The sour grapes effect in youth career counselling

Abstract

Career counseling has emerged as a way to respond to social pressures imposed on the implications of this phenomenon in the ever-changing relationship between jobs supply and demand, raising the quality of requested skills as well as efficiency, in a client commitment manner. Career counseling theoretic literature abounds in models and strategies that when put into practice simply do not work, not because they are wrong, but because client's expectations and beliefs are so different. The main focus of this paper is to analyze youth perception on career counseling activities, for a better understanding of what triggers them to be fully active into the process. The purpose of current paper is to identify the relationship between perceived employment barriers and perceived employment support of 432 last year students and young graduates from 4 European countries. The curvilinear relationship identified, shows that very high and low scores on perceived employment barriers significantly influences the outcome of the career counseling process, while medium scores on perceived employment barriers, gives youth incentives for authentic receiving of career counseling services, mostly in terms of employment support. Conclusions and practical implications are discussed.