Between career choice and vocational integration

Abstract

The Career Guidance Service as part of the Federal Employment Agency of Germany is responsible for supporting young people in questions of career choice and vocational integration. A personal counseling session focusing on these issues plays an especially important role in this regard. The majority of German-language research barely touches on the contents and spectrum of subjects of educational and career guidance and counselling; at best, they are assigned a derived function as compared to the prevalent orientation towards interactive-procedural events in counselling. The present study hence focuses its research interest on this rather neglected aspect of counselling. Its central questions are: Which topics and key subjects characterize vocational guidance? To what extent do individual counseling types emerge? To what extent are the topics discussed guided by the counseling requirement of the clients or primarily by a successful integration into an apprenticeship? The study is based on a sample of 54 counseling sessions and a standardized interview of clients regarding the status of their career choice. It methodically links a qualitative content-analytical procedure with type-forming and quantitative-statistical procedures. The results show a spectrum of subjects varying along counseling types and the clients’ status of career choice. Overall, the counseling sessions show a decidedly solution-oriented and vocational-oriented structure guided by the two poles of career choice and vocational integration as regards subject matter. Finally, these results are discussed in the context of the research findings of educational and career guidance.