Victor Wong and Toby C.Y. Yip have been encouraging young people who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) to concern themselves with unpaid work experiences such as volunteering, family and domestic life, community work in their neighborhoods and serious leisure? In this post they will discuss why and how they are doing this, drawing on their chapter from Career Guidance for Emancipation.

Until recently, many career practitioners have focused exclusively on work and have addressed things outside of work only from the perspective of ‘work-life balance’. However, this views ‘work’ and ‘life’ as two separate entities. From this viewpoint the focus for career guidance becomes to help people to find work that affords them the opportunity for family, friends, community participation, and recreational leisure activities to reduce the stress of work.

Yet, can we break the rigid binary divide between work and leisure, and think differently about unpaid work pursuits and non-work obligations? Can we envision alternative ways in our practices to connect a teenage mother’s parenting work and leisure pursuit such as DIY handicraft to the pathways of career development? By recognising and supporting unpaid work endeavors and serious leisure experiences can we maximise the potential and opportunities for young people who are not in education employment and training? To a certain extent, this desired transformation requires a fundamental shift in the values and behaviors of all concerned stakeholders who work with young people at the margin of society.

But today there has been an outcry to develop an “expanded notion of work” (ENOW) perspective and put it into practice in Hong Kong – a global financial hub and neoliberal marketplace. This ENOW perspective helps to support the idea of social justice, by helping NEETs to build up their portfolio of both paid and unpaid work experiences, explore and construct multiple pathways in their careers, and view themselves as the “owners” and “partners” of their own career development.

We have been involved in a five-year Career and Life Adventure Planning project with a community-based team which works with students in schools and those who have dropped out or left school. For example we work with school dropouts, youth in social withdrawal, marginalised youth, teenage parents, ethnic minorities and youth with special educational needs. This project has been funded by the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust.

In our chapter in Career Guidance for Emancipation we explore the meanings and impacts of career development programmes which are embedded in a community-based approach. We look at the theoretical relationship between paid work (including employment/ entrepreneurship, and work trial programmes/ trial run business) and unpaid work pursuits (including job exposure programmes, volunteering, domestic & neighborhood provisioning, and serious leisure), and their connections to career and life planning. We are particularly interested in how the values, attitudes, skills and knowledge developed in one activity can be transferred to another in a different domain of life.

We are also interested in establishing some principles that can inform the practice of career practitioners to assume a “dual focus” on designing, delivering, and reviewing a wider spectrum of paid and unpaid work experiences. Key to this is encouraging young people who are NEET or at risk of NEET to develop the competencies to manage their optimal mix of paid and unpaid work in accordance to their own life circumstances and career choices. We believe that such a focus can support those who have been socially excluded or marginalised to reengage. Such career development programmes are delivered within a context where many of the young people that we are working with are defined by their ability, ethnicity, gender and socioeconomic status. To address this we also focus on the roles that community and business stakeholders can play.

It is our belief that ENOW is a distinct theoretical approach to engaging NEET young people and those at risk of NEET and unleash their potential talents through career development. In doing this we are trying to move away from individualistic notions of career and career counselling and test the possibilities of contextualized and community rooted practices. The expanded notion of work can inform career interventions and practices that are more relevant to the local context. These need to be co-constructed by youth, career practitioners, researchers, youth workers, scholars, and community stakeholders with a spirit of partnership and collaboration.