Psychological Intervention for Exit Guidance in University Context: A Research-Intervention Project

Abstract

The paper aims at presenting the results from a psychological research-intervention project regarding a counseling and guidance course addressed to university students, with a double-faceted aim: a) explore the main representations by which students anticipate their entry into the labor market and future career development; b) grasp some relevant issues to better develop exit guidance in university context. The Emotional Text Analysis (AET) carried out on the narrative reports of 36 students written after the intervention completion detected five main symbolicalcultural dynamics: the need for recognition and the fear for the devaluation of one’s own competences (1), the loss of a reassuring belonging to university context and the acquisition of a professional identity (2), the desire to experience competences learned in previous training and invest on the labor market (3), the resistance to involvement and the tendency to conformism (4), the difficulty to negotiate and omnipotent reactions to the labor market (5). The paper proposes to overcome the main limitations of the current offer of university services and provides useful cues to rethink exit guidance in university context.