DPU

Career practitioners’ reflexive understanding of their professional role as change agents in career guidance and counselling practices has a major impact on how social justice can be achieved. This entitles an awareness of the way in which guidance and counselling practices are embedded in the complexity of causes of social injustice in their own environment – i.e. how these are perpetuated in the design and implementation of national and organisational policies and how they influence counselling relationships. A generic challenge in career guidance is, for instance, to help individuals follow their dreams and at the same time make them accept and adapt to the external ‘reality’. This challenge seems closely connected with another classic tension in career guidance, namely the tension between staying true to the person-centred approach to guidance and following policy targets and guidelines. In this chapter, we argue that career practitioners may perpetuate social inequalities by not reflecting on how they themselves potentially take part in the reproduction of dominant discourses when they navigate and handle these tensions. In particular, the dominance of neo-liberal discourse in institutional practices makes reflexivity indispensable for career practitioners. This discourse potentially masks social inequalities because it resonates with traditional humanistic goals of career guidance, which include personal growth and development. In this regard, reflexivity invites practitioners to critically reflect and unpack the reflexive nature of their actions – i.e. both the way in which their actions are embedded in dominant ideologies, which inform guidance practice, and in the way these actions potentially reproduce the very same ideologies.