A systems theory framework approach to dynamic relationships in youth career counselling

Abstract

This paper is focused on discussing youth perception on career counselling services, with the purpose of delineating best practices in active employment behaviour engagement. The main purpose of current study is to analyze the dynamic relationship between perceived employment success and perceived employment assistance in career counselling of 432 youth, last year students from Romania, Turkey, Hungary and Cyprus. The curvilinear relationship highlighted demonstrates that very high and very low scores on perceived employment success are related to a negative perception of employment assistance, while situating on the medium response scores, and gives youth incentives for a positive perception and acceptation of employment assistance, which instead will work in their favour. Perceived employment success and perceived employment assistance prove to be crucial concepts when directly working with clients, because depending on these two perceptions the first beliefs of trust or distrust the career counselling process are formed. Results can be easily approached by the Systems Theory Framework (STF) of career development (McMahon, 2015), that proves to be more efficient that any other approaches in understanding the complex and dynamical process of youth career counselling.