In August 2022, Heidi Jänkälä (Master student in Guidance and Counselling at Jyväskylä University, Finland) and Nikoletta Terzi (Master student in Pedagogy at Stockholm University, Sweden) attended the Career Guidance and Social Justice summer course organized by the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. As part of the course they created a resource about intersectionality and social justice in career guidance. In this post they set out the thinking behind their resource and share the resource itself.

We were asked to create a resource which could inform other practitioners about how career guidance can contribute to social justice. In doing this, we were to find a subject which could help us to explore and problematise a social justice issue. We both were interested in how the different orders of power and social aspects (ethnicity, gender, socio-economic status, ability status, religion etc.) interact with each other.

We were engaged in thinking about immigrants’ perspectives and recognised that different groups of immigrants have different needs, not only because of their different cultures and languages, but also because of their diversity by gender, religion, neuropsychiatric disorder and other factors. We felt that an intersectional approach helps us to adapt interventions to their specific needs and to contribute in that way to social justice. If career guidance practitioners concentrate only on one factor, for example gender or ethnicity, they might not notice other aspects that are to be taken into account to help people. This is why we invented Fatima’s case.

Furthermore, we noticed a gap in research that has to do with intersectionality and career guidance, something that has also been underlined by researchers in the field. Current research has focused much on how separate factors can affect a person’s career development but not how we can see several societal factors in interaction with each other. We thus found it a good opportunity to explore the idea of intersectionality further and to combine it with the valuable knowledge we learned during summer course including the five signposts to a socially just approach to career guidance. Through our presentation and Fatima’s fictional case we thus summarised and visualised information about how intersectional approach can raise awareness about social justice issues and apply it in everyday work with immigrants.

We think that even though Fatima’s story is fictional, it could be someone’s reality. We thus used it to demonstrate why it is important to simultaneously consider various social factors in a client’s situation. Different organizations, educational groups and other social networks, even when working with other client groups, could use this resource as a base for their own reflection about their guidance practice and to help them to think about how to apply the intersectional approach in it. We acknowledge that it can be hard to balance between not making assumptions about the clients and simultaneously understanding how the various social factors might affect their career. In addition, we want to encourage fellow practitioners to point out the power structures affecting their client’s career but doing it in a way that still empowers the client. These aspects can be difficult to apply but they are still worth considering to promote more socially just career guidance.

Download the resource