jobseekers, their tendency toward competition is accentuated, with clearly neo-liberal elements of the entrepreneurial self. However, what emerges most distinctly from CGCs is the discursive construction of the ‘self’ as something to be ‘discovered’ through tests, from psychometric quizzes to labour market competitions. The ‘experience’ of the self in education, work and the labour market becomes refigured as an ‘experiment’ which generates not just self-knowledge, but the ‘realisation’ of the self. CGCs encourage engaging in labour market competitions, indexing these as meaningful tests of the self. Fruitless jobseeking or unsatisfying experiences of work can be discounted as negative experimental results, poorly compatible with inner character, stymieing the realisation of potential. Thus, CGCs are ‘market makers’ (Callon, 2021), producing transformable workers who can experimentally attempt many roles, and where successful, commit to these as expressions of supposed character.

Within certain strands of welfare policy, jobseeking is considered ‘emancipatory’ (Hansen, 2019), whereas critics consider it governmentalising (Besley, 2010)—yet each of these perspectives incorporates a ‘transformativist’ ontology, assuming people can be ‘changed’ (Boland, 2024). While the idea of ‘inner potential’ is contested by critical perspectives on the labour market (Grover, 2019) that people can be transformed by subjectification and new techniques, discourses and practices is a central element of ‘governmentality studies’ (Boland, 2021). Beyond the notion of ‘career transformations’, social sciences generally articulate a similar ontology of change—which invites genealogical investigation.

Conclusion

This niche study of CGC is relevant to the sociology of work and unemployment, as it demonstrates how Career Advisors articulate specific discourses about the labour market. Perhaps some clients—and practitioners—resist these cultural scripts (Hooley et al., 2017), but these ideas are commonplace, even adopted by those who have less formal training, and broadly replicating psychological perspectives popularised by Maslow, Rogers and others. Arguably, these ideas justify capitalist institutions of work and meritocracy (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005), and contribute to the responsibilisation of individuals for unemployment (Dwyer, 2019). Perhaps CGC can mitigate entrenched inequality by promoting social mobility, although the disparity between advice and inherited class advantage is considerable (Ingram and Allen, 2019). Broadly, the notion of career transitions and personal transformations seems to reinforce meritocratic values of achievement (Skeggs, 2014).

Beyond the social consequences of CGC, what emerges from the foregoing exploration of its central discourses is the notion of the labour market as an experimental zone. Encouraged by Career Advisors, jobseekers and school-leavers can interpret their experiences of success and failure, satisfaction and dissatisfaction at work as quasi-scientific tests of themselves. Adopting the valuations of the labour market, they scrutinise themselves to determine what kind of ‘person’ they are, and what kind of ‘career’ they should pursue. This discourse arguably pervades the labour market, even social constructionist critics are inclined to invest their career path with meaning and significance, as a test of themselves.

This orientation to tests, trials, transitions and transformations is a complex and central ontology within modernity. Its genealogical roots can be traced to Puritan tests of faith and Christian understandings of life as a great trial (Boland, 2021; Schwarzkopf, 2020). Similarly, it can be located within the scientific revolution and British Empiricism wherein ‘reality’ was to be discerned through ‘experiments’ rather than by logic or philosophy (Wierzbicka, 2010; Wooton, 2018). Today, these discourses often go unremarked, or are held as ideals, whether in Maslow-esque celebration of self-actualisation or similar valorisations of the individual today, and even influence the ontology of social and psy-sciences. Perhaps there are some arenas of social life within which they are useful guides, but their permeation of the labour market should provoke ambivalence and debate.