Abstract:

Career preparation in higher education has been strengthened in several institutions, in particular, following the recommendations of national or international accreditation organizations. In the context of IMT Atlantique, a French graduate engineering school, this paper presents feedback on the implementation of a method for standardizing teaching & learning practices related to career guidance. The issue is to provide students with a proven method to facilitate decision-making with regard to professional mobility, throughout careers that will be subject to the vagaries of a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous international market (so-called VUCA environments).

This method advocates approaching career preparation by relying on coaching through positive psychology that promotes self-fulfilment and self-actualization, and by adapting co-development facilitation techniques to ensure neutrality and empathy, feedback seeking. Peer-learning pedagogy is used also as collaboration learning model, derived from cognitive psychology that builds on collective knowledge and generalized self-efficacy. An analysis is proposed in this paper, as well as a standardization of the teaching & learning process to allow any university to implement more easily and autonomously the method.

Keywords:

Professional identity, co-development, career/employment guidance, coaching, lifelong learning, peer learning, employability, decision making.