Must we create a narrative to give ourselves careers advice?

This was the theme announced for the first meeting of training, integration and support stakeholders for the 2017 - 2018 season (Nancy, 17 October 2017)

According to the European Lifelong Guidance Policy Network (ELGPN), lifelong careers advice (OTLV) is available in different contexts such as education, training, employment and the community and in the private sphere, and sets out a whole range of activities which allow users, no matter what their age, to:

• identify their abilities, skills and interests,
• take informed decisions concerning their education, training and profession
• make the best individual life choices as regards their training, the profession they follow, and any other area in which these abilities are acquired or used.

Francis Danvers points out that etymologically, [1]orientation (career guidance in French) means finding the east. For this author, ‘orientation’ can be understood in a triple sense: sensitivity, direction, purpose and ‘ceaselessly considering the interweaving of its symbolic or imaginary aspects, even combining fantasy with reality.’

So where do we place the cursor between lifelong career guidance in terms of an ad hoc mechanism, and lifelong career guidance in terms of the process of personal and professional development?  What are the decisive factors in the career path of available territorial employment where changes are chosen or imposed in the personal life? These are the questions asked today of careers advice stakeholders.

Because what does taking professional careers advice really mean, in a context of increasing scarcity of jobs and massive turn-over? in a context where the criteria of employability vary according to the terms and conditions of employment, and the sectors of activity? Two-thirds of jobs are occupied by people not trained for them, points out Bertrand Marquis, director of the regional employment facility in the Val de Lorraine.

In this perspective, career guidance consists mainly of making moveable jobs accessible, and for this purpose, information plays a crucial role. “We have gone from skills assessment and a battery of psychometric tests to providing support for people's information”, explains Véronique Lefèvre, psychologist and careers adviser. The added value of support is to give access to a better knowledge of the environment and the opportunities it offers. In this context, the professional position would no longer be that of the expert (project prescription / validation), but that of the supporter who leads a person to ask himself the right questions about his past experience, and to look for relevant and useful information for his future.

But who can claim that a person’s current activity is the culmination of a chosen direction, rationally thought out, duly documented and finalised throughout his journey so far?

This was nicely expressed by one of the participants: "careers advice is like watching the future through the windscreen at the same time as seeing the past in the rear-view mirror"; and in this game of looking around, time past, time present, and time to come are inseparable.

There we see the essential dimension of careers advice: feedback on oneself and the understanding of oneself. There the threads are woven between experiences and acquired skills; between what has been lived and one’s own story.

The story of oneself derives from the implementation of the words ‘in oneself’, meaning the development of one's own career path and project. The story of oneself is the story sent to others to structure the relationships one has with others and with the environment.

In this vein, the approach by the 'reasoned autobiography', which we owe to Desroches (1914-1994), opens up a promising pathway for career guidance professionals.

In this particular exercise of confronting others, the person who is giving himself careers advice deconstructs and reconstructs his landmarks, re-examines his values and so gives a new meaning to his career path.  It is this work of subjectivation which will allow him to support his commitments, including professional commitments, in the future.

For all that, this type of professional careers advice support implies a solidly constructed professionalism, as Christine Mias reminds us
[2]: "Using autobiography as a procedure certainly engages the person who is taking this approach, but it also commits the group which is listening (and each of whose members may be the bearer in his turn), as well as the trainer, who is responsible for its good conduct; far from a skilled, Utopian, outcome."

In any formal or non-formal career guidance activity it may seem good for the person to revisit the past at the present time to view the future in a better way; yet, very often, nothing turns out as expected …

so should he necessarily take this as a guide?

Certainly not, if we mean by that simply the inflexible nature of this invitation to unwind and argue the thread of his curriculum vitae; and the expectation of automatically drawing the relevant decisions for his future from it.

Certainly, if what we mean by that is the free exercise of the story of oneself: setting out the search for his career path, which aims to create the time for oneself, and to reconfigure it for others (Ricoeur[3]).