Inclusive Career Counselling for Individuals with Incarceration Experience: Opportunities and Barriers

The escalating vulnerabilities arising from the instability and unpredictability of contemporary life underscore the crucial social and inclusive role of guidance. Serving as a tool to diminish inequalities, broaden opportunities for all individuals, and deconstruct stereotypes and stigmatization that often confine certain social groups to marginalized occupational niches, guidance provides a platform for people to articulate their unique qualities and diversity. In the last years, the most updated career counselling frameworks have provided insights that help practitioners respond to situations that are characterised by complexity. Such approaches stress that social and economic contexts matter and that it is impossible to promote the career human agency of diverse populations without considering the dynamic interplay between cultural, contextual, and psychosocial factors in the life design process. Within these frameworks, the need to move towards qualitative procedures is emphasised, especially for recipients or in situations where standardisation - of the method, stimuli, and evaluation - is not helpful because it would mean losing relevant information linked to uniqueness. The present contribution will share some reflections on the opportunities and the barriers arising from the interventions involving persons with imprisonment experience, aimed at understanding the dynamics of the career development in this field. We aim to identify strengths and weaknesses that could serve as starting points for career counsellors dealing with these distinctive and challenging clients.