In this article Miika Kekki of the University of Eastern Finland discusses his doctoral research on how career counsellors work with adult migrants. He raises critical concerns about how these interactions between professionals and their clients actually work.

In a recent article, which is a part of my PhD project, I have examined how career counsellors working with adult migrants respond to discussion topics brought to the counselling encounters by their counsellees. The counselling context here is a Finnish integration training programme, which is targeted at adult jobseekers.

The programme has a dual goal: it aims at raising the language skills of the migrants but includes also teaching of civic skills and career-related knowledge. The latter fall under the responsibility of career counsellors. They support their counsellees to make career decisions, apply to different educational programmes, and conduct career discussions with them. In these discussions, the focus is primarily on which educational or employment choices would best suit the person in question, but in principle also other topics are possible and welcome.

Dismissals and evasive counselling

The counselling discussion tend to follow quite a strict counsellor-driven agenda, where the counsellors decide both the discussion structure but often also the discussion topics. When the counsellees wish to bring a topic to the discussion, the counsellors’ reactions to these attempts varied a lot.

One of the main reaction strategies assumed by the counsellors was to dismiss or ignore the migrants’ topics or to divert the discussion to other topics, which were more suitable for the counsellors’ agenda and pre-formulated discussion structure. Occasionally, the counsellors might also treat the migrant-initiated topics with less accuracy or depth.

In general, the counsellors’ reactions can be described as examples of evasive counselling, and they could be interpreted as evidence for so called non-decision-making. This is a term coined by Bachrach and Baratz in their book Power and Poverty who proposed that it is one way of executing power over someone.

What topics are they avoiding?

In my data, the counsellors were consistent in avoiding certain types of topics—specifically, issues related to grievance points or topics of interest that counsellees tried to bring to the discussion. It appears that the subjects raised by the migrants, are, if not problematic for the counsellors, at least a cause of disruption to the career discussion. The counsellors indicated that these topics did not fit well with their counselling agenda.

There seemed to be more space for dealing with other kinds of topics initiated by the counsellees, but generally, the counsellors tended to focus on topics that they proposed themselves and directed the discussion back to them.

Act correctly within the structures

The strict counsellor-driven pattern of the discussions seemingly emphasises an aspect of power. It also underlines the overall ideology of how migrants are expected to act correctly within the given structure. This can be considered a step back from a so-called holistic counselling approach where the focus is on the counselee’s situation as a whole. The current practices narrow down the scope of counselling to certain topics, such as educational and career choices, which are considered less problematic. 

The full article is available here (open access).