CBS RIGA 2022 Compendium of National Surveys
Download CBS RIGA 2022 Compendium of National Surveys (pdf)
Euroguidance CROSS BORDER SEMINAR “Hope in times of uncertainty” was held in Riga, Latvia from November 7-9, 2022.
It was a privilege for Euroguidance Latvia to host its first Cross Border Seminar, which was also its first major international event with a dominant on-site presence after the Covid restrictions. Career guidance practitioners from ten countries, including Austria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Portugal, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia shared their experience in application of various career guidance tools in a total of 16 workshops.
The theme of “Hope in times of uncertainty” was chosen as a reflection of the need to support both clients and guidance practitioners in the context of the covid recovery period and the Russian aggression. Prior to the seminar two main questions were addressed in national surveys submitted by CBS group members to the host country: (i) factors causing uncertainty in individuals making career decisions and (ii) approaches for helping clients deal with uncertainty and for career practitioners to manage stress.
Seminar participants had the
opportunity to participate in an introductory lecture and masterclass
delivered online by the world-renowned founder of the Hope-Action Theory,
professor emeritus of the University of British Columbia, Dr. Norman Amundson
(Canada).
At the workshops during CBS Riga 2022 seminar national experts presented a
variety of methods, tools and approaches suitable for students, young people,
adults, as well as those aimed at career guidance practitioners themselves. The
workshops addressed various psychological and practical obstacles that hinder
career planning and integration into studies or the labour market.
Workshop leaders presented techniques for strengthening psychological
resilience, confidence building and developing trust in one’s abilities and
capabilities for both clients and guidance practitioners. Decision-making and
problem-solving skills were also improved and the issue of how to encourage
individuals not to be afraid of the unknown was addressed, as well as how to
involve and motivate cooperation partners in providing career guidance support.
Participants also had opportunities to network during the event and share their
professional experience with colleagues from other countries.
The current compendium comprises national contributions of what approaches are used in different countries when working with individuals and groups to help them to manage uncertainty and increase their hopefulness in the context of career planning and decision-making.
More information about CBS RIGA 2022 can be found hereFunded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
4. National survey: Hungary
Cross Border Seminar "Hope in times of uncertainty"
Hungary Country Note
"Uncertainty, career decisions and the well-being of career practitioners"
(Author: Tibor Bors Borbely-Pecze)
Rationale
The Euroguidance Cross Border Seminar (CBS) will address factors causing uncertainty in career decision making as well as career practitioners stress management techniques in Riga 8-9th of November 2022. This background paper had been prepared to support the Riga discussion, and underline important trends, which have effect in Hungary as well and to pinpoint recent Hungarian studies in the given topics.Global trends - local resonances
Fukuyama (1992) declared the end of history just a year before the collapse of the Soviet Union (USSR). The article version was published in 1989. He argued that history is an evolutionary process, so after the downfall of the USSR only Western liberal democracy as a model will remain. In his peace theory he debated that mature democracies rarely or never go to war with one another.
This linear progression approach was heavily criticized by many. As Mark Twain said; “History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” Since the collapse of the USSR, during the last 30 years a number of significant events have taken place that disprove the linearity of history. These megatrends have been shaping and reshaping the global landscape as well as local realities. Just to name a few of these: Climate Change, the rise of China as the second superpower, “9-11” 2001 terrorist attack in the USA, in 2009 the Lisbon Treaty entered into force and reformed many aspects of the EU, finally the “24th of February” (2022) events have been influencing our life at local levels. Even globalisation has no linear trend line as the Global GDP stood at 15.1 percent in 2015, right before the COVID-19 pandemic and was 19.7 percent before the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (Chandy&Seidel, 2016). More recently the global shortage of shipping containers, primarily caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, has led to drastic inflation in shipping and container prices and increased delay times for companies. This had direct implications on regional and national labour markets. Not only geopolitics and environment but also human technology has been changing our livelihood. A global Internet network contains billions of personal data, nowadays referred to as the “Big Data” revolution. Since the late 1980’s VUCA as an acronym has become a key phrase for strategic management as it stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of general conditions and situations.
Impact on careers
Super-complex career information
The traditional description of occupations is now being challenged by super-complexity (Barnett, 2000) – where even our frames of understanding are unstable – and a rapidly changing labour market (Borbély-Pecze, 2020). The challenge of shifting from a static matching approach to a more dynamic match has led to many new taxonomies and approaches. Career information provision for a well-informed career decision making process has become a challenge for most career support development agencies as well as a weak spot for career practitioners. Citizens/users as well as professionals have been overloaded with career information, but information might come through echo chambers or impartiality is not certified.
Multiple career transitions
Career transition is one of the most recurring concepts in the literature on modern labour markets. It relates to the changing nature of work and the new shape of the labour market. The Bureau of Labour Statistics counted 12 job/career changes during the lifespan of the average US worker in 2017 (BLS, 2017). EU figures have been catching up. In the United Kingdom an average worker experiences six different job roles throughout their working life. Career paths are becoming more fluid. The traditional three-stage model of education, employment and retirement is dead and now we live in a multi-stage model with several transitions. (OECD, 2020).
Hungary
The definition of career decision making went through a fundamental change during the last three decades in Hungary. During the years of Communism, career was more about fitness for work and occupations and it was not based on individual needs (Borbély-Pecze & Hloušková, L. & Šprlák, 2022). As a contradiction, in the 1990s, career had a negative connotation, as in somebody is “careerist, pushy or a trouble-maker’. By the 2020s this perception had been changed again and the term is now much closer to the original meaning. Still, it is often debated whether everybody has a career, or career means something extraordinary (such as to be an elite athlete or a scientist, politician, company director etc.). Even the Hungarian literature of career guidance reaches into modern career theories. For example the most widely used Hungarian definition puts the emphasis on the individual decision and the role of meaningful working life as; "the individual chooses an occupation independently, according to the opportunities available to them, activity which enables him/her to create value for society and/or for himself or for herself." (Szilágyi, 2000). Still in 2019, in a large sample career education survey (n=9264) most of the 8th grade students (65%) identified their parents as proper career decision makers and information providers (Kenderfi, 2019).
Career decisions and uncertainty
Career decisions and uncertainty
Uncertainty in career decision making is a well-documented field of research in Hungary. In this short overview a few recently published research papers are covered (Kiss, 2009, Lukács, 2012, Török, 2017, Tudlik, 2021, Oltenau, 2022). We may not be able to identify the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic or the Ukraine-Russian War as direct reasons for a higher level of career uncertainty, even with the most recent research of Oltenau, 2022 and Tudlik, 2021. Moreover, the end of the traditional three-stage model of career is present in these researches. Firstly, the extension of individual life stages (e.g. exploration may not stop at age 25 as Super (1980) originally pointed it out, and secondly, modern career is full of temporary jobs, which may hinder the fulfilment of other life roles also suggested by Super. The Poorly Integrated New Entrants (PINEs) issue (Bell&Benes, 2012) can be observed in Hungary as well. The following quotations are taken from the authors as a literature review.
Secondary education and higher education
Kiss (2009) - based on two samples from Hungarian higher education - further developed the original self-efficacy model (Bandura, 1993). He used 523 paper-based test results and additionally 1870 online answers. The construct of life competence and general self-efficacy were previously examined by several authors. The research examines a system the perceived effectiveness of a person in relation to different life management tasks of the person's experience of life's tasks. It captures a pattern between the skills that are critical for life skills, and the related experience of self-efficacy (Kiss, 2009).The aim of the Lukács (2012) study was to reveal the cognitive and emotional factors of career indecision, as well as to define types considering the characteristics of career indecision among samples of secondary school and university students.
683 secondary school students took part in the first study. 219 female university students answered the inventories in the second study. Based on her research, Lukács (2012b) identified the following categories:
The path seeker type can be characterized by a high level of identity, balanced time orientation, high academic motivation, good results at school and high self-esteem.
The members of the ready to decide group have better results in terms of identity, time orientation and self-esteem than the choice anxious and the chronic indecisive, at the same time they fall behind in their achievement and academic motivation compared to the path seeker group, the reason for which is yet to be found out by further studies.
The type of the choice anxious constitutes a relatively small proportion of the entire high school student sample. The individuals belonging to the group score low on the commitment, the exploration and the ruminative exploration scales, as well as on both possible outcomes of identity crisis (identity synthesis and identity confusion).
The members of the chronic indecisive type constitute more than one quarter of the sample (N = 190, 29,73 %). The individuals are characterized by a low level of commitment and high ruminative exploration.
Secondary education
Török (2017) used the Career Decision Self-Efficacy Scale based on a sample of special education secondary school students in Hungary. The research sample comprises students of typical development and secondary school students with a sound mind who qualify as students of special educational needs based on the opinion of the expert and Rehabilitation Committee.
(source: Török, 2017)
The author found a moderate degree of positive significant correlation between career decision self-efficacy and self-esteem on both samples.A recently published Ph.D. thesis of Oltenau (2022) used the adaptation of the Career Decision-making Difficulties Questionnaire, CDDQ (see: Gati, Krausz, et al., 1996) alongside the Career Factors Inventory, CFI (Chartrand et al. 1990). The research compares the results of the examination of questionnaires filled in by 544 grammar school and secondary school students who study in institutions of public education. 507 students took part in the questionnaire-based research, while 37 students participated in the pilot training that was designed to promote career decision-making.
The sample serving as the basis of the questionnaire analysis includes 507 high school and secondary school students, who are between 15 and 19 years-old. The gender rate in the sample is: 56.8% female (n=292), 42.4% male (n=215). The results of secondary school students show that both questionnaires suggest moderate level career decision-making difficulties. Among these results, the following factors have a considerable impact: general indecisiveness, general uncertainty, harmful misconceptions and the need for more information about careers. 16-year-olds struggle with serious career decision-making difficulties on the wide scale of examined variables that have been based on the research results of questionnaires. The need for concrete forms of career decision-making support appears in the age groups of 17- and 18-year-olds. The age group of 17-year-olds is faced with the pressure of the need for the choice in career decision-making.
Tudlik (2021) original field research took place in Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg County (Northern-Eastern part of Hungary). She covered 490 secondary grammar school students in 2020. Her main research question was to map the relation between career decision making uncertainty and the available career services. Her key findings were:
- at grade ten (age 16) is the strongest need for the development of self-awareness
- students usually have access to 3-4 types of career education activities, open career school days are the most popular
- there was no correlation between the number of career services taken and level of career decision making uncertainty
- however the individual absorption level of career information is linked with the level of self-awareness and negative career anxiety therefore this can be used as an indicator.
Coping with stress and career practitioners
It is almost impossible when addressing uncertainty, stress management in the career services as well as describing the well-being of individual counsellors not to mention the pandemic. Based on a recent research (Tajtiné Lesó & Borbély-Pecze & Juhász & Kenderfi, 2020) it is clear that Hungarian guidance professionals lost many of their clients during the lockdown period and were pushed by the circumstances “to be creative” and resolve their own client management. DIY (Do-It-Yourself) was a well known buzzword during the lockdown period. The quarantine of institutions, the rapid depopulation of schools, universities, chambers, and most workplaces due to the coronavirus has also put the Hungarian career guidance and counselling profession in an extraordinary situation. Although the country has several strategies adopted and under implementation in public services and human services (education, training, employment), some of the career counsellors have been left alone during the COVID-19 closures.
The lack of data protection was mentioned as a problem by many when using the platforms (mixing up personal and professional identities of the counsellors), which is an important element because counsellors have to comply not only with the GDPR, but also with their own institutional data privacy policies. Respondents were unanimous in their lack of a centrally operated and continuously updated career information platform that would cover all types of training.
Similarly to public education, within vocational training and employment services, career guidance and counselling are essentially based on personal presence although they have been digitally prepared for decades. Our main findings were in line with the key outcomes of the international reports, as a Russian guidance researcher explained; ‘All attempts to do what they did before, only remotely, look home-grown and artisanal.’ (Cedefop, European Commission, ETF, ICCDPP, ILO, OECD, & UNESCO, 2020 p. 39.).
Stress management exercise based on the short survey among Hungarian career practitioners
We also asked a small sample (n=4) of Hungarian practitioners about their stress-relief strategies during and after work. In addition to music, yoga, sports and other recreational activities, some counsellors also participate in regular case group meetings and supervision. Based on the answers and the literature review it is very clear that Hungarian guidance practitioners and researchers put a special emphasis on positive feedback to the client. Based on a recent national research about the influence of the teacher's personality and his/her role as a mediator in educational counselling; “Professionals working in educational (career) counselling are role models, good judges of character, positive with a positive outlook on life, the ability to lead, a planned and conscious personality.” (Kissné, 2016).
Conclusions
The contemporary Hungarian literature review suggests that the relation between self-esteem and self-efficacy is important. Modern career development tools and techniques are available in Hungary, and even more importantly as Hungarian is a unique language, are available in Hungarian. The high level of uncertainty of the current years (COVID-19, Russian-Ukrainian War in the neighbourhood, high inflation rate) may change people’s mind-set when looking for a career or a job, but so far these geopolitical and technological changes do not create an even higher level of uncertainty as the citizens of a transition country already have related experience for centuries. Based on the World Value Survey (WVS) time series Hungary has been moving toward a more Orthodox value structure (still inside the Catholic cluster) where traditional-survival mixture of values play an important role (Haerpfer, C. et al. 2022). The desire for security is also likely to be reflected in career aspirations and career decision risk-taking as well.References
Bandura, A. (1993): Perceived self-efficacy in cognitive development and functioning.in Educational psychologist, 28(2) 117-148
Barnett, R. (2000). University knowledge in an age of supercomplexity Higher Education 40 pp. 409–422
Bennett, N. & Lemonie, G. J. (2014) What VUCA Really Means for You? Harvard Management Magazine https://hbr.org/2014/01/what-vuca-really-means-for-you
Borbély-Pecze, T.B., Hloušková, L. & Šprlák, T. (2022) Career/lifelong guidance systems and services: continuous transformations in a transition region. Int J Educ Vocat Guidance 22, 67–91. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10775-021-09473-4
Bell, D, & Benes, K. (2012). TRANSITIONING GRADUATES TO WORK: Improving the Labour Market Success of Poorly Integrated New Entrants (PINEs) in Canada CCDF. Ottawa https://ccdf.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/PINEs-Report-Executive-Summary.pdf
Borbély-Pecze, T. B. (2022b). Labour market management skills among career practitioners: tackling increasing complexity pp 10-120 in Cedefop, Digital transitions in lifelong guidance: rethinking careers practitioner professionalism: a CareersNet expert collection, Publications Office, 2021, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2801/539512
Borbély-Pecze, T. B. (2020) The changing relationship between people and their job – the validity of career information, British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 48:3, 430-437, DOI: 10.1080/03069885.2019.1621264
Cedefop, European Commission, ETF, ICCDPP, ILO, OECD, & UNESCO (2020). Career guidance policy and practice in the pandemic: Results of a joint international survey June to August 2020. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. http://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2801/318103
Chandy, L. & Seidel, B. (2016). Is Globalisation’s second wave about to break? https://www.brookings.edu/research/is-globalizations-second-wave-about-to-break/
Fukuyama, F. (1992). The end of history and the last man. Free Press.
Fukuyama, F. (1989). The End of History? The National Interest (16): pp. 3–18
Haerpfer, C., Inglehart, R., Moreno, A., Welzel, C., Kizilova, K., Diez-Medrano J., M. Lagos, P. Norris, E. Ponarin & B. Puranen (eds.). 2022. World Values Survey: Round Seven – Country-Pooled Datafile Version 3.0. Madrid, Spain & Vienna, Austria: JD Systems Institute & WVSA Secretariat. doi:10.14281/18241.16
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development/OECD (2020). Promoting an Age-Inclusive Workforce. Living, Learning and Earning Longer. Paris https://doi.org/10.1787/59752153-en
Kenderfi M. (2019). Szülői pályaválasztási attitűdök 2019 avagy a szülők véleménye felső tagozatos gyermekük pálya- és iskolaválasztásával kapcsolatban. Budapest. Innokend Kft. {Parents role in career attitudes of the students} https://mkik.hu/download/175/szueloi-palyavalasztasi-attitudoek-2019
Kiss, I. (2009). Életvezetési kompetencia {Life management skill) PhD. Thesis ELTE PPK. Budapest https://ppk.elte.hu/file/phd_tezisek_kiss_istvan.pdf
Olteanu, L. (2022). Educational Aspect of Career Choices. PhD. Thesis. EKKE Eger http://disszertacio.uni-eszterhazy.hu/93/3/Olteanu_t%C3%A9zisek%20angolul.pdf
Lukács, F. (2012). Kompetencia, motiváció és pályaválasztási bizonytalanság egyetemi környezetben. { Competence, motivation and career choice uncertainty in an university setting.} Felsőoktatási Műhely {Higher Education Workshop} 2012/3 pp 51-66. https://www.felvi.hu/pub_bin/dload/felsooktatasimuhely/FeMu/2012_3/FeMu_2012_3_51-66.pdf
Lukács, F. (2012b). The Connection of Career Decision and Identity Development Types of Career Indecision from the Perspective of Identity Statuses Ph.D. Thesis. ELTE PPK, Budapest https://ppk.elte.hu/file/lukacs_eva_fruzsina_tf_angol.pdf
Kissné Gaál Zs (2016). A pedagógus személyiségének hatása és mediátori szerepe a nevelési tanácsadásban – a vezetői attitűd jelentősége { The influence of the teacher's personality and his/her role as a mediator in educational in counselling - the importance of leadership attitudes} Opus et Educatio 2 (3) pp 161-173 https://epa.oszk.hu/02700/02724/00004/pdf/EPA02724_opus_et_educatio_2015_03_161-173.pdf
Super. D. E (1980). 'A Life-Span, Life-Space Approach to Career Development,' Journal of Vocational Behavior, 16(3), 282-298.
Szilágyi, K. (2000). Munka – pályatanácsadás, mint professzió, Kollégium Kft. Budapest {Career development and career counselling as a profession}
Tajtiné Lesó, Gy., Borbély-Pecze, T. B., Juhász, Á., & Kenderfi, M. (2020). "Quarantine counsellors": domestic career orientation and career guidance during quarantine from the perspective of counsellors. {"Quarantine counsellors": national career guidance, career education during quarantine from the perspective of counsellors} Új Pedagógiai Szemle, 5-6. 39-58. https://epa.oszk.hu/00000/00035/00199/pdf/EPA00035_upsz_2020_05-06_039-058.pdf
Török, R. (2017). The characteristics and change patterns of career decision self-efficacy among secondary school students of special educational needs and those of typical development ELTE PPK. Phd. Thesis https://ppk.elte.hu/file/torok_reka_tezisfuzet_angol.pdf
Tudlik, Cs (2021). Pályaorientációs szolgáltatások és pályaválasztási bizonytalanság kapcsolata egy gimnáziumban {The relationship between career guidance services and career choice uncertainty in a grammar school} Képzés és Gyakorlat {Training and Practice} 2021/1 pp 163-171. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353228939_Palyaorientacios_szolgaltatasok_es_a_palyavalasztasi_bizonytalansag_kapcsolata_a_gimnaziumban