Marcelo Afonso Ribeiro

Early Career Construction for Brazilian Higher Education Graduates: Trajectories and Working-Life Projects

University-to-work transitions are the starting point of this chapter. After some theoretical considerations, a research project within the Brazilian context of the early years of graduates’ careers is discussed. The first section of this chapter looks to draw attention to school-to-work transitions processes, with particular consideration given to social constructionism and its epistemological basis inspired in life design paradigm. Transitions are understood as an ongoing and unpredictable process, being present throughout the students’ training and throughout their career, not a right moment, after completing the college course, as traditionally framed. The second section is dedicated to the presentation and discussion of a research undertaken with 25 egresses from a Brazilian public university through a qualitative approach based on grounded theory. The main findings highlighted that experiences during graduation and different labor market settings according to the chosen profession generate diversified ways for entry into the labor market for each course, which tends to lead to different processes of career construction. Thus, the first steps of contemporary career construction have articulated more traditional strategies (e.g., the seeking of public employment and lifelong learning, as ways of career advancement), with more contemporary strategies (e.g., working in multiple jobs, apprenticeship in the workplace, online education, or the seeking of training outside of the educational institutions), which allowed the understanding that career construction nowadays is defined as a person’s co-construction process with the context. Conclusions draw to a close, summarising the most useful and practical suggestions which have been presented.

Impacts of a Group-Based Career Counseling Model for Unskilled Adults in Crisis: A Case Study

The career counseling field has been challenged by the current working world marked by heterogeneity and flexibility which have generated a disembedding experience associated with an identity crisis in most workers all over the world. This new working world frame led to the increase of mature people in search of career counseling, because of the continuum experience of non-expected crises, which do not qualify as expected transitions. To this extent, the objective of this chapter is to investigate and discriminate social and personal determinants that are present in search of career counseling, and what the impacts and effectiveness of a group-based career counseling model for adults are, regarding their specificity, as well as the possibility of psychosocial intervention that considers the inextricable relation between social and personal determinants. With this goal, we describe a case study of a group-based career counseling with unskilled adults in crisis. The proposed group-based career counseling model for adults is based on research and practices systematically developed in the Brazilian context in the recent decades, grounded on a psychodynamic approach inspired by the South American critical psychoanalysis and by the traditional psychodynamic approach in the career counseling field, which are articulated with the theories that have been produced around the world with similar and related purposes, as Life Design and Psychology of Working. This is a contextualized model of career counseling focused on the radicalization of the reflexivity and on the possibility of offer, at the same time, a subjective instrumentation (clinical function) and an objective instrumentation (operative function). On the one hand, this model enables clinical space of holding, identity reconstruction, and deconstruction of preconceived stereotyped ideas about themselves and the working world (societal metanarratives) for a subjective instrumentation, aiming the deconstruction, reconstruction, and co-construction of the working life project. On the other hand, it enables operative space for the construction of the career projects or action plans within a relational context through the constant negotiation with the working world. The effectiveness of the intervention was qualitatively evaluated by a non-structured method based on the participants’ life and working narrative changes throughout the group process, and the main results indicated an increased reflexivity and a clear process of narrative changes during the counseling. In conclusion, career counseling has much to contribute with unskilled adults in crisis and the qualitative non-structured method based on narrative changes has shown to be a reliable method to assess counseling effectiveness.

Understanding Career Resilience and Career Adaptability in Challenging and Vulnerable Contexts

This chapter aimed to understand these constructs in challenging and vulnerable contexts such as Global South countries, by means of analysis of research on career construction advanced in Latin America and based on the notion of intercultural dialogue. The overall aim was to produce knowledge that blends the Global North epistemology of social constructionism with contextualized theories from the South (a vulnerability and human rights framework). It also aimed to make a contribution to the social justice agenda in the field of career guidance and counseling. It was argued that three dimensions (personal, social and programmatic) that have the potential to transcend the person and include persons, contexts and relationships in its constructs should be considered in the process.