What child does not want to do everything possible to please his or her parents? Many times children, regardless of age, find themselves struggling to decide what is right for them and what their parents feel is right for them. Parents are not always to blame for a child's unsatisfied feeling. Children often have a hard time articulating what they are feeling on the inside. I now find myself in the same conundrum with college students who have difficulty articulating what they want in life. With writing as my medium, this thesis will use the power of both Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN) and Epistolary Scholarly Personal Narrative (eSPN) to explore my personal battle with articulating what I want for myself and the world around me. With creation of a personal definition of success as my end goal, I will explore and exemplify how SPN and eSPN writing can be used in one's life to reflect upon and articulate internal desires for how we want to live our lives. With my background in engineering and mathematics, I have found writing to be a release from the straightforward answers that I have been trained to search for. All types of people, engineers or not, can use the power of SPN and eSPN to dig deeper and find what exactly they want to do with their time. Finally, using narrative writing to help others write their stories will give both the reader and their respective audiences a medium through which to connect, i.e. SPN and/or eSPN writing.

The aim of this thesis is to contribute knowledge to how professional conversations such as career guidance and coaching contribute to adults’ learning in their career development. Unemployment is a topic that has recently gained much attention in the political debate as well as in society. Career guidance and coaching have largely been used as a means for supporting the unemployed in their career development. This thesis takes the adult job seekers’ perspective for increasing our knowledge of the learning-process taking place in professional conversations. The study draws on theories of learning, recognition, career development, dialogue and relationships. The thesis focuses on the following research questions:How do participants experience professional conversations? What learning conditions emerge from the participants’ experiences? How does learning take place and what meaning does this have for the participants in their career development? The study was conducted in two municipal labor market projects. The empirical data is based on 22 qualitative interviews with 16 long-term unemployed, 16 initial interviews and six follow-up interviews one-and-a-half year after the first interview. The interviews were conducted as reflective conversations, about participants past experiences of professional conversations in order to benefit participants’ own stories. The results show that: Learning in professional conversations is influenced by the tensions between participants’ self-image, societal demands on the outcome of conversations and how the conversations are organized. The participants’ previous experiences of different forms of employment measures seem to affect their experiences of the professional conversations. Participants’ previous experiences of professional conversations affect the participants’ learning in different ways. How the professionals have treated the participants affects the participants’ confidence or skepticism towards the professional helper. It opens or closes for the relationship and work alliance between them. The participants’ emotional experiences in their encounter with professionals appear to be an important driving force in the learning process. Small nuances such as how the professional attitude is perceived are crucial to the learning process. The dissertation shows that emotional and relational aspects, largely, influence participants’ learning process in professional conversation. Three conditions for learning were identified: Pre-existing conditions, organizational conditions, and conversation related conditions. Four learning processes have also been identified: The positive, the turning, the adaptive and the negative. These learning processes seem to affect the continuing career process in different ways.

Undersökningsområdet i detta examensarbete är karriärcoaching och studie- och yrkesvägledning. Inom dessa båda yrken undersöks flera aspekter som exempelvis den historiska bakgrunden, vilka samtalsmetoder som används och på vilket sätt yrkesverksamma vägledare och karriärcoacher arbetar. Likheter och skillnader undersöks också, detta för att få kunskap om huruvida det kan finnas en konkurrens mellan yrkesgrupperna på arbetsmarknaden men också för att uppmärksamma eventuella möjligheter till samarbete. Vi har genomfört en enkätundersökning med 115 studenter på studie- och yrkesvägledarprogrammet vid Malmö högskola samt gjort intervjuer med yrkesverksamma personer inom både vägledning och karriärcoaching. Syftet med enkätundersökningen var att få en uppfattning om hur mycket kunskap som fanns kring karriärcoaching hos dessa studenter och om de önskade få mer kunskap i området. Ambitionen med intervjuundersökningen var att ge en så täckande bild som möjligt av de båda yrkesområdena. Resultatet visar på både skillnader och likheter mellan yrkena och att det finns en möjlig konkurrenssituation men även möjligheter till samarbete.

This thesis examines the nature of transition expertise which enables individuals to make repeated successful transitions over the course of their career. It addressed four areas that contribute to transition expertise: 1) cognitive flexibility that enables the generalisation of expert knowledge and processes; 2) inferential and inductive cognitive mechanisms that enable expertise to be generalised; 3) personal intelligences that are used to support transitions; and 4) practical intelligence as it supports performance contextually during transitions. The study used retrospective interviews to gather data from elite performers in three fields who had made successful career transitions: sports people who become national coaches or heads of national bodies; successful musicians who become heads of faculty or principals of a conservatoire; successful business people who become senior vice presidents or CEOs. Participants were able to generalise expert knowledge and processes beyond their primary domains, contrary to widely held views about the domain specificity of expertise. Cognitive flexibility enabled this generalisation and was developed through broad based training, early exposure to multiple domains and the early use of generative cognitive processes during the development of primary domain expertise. Inductive, inferential and analogical cognitive mechanisms were the main tools through which expertise was generalised during transitions. Personal intelligence contributed to transition expertise. Intrapersonal intelligence enabled individuals to understand how their abilities, values and motivations shaped their career progression. Interpersonal intelligence enabled individuals to respond effectively to the requirements of their peers, direct reports, stakeholders and organisational context. Contrary to expectations, self regulatory processes did not play a central role in the management of transitions. Practical intelligence enabled transition expertise. It involved more than applying subject-area and tacit knowledge. It encompassed the abilities to: identify and resolve problems; manipulate environmental objects in the form of administrative tasks, schedules and plans; utilise resources in terms of people and materials; and shape their environment, corporate structures and culture. Transition expertise develops and evolves over the course of a career as it uses convergent and divergent cognitive processes, inductive mechanisms, personal awareness and cognitive pragmatics to address issues of increasing scope and implication. While motivational factors, self belief and personality resiliency are important contributors to transition expertise they did not form part of this study.

This thesis deals with coaching with an emphasis on career and personal development. Coaching is becoming a new phenomenon which helps a person to discover and maximize his or her potential. Through in-depth qualitative research it has been established which coaching services people are most interested in. One of the sub goals of this thesis was also to analyze current tendencies and trends in coaching. The theoretical information from expert sources were verified in the practical part of this thesis and emerged from public enquiry that clients usually use coaching services which are concerned with interpersonal relationships, managing financial resources and improving their opportunities on the labour market. In conclusion of this work, I evaluate the performance of set goals for this thesis and propose recommendations for putting this subject matter into practice.

The diploma thesis deals with the relationship and connections between career guidance and the personal well-being of adults. The aim of the work is to analyse the impact of career guidance on the personal well-being of adults. The theoretical basis of the work is devoted to the current form of career guidance in an andragogical context, the work of a career counsellor and various concepts of personal well-being are introduced. Subsequently, the relationship between career guidance and personal well-being is identified and specific mechanisms of the impact of career guidance on the personal well-being of an adult are described. Part of the diploma thesis is also a quantitative research, which aims to evaluate how clients of career guidance perceive its impact on specific dimensions of personal well-being. It was found that career guidance has the greatest impact on the dimension called self-acceptance and the dimension called meaning of life and has the least impact on the dimension called positive relationships. The results of the research also point to the importance of a form of career guidance in relation to the impact on personal well-being. Key words: career, counselling, career guidance, career education, career coaching, well-being, life satisfaction

The diploma thesis deals with the relationship and connections between career guidance and the personal well-being of adults. The aim of the work is to analyse the impact of career guidance on the personal well-being of adults. The theoretical basis of the work is devoted to the current form of career guidance in an andragogical context, the work of a career counsellor and various concepts of personal well-being are introduced. Subsequently, the relationship between career guidance and personal well-being is identified and specific mechanisms of the impact of career guidance on the personal well-being of an adult are described. Part of the diploma thesis is also a quantitative research, which aims to evaluate how clients of career guidance perceive its impact on specific dimensions of personal well-being. It was found that career guidance has the greatest impact on the dimension called self-acceptance and the dimension called meaning of life and has the least impact on the dimension called positive relationships. The results of the research also point to the importance of a form of career guidance in relation to the impact on personal well-being. Key words: career, counselling, career guidance, career education, career coaching, well-being, life satisfaction

The post-modern economy has altered the career landscape – career trajectories are now far more fluid and unpredictable, punctuated by multiple occupational changes, increased job mobility and more frequent and increasingly difficult job transitions. Leaders are frequently ill-prepared for the changing world of work that is progressively dominated by self-managed careers. Taking on a new role is fraught with complexity - for the “chosen one” and for organisations. The implications of successful, failed or derailed job transitions can have strategic and other ramifications for organisations and individuals alike. This study explores the career transition experiences of and the usefulness of career transition executive coaching for eleven individual leaders from various South African organisations. It is a descriptive, explanatory and exploratory qualitative study, employing the systems psychodynamic paradigm, chosen because it focuses on depth psychology and is a developmentally oriented, psycho-educational organisational theory. The study adopted an interpretive stance for understanding leaders’ systemic conscious and unconscious behaviour. The ACIBART model helped to interpret the experiences of leaders in transition. These transitions involve the taking and making of a role, implying the loss which attends leaving a previous role, and adjustment to and being authorised in a new, unfamiliar role, including a liminal period of being “in between”. This inevitably produces an inner drama in which internalised past figures, possibly related to the new role, are brought back to life, and perhaps even amplified in the present. These “unconscious echoes” explain the powerful emotions that frequently attend transitions, especially at the so-called mid-life, and which in turn activate various defence mechanisms. The systems psychodynamic approach to career transition coaching was particularly useful in helping the participants identify personal patterns and link these to their past and thereby develop personal awareness and insight. The “coaching space” thus became a containing, “transitional space” where the participants could safely do the work required to make the adjustment to their new roles. Finally, recommendations to various stakeholders regarding the provision of systems psychodynamic coaching for leaders in career transition are made. / Psychology / D. Phil. (Psychology)