This thesis explores innovative ways to help young people, challenged by their transition to the world of work, to have a clearer path planned, and be more confident in their lives and aspirations. The thesis also explores the design of such approaches. It is a qualitative practical action research project that involves an investigation of the practices of design and of career counselling for young people. The researcher is also the practitioner for the design thinking and counselling delivery study. This explores possibilities for more effective career counselling approaches and interventions, and considers whether the design process of a career service can be researched. The design thinking approach is applied during both the counselling design process and the research design; many design tools are used during the co-design process with youth advisors who belong to the target client group.
Today’s job market is competitive, flexible, and complicated. Young people’s transition to the world of work is challenged by both social-economic pressures and the ever-changing nature of the job market. The research argues that traditional career service models do not respond to the new challenges of the 21st century, and current career services still require improvement in many aspects to meet young people’s needs. These needs for improvement in available career services, and the development of new career services, including new career counselling models, are recognised by researchers and policymakers globally and locally in Scotland.
This study takes a social construction perspective and adopts the life-design approach for developing a new ‘narrative career construction counselling model’ called FutureMadeByMe (FMBM). The focus of my design of the approach and interventions is informed by the gaps I have identified in both the practitioner literature and academic literature. These are: lifelong learning, self-knowledge development, holistic and individualised career counselling, future thinking, action-taking, and group career counselling.
The theories of Community of Practice (CoP), narrative counselling, action research, and youth participatory research informed the theoretical framework for this study. CoP theory informed the design and the evaluation of the group counselling model. The narrative counselling theories directed the design. Adopting an Action research approach helped my development professionally as a youth worker delivering career counselling. Youth participatory research theories helped me maintain research integrity when working with young people, and ensured that the design respects young people’s voices. To evaluate and improve the counselling model, I tested the design in three stages. The results show that FMBM can help young people in transition to improve their self-knowledge, enhance their future-thinking, and encourage action planning and action taking.
This study primarily contributes to knowledge in this area with a step-by-step design process innovation, illustrated by the development of a career counselling model that helps young people’s voices to be heard. It provides a narrative career counselling model that can be adapted by professionals from multiple disciplines who want to help young people in transition with career development and life design issues. It serves as a handbook to help ensure that the model can be more easily learned. It also provides a reflection on the methodology of action research and youth-participatory research. Beyond that, I have also engaged in professional development as a youth worker and service designer.