Algunos argumentos en favor de un nue vo paradigma del don

A central question posed by the present study relates to how young people construct their career pathways and the effect that resources and messages have on their pathways. The constructivist grounded theory methods described in the previous chapter enabled me to identify codes and then categories that helped construct an explanation of what was occurring in the data. A key process that was identified in the study related to participants engaging in finding a career-related place. After an introduction of the 47 young people who participated in the study (27 who were recruited into the study and 20 young people who formed the theoretical sample), this chapter will discuss the process of finding a career-related place and how it related to participants’ identity explorations. Discussion will then move to the categories and sub-categories that emerged from the study that identified five strategies that participants used to find a career-related place and the consequences for those who utilised different strategies.

As noted in the previous chapter, the constructivist grounded theory methodology used in this study emphasises that research findings should be viewed as being co- constructed by the researcher and participants. Constructivist approaches encourage the generation of new points of view and make researchers sceptical with regard to dogmatic assertions of how people negotiate their career paths in complex environments (Poerksen, 2004). Hence, as recommended by Charmaz (2006), the findings of the present study are offered as “plausible accounts” of participants' experiences rather than “verified knowledge.”

Participant Profiles

The 47 young people who participated in this research ranged in age from 23 to 30 years old. Of those 47 participants, 24 were male and 23 were female. Participants varied with respect to their geographic locations. Twenty-seven were living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The remaining 20 participants were living in Montague, Prince Edward Island; Guelph, Ontario; and Calgary, Alberta. Participants varied widely in terms of the pathways

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that they had taken since leaving secondary school. Appendix N contains a table that summarises the profiles of the 27 participants from Halifax. Appendix O contains another table that provides the profiles of the 20 participants who lived in other geographical locations who were part of the theoretical sample.

Finding a Career-related Place

The majority of young people interviewed either did not have long term career- related plans when they graduated from secondary school or changed their original plans in response to new experiences or changes in their internal and external resources. Although their life stories were very different, the participants shared at least one common struggle after graduating secondary school: they wanted to find a career-related place. While the term "career” was defined for the purposes of this thesis as an individual’s life long progression in learning and paid employment, most participants defined a career in terms of an end point rather than a process. None of the participants considered their education to be part of their career and they sharply delineated the differences between having a career and a job. The three most commonly cited criteria for having a career related to it being long term, providing financial stability, and being something the participants were passionate about doing. An additional criteria cited by a few participants was that it was work that would gain them respect from other people. Jordan, who was working as an assistant manager with a telecommunications company, used all three criteria in relation to a career. He considered his work a “very well paying job” rather than a career. He defined a career as:

Something that I can see myself doing for the rest of my life. Something that I can comfortably live with as far as financially and personally as well, as far as being able to deal with it for another fifty years or forty years. Something that I would consider, I can’t even put it into words. It’s just something that earns you enough respect I guess. That somebody would look at you and say, he’s got a career.

For a few participants, financial security was the only requirement in terms of considering a job a career. Anthony’s definition of a career was indicative of this perspective:

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A career in my mind is something that there’s always going to be a need for. A job, you can get terminated, fired. I’ve had jobs, I worked at Canadian Tire,22 that was a menial job. Any monkey who was trained could do it. I worked at a call centre, that was a little bit more towards a career but again, there was always a constant fear looming overhead, it’s like the pressure of oh my God if I don’t do this perfect or somebody comes along that’s better than me I’m going to get canned. Really, working where I’m at right now, I don’t have that kind of a worry. I can always go ahead and train myself and better myself.

Claire, who worked as a fitness trainer, considered her job a career despite it not providing job security. For her, being passionate about her work was the only criteria that she used to determine whether or not she had a career. This was also the case for Stacey who loved being a stay-at-home parent and as a result considered it to be her career. The idiosyncratic ways in which participants defined career meant that only they could determine whether or not they had found a career-related place. Rebecca noted that others might assume that her job as a support worker for autistic children was a career because many of her co-workers considered their work to be one:

Yeah, so my co-workers are where they want to be and this is definitely going to be their career for the next twenty or thirty years. Where for me it’s a job because I know it’s only going to be another year possibly, before I move on and do some more school to move toward something else.

Though the study sought to understand how young people made career decisions, analysis of the data indicated that selecting careers was a way participants expressed and confirmed their evolving identity. During the decade after graduation, they had much to learn about themselves through the opportunities that were available to them. Lyle, a 25- year-old participant, said:

22 _{Canadian Tire is a chain of stores in Canada that sells hardware, sporting goods, and} automotive parts.

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I needed to find out who I really was. I haven’t found out who I am completely yet, but I know better now than I did when I finished school. I had no clue. I didn’t have any time to figure it out. I was just in school and doing whatever it was. You need time where you can think and work, find out who you are.

For most, finding a career-related place was the result of engaging in a process of trial and error. As they experienced different tertiary education programmes and types of work, they began to have a better sense of who they were and which career paths might suit them. Participants recounted stories of feeling that they had found their career-related place when something “felt right.” Carol’s experience is representational:

When I was taking the programme, I wasn’t so sure that being an administrative assistant was for me. I did my practicum at a large oil and gas company. I worked under three vice-presidents and realised this is kind of where I want to be.

For others, what they wanted to be changed over time as their identity evolved. This was the case for Torin who at 27 years of age said: “I think I’ve only really become comfortable with who I am and who I see myself being professionally or in terms of my career, probably in the last year.”

The Participants’ Strategies for Finding a Career-related Place

A key finding of this study was that participants appeared to use five different strategies to find a career-related place: navigating, exploring, drifting, settling, and committing. The word “strategy” implies a level of intentionality and proactivity that was not typical of participants’ behaviour. As will be explained later in this chapter, strategies generally emerged from a convergence of factors rather than being chosen by participants. However, I have chosen to use the word “strategies” here because there did not seem to be a word that more comprehensively encapsulated participants’ actions. A description of how the strategies emerged through the data analysis was provided in Chapter Four.

The five types of strategies identified in the study can be categorised into search and engagement strategies. The search strategies (navigating, exploring, and drifting) related to

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the way that participants went about finding a career-related place. The engagement strategies (settling and committing) were those that described the cognition that participants had about the career-related place they had found. It was not uncommon for participants to use a number of strategies either simultaneously or successively. Hence, the typology is offered as a heuristic device rather than an attempt to definitively categorise the activities of particular young adults.

Navigating

When participants used a navigating strategy to find a career-related place, they knew what they wanted to do and were engaged in education and/or work activities necessary to achieve their goals. Though they could clearly articulate a desired destination for their career searches, they may or may not have known very much about the specifics of what they had chosen to do.

Kirsten’s experience provided an example of a participant who used a navigating strategy. She was 24 years old and working as a chemical engineer with a large petrochemical company. Kirsten enrolled in a university chemical engineering programme immediately after secondary school and found work in her field soon after graduation:

At the beginning of Grade 12 I had no clue what I wanted to go into, but I was leaning towards chemistry. I had weekly meetings with my teacher advisor to check my progress because I was going to a self-directed learning school. I was discussing with him that I was thinking chemistry and he suggested getting into engineering. When the university was doing their open house for high school students, I went to both presentations by the engineering department and the chemistry department and from that decided whole-heartedly that engineering was the way to go.

While Kirsten appeared to know exactly what she wanted to do coming out of secondary school, she said that she had not been certain about her decision. She had to experience the engineering field through her university courses and cooperative education placement to confirm that engineering was a good career choice for her. As Kirsten said: “Even though I

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didn’t know what I wanted to do for sure, I thought it was a good opportunity. I don’t even know if I knew back then that engineers can do so many different jobs.”

Kirsten was committed to her job at the time of the follow-up interview, but fully expected to be doing other types of work within the engineering field in the future.

Consequences of navigating. The consequences of navigating varied dramatically among participants. For participants like Kirsten, the utilisation of a navigating strategy led to an efficient school-to-work transition. Their plans went as intended and they moved directly into a satisfying career. They liked their tertiary programmes and excelled as students. When they graduated, they found jobs related to their training that were interesting and satisfying. Conversely, others invested considerable time and money into a career pathway only to find that it did not meet their needs or that they could not continue because of the barriers they encountered.

Few participants in the study took a direct route like the one taken by Kirsten. Those who did typically did so by taking occupationally specific tertiary education programmes like engineering or accounting. Often, they had some exposure to an occupation prior to choosing it or some assistance in identifying an occupation that was a fit with their interests and skills. Even so, most navigators did not know very much about their chosen occupation which meant there was an element of chance to their ending up both enjoying the work and finding employment in their field. Those who were able to navigate directly into satisfying work were in an enviable position. By their early to mid twenties, they were well-employed while most of their peers were either still in school or working at low-skilled jobs.

Participants who used a navigating strategy immediately after secondary school were inclined to end up somewhere they did not want to be. More often than not, participants who used a navigating strategy told stories of having chosen a field only to discover that the realities of the work did not interest them as much as they had expected. Jeff described navigating towards computer networking only to find out that it was not something that he enjoyed:

At the time when I went to university, computers were the thing, so that’s what I did. Thinking: “I like to play computer games, I’ll love computer science.” Not the

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same thing at all. I went to university for three years and I got my certificate in computer science, which is now just a real expensive banner on the wall.

After that, I went to work for a psychology professor, installing coding software for her. That’s when I decided I hate computers. Not really hate them, but I just couldn’t . . . I grew up doing forestry for my father. Like planting trees, anything in the woods, so I’m really used to working outside with my hands, doing a lot of physical labour stuff. So I was inside doing the computers [working on computers] and I looked at all the kids walking around campus on a nice day. It was just hard on my head. It really wasn’t me. I mean I could do it, but I really didn’t like it. I made great money doing it, but I just couldn’t stand it. I’d rather make way less money for something that I like to do.

In some cases, participants who were navigating did not stop to consider whether their career choice fit with their interests. As Torin who started in a biomedical engineering programme and continued on with a Masters degree said: “I slipped into biomedical engineering and then kept going with it.” Part of this may be because as Chris said, it’s easy to become “caught up in the busyness of school” without much opportunity “to catch up with yourself.” Chris also observed that it “takes a lot of will to shake yourself out of the path you are on.”

Some participants said that navigating toward a particular occupation that you were not sure about “can be a trap” because it was hard not to follow through once you had the certification to go into a particular occupation. This is particularly true for prestigious high paying occupations such as law, medicine, and engineering. Participants reported that it was difficult to resist the money or expectations particularly if they were unsure about what else to do. While some navigators in the study changed course when they realised their path did not fit, others did not switch and settled for what they were doing at the time.

Some navigators expressed a sense of confusion and anxiety when their plans did not work out. This was particularly true for those who had been single-minded about what they wanted to do. Vanessa said that she had decided in secondary school that she wanted to be a doctor and when she was not accepted into medical school she became “bogged down in the mud.” It took her many years of drifting and exploring before identifying

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another career that she wanted to do. Several participants ended up with high debt loads as a result of navigating toward an occupation only to find out it was something that they did not like. Val incurred a $20,000 debt obtaining an office administration diploma only to find out that she did not like the work. Ten years later she still owed $18,000 for a diploma that she had never used.

Many participants who were navigating after graduating from secondary school said they had not looked for or received help. They thought they did not need assistance beyond help with finding out what tertiary education was required to pursue their chosen career path. Most participants who were utilising a navigating strategy at the time they graduated from secondary school said that few, if any, questions were posed to them to ensure that they had some knowledge of the subject area or job they had selected. They were even less likely to be queried about how, if at all, their choice corresponded with their interests and abilities.

Exploring

The use of an exploring strategy in finding a career-related place occurred when participants could not say what they wanted to do specifically, but were engaged in a process of experimentation as a way to learn more about themselves and their options. They were proactive in their search for information about career opportunities, they speculated about areas of interest, and they sought experiences whereby they could determine the fit of particular career options. Explorers, though uncertain about their goals, actively tried to understand where they might put their talents and interests to best use.

Illustrative of a participant using an exploring strategy was 24-year-old Carol. She worked as an administrative assistant for two years with an oil company. Carol loved the fast-paced nature of her work and the interaction she had with people. She was unsure what she wanted to do after graduating from secondary school, but was interested in exploring different possibilities:

I did a little bit of research, but I just wanted to see what would interest me. I