In this post Anna Bryntse, a career guidance practitioner working in a Folk High School in Göteborg, Sweden, discusses social justice and the community career guidance approach that she takes in her practice.

My name is Anna Bryntse and I’m a career guidance practitioner in Göteborg, Sweden. I’m currently working at The Folk High School in Angered which is a school for adults (read more about the Folk High School movement). The Folk High School offers education, or bildning as we prefer to call it, through a variety of courses: comprehensive level, upper secondary level, Swedish for immigrants (SFI), Swedish for asylum seekers, upper secondary vocational course within outdoor maintenance, establishment course for refugees and also art courses in various fields: theatre, popular music, art and creative writing.

My background

I studied for three years at Malmö university’s bachelor program in career guidance. Before my studies, I completed a vocational course in youth recreational leadership at a folk high school. Whilst studying to become a youth recreational leader, I became interested in community work, perhaps because I grew up in a small village in the middle of Sweden where the community was important. After my youth recreational leadership course, I ended up working in a community centre run by a local umbrella-NGO. My position was funded by different projects and I found myself working with unemployed youth. When the project funding ran out after three years, I had to think about what I wanted to do next and ended up applying to the bachelor program in career guidance.

I am now employed as a career guidance practitioner by the Folk High School in Angered. There are 156 folk high schools in Sweden, and we all use a certain lingo based on our democratic values. One of them is that students are called participants, which is a crucial thing for us. The words we use reflect our view that education is based on group learning, and that the teacher is one of many in the group with knowledge to share.

Community career guidance

As well as working with the participants in the Folk High School, I also provide community career counselling for young people aged 18-25 who are Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET). This work is supported by funding from the Swedish government to develop methods to support NEET-youths to enter studies or work.

In Sweden, we also have something called youth outreach program, who work with specific individuals, found on a list provided by the city council, looking up young people who are not enrolled in schools up to the age of 19. The difference between my work and the youth outreach program is that I don’t have a list, my aim is to meet people where they wouldn’t expect to meet a career guidance counsellor or meet them at their preferred place.

What I do is not rocket-science, but it is still quite rare when it comes to career guidance in Sweden. I am leaving my office and using a range of different arenas where I offer career guidance. So far, these have included youth centres, citizens’ office, municipal work agency, non-governmental organisations, library, hospitals, at people’s homes, social workers’ offices, other offices, and cafés.

The network I have built by visiting different arenas is also beneficiary for the clients I meet. When a career guidance session takes place, we connect and gain access to each other’s networks. For example, if I meet a young person who wants to become a police officer in the future, I know that there’s a program for learning more about policing in one of the youth centres. The distance between the course and the client narrows when they meet me and come to trust me.

How I see social justice in career guidance practice

I was very inspired, when attending a seminar at the 2018 IAEVG conference in Gothenburg, by listening to Ronald Sultana’s distinction between social justice and social inclusion. Sultana asked; “inclusion to what?”. Social inclusion as a concept states that society works well but many people haven’t figured it out yet. For me, the distinction lies right there – is it individuals who need to change or are there things in society that should change? In many cases, both will have to change. As a practitioner you will lean one way or another, and in today’s society it is easier to lean to the individualistic perspective.

The individualistic perspective in career guidance is shown in different policies, like those that argue that the main goal of career guidance is career management skills. The concept of career management skills are focused on getting people to adjust themselves to the labour market by becoming more flexible, comparing alternatives, branding yourself as if you were a product and so on. The total focus is on the individual’s responsibility to make it into the labour market.

For me, social justice is about recognising injustice and supporting action to change society rather than individuals. In many ways, my everyday work resembles social inclusion rather than social justice. I think you can do exactly the same thing as me and brand it as social inclusion – there are some people who don’t have access to career guidance, therefore I will provide it to them. Problem fixed!

But I don’t think career guidance will make everyone equal and create a just society. For me, it’s a matter of asking yourself a few questions:

• If every teenager graduated upper secondary school and passed all subjects – would there not be any unemployment in society then?
• If all citizens had to learn career management skills in schools, would there not be any unwanted precarious jobs around?

If you, like I, answer ‘yes there would be’ to both questions, you have to start question the concept of social inclusion. Should the aim of career guidance be to include people into to a precarious labour market? Does that make the world better or worse? Does that make people healthier or sicker?

A commitment to social justice in career guidance is not just about who you provide career guidance to, it is also about what you say and do during the guidance sessions. I always try to use the discourse of social justice rather than just that of social inclusion.