In Search of Responsible Career Guidance: Career Capital and Personal Purpose in Restless Times

Abstract

Management educators have developed a wide variety of approaches to ensure students develop job-ready skills, resilience, and other forms of career capital to gain and retain employment in an ever-changing, competitive job market. Yet, concerns about the employability agenda’s consequences for students’ self-concept and wellbeing have gained urgency amid a crisis of confidence in capitalism. Humanistic approaches to management education map an alternative path, starting from students’ unique values, voices, and experiences, and leading to the pursuit of a personal purpose. In this essay, we explore the tensions and potential synergies of the career capital and personal purpose approaches to career preparation and support. Building on our experiences at the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Business and Economics, we discuss how integrative learning experiences can combine these two approaches to (1) encourage students to recognize the mutual influence of career capital and personal purpose; and (2) provide rich opportunities for external stakeholder involvement to contribute to students’ career capital and personal purpose development efforts. We believe that our proposals for embracing both career capital and personal purpose considerations can help management educators recalibrate their efforts to help students develop personally meaningful and sustainable careers.