Abstract:

This paper aims to explore how young people outside of work and education may get access to information about work and workplaces by making use of Augmented Reality (AR). We have observed and interviewed seven young people between 20 – 30 years while they were using HoloLens to explore virtual career counselling modules. Our data corpus consists of in total 8 hours of video recordings of brief – exercise – debrief practices (Dede et al. 2017) and semi structured interviews. Through interaction analysis we roughly transcribed the material to identify patterns and overarching themes. In this paper, we investigate 1) how young people experience using the method brief – exercise– debrief when trying AR as a digital resource, and 2) how young people reflect on virtual simulations as a method to create a better understanding of future career opportunities. We will use the Bandura (1997) concept self-efficacy in two ways: To critically look into the relevance of the concept in understanding this group in entering the work life, and to question if and how AR may offer new modes of possible accesses to work that influence the subjective experience of self-efficacy.

Through seven video-recorded exercises and semi-structured interviews, our findings display that the participants can be characterized as “digital natives” using a wide range of digital tools in their everyday lives. Results documents that they find AR as an interesting tool for virtual career counselling and contribute with advice to further elaborate functionality to allow young people to be actively engaged, immersed and with ability to practice and exercise how everyday tasks are carried out in simulated workplace activities. They suggest making use of gamification features such as avatars for role plays, levels to enter virtual workspaces to examine future jobs, contests to motivate for investigating, and prizes. Additionally, our findings display how the young adults describe their work life experiences and future expectations as subjective experiences of self-efficacy and self-doubt (Betz, 2007; Gainor, 2006). The participants share their educational and work-life experiences, display their advanced media-productions labeled as leisure-time activities and their vulnerable life challenges forcing them to find a better balance between working-life and living-life. Consequently, we find seven highly skilled digital natives searching for an equilibrium in their transition between education and future professional life experiences where new technology, such as AR, may offer new modes of possible accesses to work.
 
References:
[1] Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: Worth Publishers.
[2] Betz, N. E. (2007). Career Self-Efficacy: Exemplary Recent Research and Emerging Directions. Journal of Career Assessment, 15(4), 403–422. https://doi.org/10.1177/1069072707305759
[3] Dede, C.J., Jacobson, J., Richards, J. (2017). Introduction: Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Realities in Education. In: Liu, D., Dede, C., Huang, R., Richards, J. (eds) Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Realities in Education. Smart Computing and Intelligence. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5490-7_1
[4] Gainor, K. A. (2006). Twenty-Five Years of Self-Efficacy in Career Assessment and Practice. Journal of Career Assessment, 14(1), 161–178. https://doi.org/10.1177/1069072705282435

Keywords:

Career-supervision, Augmented Reality, self-efficacy, semi-structured interviews, video analysis.