In this post Sanne Theresa Hasselby who is an Educational and Career Consultant at HK Hovedstaden (a Danish trade union) discusses her work providing career guidance.

In my work with career guidance counselling in the Danish Trade Union HK, which covers many industries – administration, graphic work, HR, IT, communication and marketing, customer service, laboratory and environmental work, management, logistics and forwarding, consulting, guidance and case management, finance, health, sales and purchasing, I have the privilege of meeting members who book an appointment with me to discuss their career and educational needs. Sometimes they don’t know exactly what they want to talk to me about, they just know there’s something in their work life, that doesn’t make sense. Sometimes it’s just a gnawing feeling, sometimes they struggle with medical disorders or with stress.

How I give career guidance

I always start career guidance sessions by having the members tell me about their situation and why they have booked an appointment for career guidance. When some members start to tell me about their situation, there is an underline story that they tell themselves about themselves, which is often about feeling insufficient or inadequate and sometimes they even say, “I am not good enough”. They think and express that the situation they’re in is of their own making and thereby their own fault. This is when I particularly use the five signposts to a socially just approach to career guidance.

I begin by asking questions about how this situation came to be? What happened? Who did what? Often, I also invite them to write on a whiteboard and sometimes even draw. Together we start to get a sense of what actually happened. Some people list all the assignment they have at work others list the chronological order of what has led to the current situation and its incidences. By using visual aids, the situation becomes much more comprehensible for both of us. I find that in this part of the, process we are building a critical consciousness. I find that the visual aids help the member to look up from the specific and often challenging or difficult situation and get a clearer and broader understanding of their situation and of the different people and structures that are also involved in creating the situation that they’re in.

This is the part of the process where we together start examining what kind of mechanisms of social injustice that there are imbedded into the systems and social structures. By identifying and naming experiences of injustices related to the current situation the individual can get a sense of the lack of options that they have had which has restricted them in the situation. Restrictions and the experience of lacking options can then be discussed in relation to power dynamics or cultural preferential treatment. I find that the five signposts help people to name experiences of oppression and this insight is the beginning of externalising the problem in relation to the situation they described in the beginning. This starts a process where they can look at their situation and they start to separate themselves from the problem and thereby become more emotionally detached.

In my experience the question of who benefits from this? lends itself to another perspective and the person starts to question the way the work is structured and how the individual cannot be responsible for the cultural norms within an organisation. Here there is often a realisation of an unhealthy acceptance of how things have always been done. In this part of the process, I have noticed the effect of the five signposts becomes clear, because at this point the realisation is that it’s not their fault and it’s not something that they alone can fix or be held responsible for. That sets them free from the inner dilemma of being “not good enough”.

Together you are stronger

Encouraging people to work together is imbedded into the trade unions ideals and values. HK’s motto is ‘Together you are stronger’. That means that we always encourage our members to interact and share experiences with each other, with their shop steward and with us, who works at the union office. When a situation is articulated through the union and with employees standing together change is possible or at least dialogue is possible, and the dialogue can fuel a wider change.

Working within a union it makes good sense base career guidance on an emancipatory approach with a focus on social justice. Because we work on both the individual level, and we work on a collective level at the same time. This presents our members with options for making their opinion heard or taking an active role in changing systemic problems. When working at the political level a member is presented with the opportunity to change your political adversary’s perspective and thereby starting a negotiation and collaborate with your opposition for social justice. Therefore career guidance can play an important role in making people acknowledge their own value and actively contributing to changing systemic and structural inequalities.