This thesis considers career turning points in the lives of four women who work in educational guidance. I am one of these women. As a practising Career Guidance Counsellor, I have seen people struggle to make career-related decisions, yet in their pasts they seemingly made autonomous decisions with little thought other than it seemed right at the time. My own understanding of decision making, influenced by my cultural heritage, appeared to be informed by intuitive responses and chance occurrences. I wanted to explore if others had similar experiences, to satisfy a personal curiosity and a professional desire to see if creative practices could capture the emotion and experience of past career turning points. Perhaps they can draw upon the knowledge gained in times of uncertainty to aid future decision-making. The study is also the story of my doctoral voyage and utilising an autoethnographic approach, enabled me to position myself in the work. Autoethnography, is both method and methodology, exploring the writer's experience of life. The tensions between the distinct roles of researcher, participant and observer of both, were explored. I wrote my story and initial, loosely-structured interviews captured the life-career stories of the other participants. Following the first interview, they were given time and space to create artefacts of their own choosing. Second interviews used questions, but allowed for the natural voicing of thoughts to maintain the informality of casual conversation. All interviews were personally transcribed and shared with co-participants to ensure transparency and accuracy. Transcriptions were utilised to create case studies and my narrative of each interview was also recorded in a personal journal. As such, there was a layering to each experience, different 'truths' of the same event. Creativity flowed through this work in the form of poetic text, imaginative prose, journal excerpts and a fictionalised chapter. The aim was to provide genuineness and trustworthiness as verification. Adopting a holistic approach to analysis enabled thoughts to emerge prior to, during and after interactions. A proforma (Merrill and West, 2009) provided the vehicle to capture the process and emerging themes. Additionally, writing on the transcripts in coloured ink, added a playful quality to investigations. Writing as inquiry (Richardson, 2000, 2008), encouraged an openness to analysis as I displayed both the writing process and product. In addition to Richardson, my theoretical framework was supported by the work of Jarvis (2006), and his notion of 'disjuncture', when something happens which makes us stop and reconsider our positioning in the world, was illuminating. Rogers' (1961, 1980) inclusive consideration of the whole person, rather than a separation of the various characteristics of a life, has informed my practice to accept that occupation is but one life role. A person can have many roles which can influence a life-career. Throughout the work I have attempted to use rich textual descriptions to show rather than tell the narrative. This is pertinent to evocative autoethnography as extolled by Ellis (2004) and in doing so, I hoped to draw others into the text. Kahneman's (2011) discussions on rational and intuitive thinking and Krumboltz and Levin's (2004) understanding of happenstance or chance, have also been a main consideration in this work. Such experiences can be reflected on as we construct our working stories (Savickas, 2011). These theoretical 'friends' and others, made me review my positioning in the study and as a result, I gained new knowledge about myself and my place in the world. I have discovered that creative practices appeared to help participants to learn something about themselves; they gained personal insight by engaging with deep reflective and reflexive processes. Knowledge which could be used to inform their future career decision-making when they are feeling uncertain. As such, creative practices could help individuals think again, with a new perspective.

This thesis argues that the primary importance placed on skills as a panacea for economic growth is a misplaced emphasis, situated within an employability and skills narrative that has so far failed to deliver on its claims. Furthermore, the failure to acknowledge and give equal weighting to notions of personal formation and human flourishing, in other than financial terms, has resulted in a one-dimensional dominant political discourse that depicts a reductionist view of higher education and impoverishes the concept of employability. The government-commissioned reviews and reports examined for this study chart the changing nature of this discourse over a fifty year period (1963-2013), as it moves away from the holistic vision for higher education set out in the Robbins Report (Robbins, 1963), towards a dominant discourse of 'economically valuable skills' (Leitch, 2006, p.44) and the assertion that universities 'should assume an explicit responsibility for facilitating economic growth.' (Witty, 2013, p.6). The philosophical lens through which the concept of employability is examined focuses primarily on the work of David Carr, whose thinking on moral and virtue education serves as the central voice around which other voices and perspectives can be identified and heard, and to show how a virtue ethical approach can form the basis of a credible, alternative employability and skills narrative. By bringing a case study approach into the conceptual analysis of employability, I have been able to interrogate how a particular university perceives and engages with the concept and this has provided unique insights into how universities, through key stakeholders, engage with employability in ways that are complex and negotiated. The term 'nostalgic pragmatism' has been coined in an attempt to convey what I have found to be a sense of yearning for the pre-expansion period of higher education, balanced by recognition of the relative importance of the concept of employability in an era of mass participation.