Assisting high school students with career decision-making difficulties through career construction counselling

Abstract

Individuals at different stages of their life experience career decision-making difficulties, especially when they are required to make career decisions. Despite the difficulties and complexity of career choice, students must make the decision quite early in life because it will determine the kind of profession they intend pursuing. In Tanzania, students’ career concerns, including their career decision-making difficulties, have not been properly addressed owing to inadequate career counselling in secondary schools. When individuals experience career decision-making difficulties, without being helped to deal with these difficulties, the possibility of choosing an inappropriate career increases. Consequently, endangering the quality of performance, satisfaction levels, and overall well-being (Kazi & Akhlaq, 2017).This underscores the need for an innovative career counselling intervention to help students resolve their career decision-making difficulties and plan their career journeys before they embark on further major decisions (Maree, 2016). Savickas et al (2009) insist counsellors not wait until individuals particularly students are in danger of making inappropriate career choices are facing difficulties of transition. This study explored the influence of career construction counselling as an intervention to resolve the career decision-making difficulties of selected form five students in Tanzania. A total of 35 participants took part in the study. A qualitative approach based on a constructivist worldview was employed to answer the research questions. More specifically, an intrinsic single-case, descriptive intervention study research design was followed. The data were generated using different sources of data such as interviews (pre-intervention and post-intervention interviews), observations, documents (the researcher’s and the participants’ journals), and the Career Interest Profile (CIP version 6 of Maree, 2017). Thematic analysis (Clarke & Braun, 2013) was used to analyse the data. The findings revealed that the career construction counselling intervention enhanced the majority of the participants’ career decision-making capacity and improved their career adaptability in regard to the four subdimensions of career adaptability, namely concern, control, curiosity, and confidence. The findings suggest that participants who participated in the career construction counselling intervention benefitted a lot as they could plan for their future and make informed career decisions.