Secondary School Students’ Experiences With Engaging in Self-Definition Tasks as Part of Career Development

Abstract

During secondary education, students have to choose what to do after graduation. Many feel pressured to choose something that fits the image of their current and future identities and experience stress and uncertainty in making a decision. The present study aims to connect secondary educational career counselling to Funds of Identity research (FoI). FoI scholarship focuses on acknowledging and developing students' identity through self-definition tasks (SDT): e.g., creative assignments such as drawn self-portraits used to gain insights into someone's identity and foster its development. To advance insights into how FoI research can contribute to the support of adolescents' career development, it was studied how students in different stages of their career development experience engaging in SDTs as part of their career orientation. It was found that students who already had some idea of their future career plans experience the SDT as more enjoyable, less complicated and more valuable when it comes to the orientation of possible career paths than those who had no idea yet. However, most students reported preferring an SDT as part of a career counselling conversation instead of having no activity to prepare such a conversation.