In this article Professor Steven Roberts and Dr Ben Lyall (Monash University) summarise their recent article from the journal Youth (February 2023), about young Australians’ experiences of navigating careers information and guidance.

Based on our research team’s interests in young people’s transitions between school and work, our recent research examined careers information through the eyes of young Australians aged 15-24. We explored their experience via a suite of complementary methods: conducting a survey (1,103 responses), focus groups (90 people) and collecting online posts from social media platforms (15,227 comments).

The context for this work is Australia, which follows other nations like the UK, in that careers guidance provisions are delivered through a mixed system of government departments and agencies, often in conjunction with private providers. Less like the UK, in Australia this is coupled with state/territory oversight of education (excluding universities), and the formal career services offered therein. Given these overlapping structures and the diversity of our data, we find that careers information is best viewed as a relational ecology.

We use ‘ecology’ here as a metaphor to describe a sustained co-existence, with different actors and stakeholders and information sources being some of the multiple component parts. Importantly, the data shows us young people seek and find many sources of career information including, but well beyond, formal careers guidance embedded in schools or universities. These sources work in concert, but are also at times, in competition. Sources include:

• professional school-based career practitioners;
• university course and career guidance;
• public sector services and information sources;
• private education and career preparation providers;
• industry and sector-led knowledge hubs;
• advice from friends, family and colleagues; and
• social media pages and anonymous online forums.

In our article we argue that documenting and exploring young people’s access to and use of this wide range of resources is necessary to further nuance our understanding of what formal services can and might do, and deliver more insights into the impediments to social justice.

So what did our data say about young people’s engagements with the different types of information sources? Unsurprisingly the top 3 sources were close to home. Our survey revealed that 56% of respondents had – at some point – talked to family about their career decisions and directions; 55% had spoken with friends; 48% had talked to professionals; and 47% had spoken with someone in an occupation they aspired to. Other activities, online resources, and career events were less popular.

In focus groups – and with little difference between state and private sector education – we learned in more detail, that experiences with any one of these sources were of mixed quality. Some had ‘absolutely fantastic’ experiences and in particular, valued guidance that offered multiple ‘paths’ to achieving career goals. Other felt pushed toward a ‘DIY’ approach to finding out more about future career options and the education/work required:

A lot of the career services tend to sort of say the same things. Or there’s either way too much information – in like, small print – that goes into way too much detail that you’re not looking for it, [or] there’s just not enough information to be useful at all. So you sort of, you do end up sort of getting forced into a position where you do need to do your own research about careers.

Of particular further importance was the positive role of unknown peers on social media. Indeed, we captured not just an enormous breadth and depth of information shared and received between young people when online, but also ample evidence of the exchange of individual stories of transitioning between school and work. These garnered empathy and support,  as this comment captures:

Try not to be too hard on yourself, and definitely don’t talk-down to yourself. It is admirable that you are still pursuing education, and it’s something that we should all do over our whole lives, not just at school. Experiences are important even if they don’t lead to the school grades you wanted.

While we observed plenty of ‘entrepreneurial’ action centred around young people proactively seeking and combining information from multiple sources, based on their job interests, this peer support speaks to a level of interdependence that is not always present in neoliberal  discourses of individual competitiveness.

While this is a positive, we also found that the confidence and willingness to access guidance is impacted by well-known markers of advantage and disadvantage. Young people with high levels of parental support were more likely to have conversations with family about career strategies as well as access professional career service providers. Those from rural areas or Indigenous backgrounds, for example, were less likely to engage to seek any careers information, not just formal education-based careers guidance.

Consistent with existing research, we also see that young people themselves, are cognisant of the relative  levels of effort required to navigate the career guidance services on offer, based on positions of (dis)advantage. While all young people were active agents in imagining their future careers, some had a greater capacity to act.

Ultimately, we argue that approaches interested in equity and justice need to be aware of the ecology we describe: young people are unlikely to access career information from a single channel, and their experience with any one support is likely informed by experiences elsewhere. Within this too, we emphasise that young people become highly resourceful practical experts. Their knowledge, shared peer-to-peer, should also be recognised as a key source of guidance.

The presence of this broader ecology of information has a more practical implication, too. We argue that any evaluations or critical assessments of current programmes or interventions – in schools or elsewhere – can be informed by what else young people do, and what structures constrain and/or enable their doing so, in terms of their career information journey.