Career Guidance: A Process That Structures Identity, Perceived Value, and Relationship with the World
This is another extract from my next book...
After this assessment, which has explored four major dimensions of the decision-making process in career guidance: the plurality of decision-making styles, the structuring role of emotions, the impact of social determinisms, and unconscious processes, it now becomes unthinkable to continue considering career guidance as a purely autonomous and rational choice. What we call "decision" in orientation is a contextualized act, traversed by symbolic power relations, internalized expectations, and real constraints. It is from this complexity that a broader reflection emerges on standardized systems, discourses, and representations that frame these choices and what they say about our collective way of conceiving humanity, success, and professional development.
Is it still conceivable to reduce career guidance to the act of being guided, or to a simple technical choice of educational path or profession, operated by instruments that are not neutral? This reduction, still widely prevalent, is no longer simplification but an actual denial of human and social complexity. Finding one's path is never about filling out a form. It is a profoundly existential act that engages at minimum three fundamental dimensions of our being in the world: our identity, our perceived value (by ourselves and others), and our way of contributing to society's evolution. Only a voluntarism guided by macroeconomic issues, or an obscurantism mixed with crass simplism, still allows us to think of it this way. We may be surprised that such a pairing between skills and opportunities is still presented as a benevolent act. What is called guidance in many contemporary systems is often merely adjustment engineering, where humans become capital to be made profitable rather than subjects to be accompanied. Such an approach reveals an insidious shift toward an economic-instrumental vision of humanity, widely spread within publicly funded retraining structures.
Those who celebrate this rationalized and scientifically supported and framed guidance as the culmination of an individual and societal project should question themselves: what conception of the other does this approach convey? What idea of the future are they defending behind this engineering of becoming? The impoverished humanism it embodies doesn't just say something about guidance; it says a lot about our society, and especially about its professional transition acrobats who claim to transform it while locking it into the same frameworks.
Career guidance shapes identity in that it actively participates in the construction of who we are and who we become. As we have seen through mechanisms of early identifications, parental projections, or differentiated socialization, professional choices do not simply stem from a pre-existing and stable identity; they also contribute to constituting and transforming it. Finding one's path means engaging in a continuous process of self-definition and redefinition, where each decision, each bifurcation, each new experience enriches and reconfigures our understanding of ourselves. This identity dimension of career guidance appears particularly salient in moments of transition or rupture, where the question "what will I do?" often merges with the deeper question "who will I become?"
