Abstract
The 1960s myth that good vocational counseling means successful youth entry into employment is back in favor and imposing itself on educational policy as an absolute priority during this period of high unemployment. But implementation of these youth career planning and employment policies has largely been delegated to local-level authorities, where interventions now take the form of reticular projects.This is the context in which we test the hypothesis of a crisis in the work of actors providing youth vocational counseling, program coordinators of various ranks, psychological counselors, and referent teachers working with students.The methodology for the main study is based on interviews with a range of professionals. A supplementary study analyzed the content of articles in “L’echo des régions”, the magazine of the Association of the Regions of France, from 2010 to 2015.One finding to emerge from these observations is that the educational system internalizes concerns connected with job openings in occupations, while actors focused on post-scholastic job placement request more general education. This role inversion highlights the main contradictions running through youth vocational guidance. All actors attest to the limitations thwarting their voluntarism as well as to the dilemmas they face. Among the identified obstacles are the individualization of vocational paths and the emergence of case-by-case counseling, the application of the principle of equality to competing strategies, the disorganization of institutions allocated declining financial resources, conflicts of interest in partnerships, devalued courses of study, and insecure jobs. We also observed that the proffered arguments propose handling youth career counseling and entry into employment according to an “emergency response” model. In such a landscape devoid of egalitarian prospects, it nonetheless emerges that the path toward the equality of girls with boys is more open. At the same time, an opposing gender logic appears in the distribution of professional tasks, with particular consequences for women and especially female teachers.
Highlights
The work of providing youth vocational counseling has been changing in recent years, as a result of an overhaul in the allocation of duties among a range of professionals and the rising sway of entrepreneurship as a model for public policy intervention as it has penetrated every sector of contemporary social work (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005)
Instead of a centralized national conception, the implementation of public policies for the career counseling and placement of young people is largely delegated to local levels, where intervention has subsequently taken the form of individualized youth counseling conceived under the auspices of projects launched by the relevant authorities at various lower administrative levels (Lafore, 1999; Greffe, 2005)
Actions promoting the local image have emerged, aiming for “visibility” on the competitive national, European and international scenes. This is the context in which we will test the hypothesis that there is a crisis developing in the work of actors charged with counseling young people, program coordinators of different scales, elected officials, psychological counselors, and teachers whom students ask for advice
Summary
The work of providing youth vocational counseling has been changing in recent years, as a result of an overhaul in the allocation of duties among a range of professionals and the rising sway of entrepreneurship as a model for public policy intervention as it has penetrated every sector of contemporary social work (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005).The logic of the 1960s that education and training should respond to workforce needs and that good guidance leads to successful integration of youth into the workplace is in favor once again and is being imposed in educational policy as the absolute priority in this period of high unemployment (Agulhon, 2003). Instead of a centralized national conception, the implementation of public policies for the career counseling and placement of young people is largely delegated to local levels, where intervention has subsequently taken the form of individualized youth counseling conceived under the auspices of projects launched by the relevant authorities at various lower administrative levels (Lafore, 1999; Greffe, 2005). This movement flourishes thanks to the voluntarist and entrepreneurial ideology supported by the last thirty-some years of the decentralization of State missions (Berthet, 1999), and in this spirit, there have been proposals to free the way for innovative local res.ccsenet.org. By examining their working conditions and how their work is organized, we will explore how these people in positions of responsibility evaluate the effectiveness of what they put in place and the status they attribute to the objective of egalitarianism for their clientele, which is the guiding principle of public intervention and the individual province of their engagement in such counseling work (Bidet, 2011)
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