Narrative career counselling (NCC) positions career support as inseparable from social justice and aims to relocate solution constructions beyond individual choice to the social, relational, communal, and contextual systems underpinning career development. For some young men from refugee backgrounds, systemic barriers to education and employment intersect with collectivist orientations, where work-life transitions are negotiated through responsibilities to family and community, culturally anchored in expectations of masculine provider roles. Attending to cultural and relational landscapes, NCC offers responsive strategies, creating room to reframe problems, thicken alternative stories, and align vocational intentions with individual preferences grounded in communal and relational commitments.
This presentation draws on case study research with three undergraduate university students from refugee backgrounds in Australia, each of whom attended two interviews. The first interview elicited migration, education, work histories, and career support experiences. The second invited relational reflections on steps toward preferred futures, the values and relationships underpinning those steps, their effects across life domains, and future actions.
A cross-case narrative analysis highlights how participants built footholds in education and work through relational and community-recognised understandings of career and work-life transitions, and how redefining progress as relational contribution and future care for others anchored their career decisions in meaningful cultural narratives. NCC facilitated movement from decision-centric framings to relationally congruent progress that felt agentic, sustainable, and accountable to significant others, supporting both personal agency and wider social participation.
The session will illustrate case vignettes, interview questions, and translate these insights into actionable guidance for practitioners and programme designers. Implications include engaging men's collectivist commitments as assets, implicitly inviting family/community audiences into career meaning-making to widen preferred options (utilising re-membering conversations). Findings contribute to international dialogues on socially just, culturally responsive strategies supporting migrant and refugee communities in transitions through higher education and into the labour market.