Praising the client in career guidance

1 Introduction

Career guidance in the Nordic countries refers to a service that is a mandatory part of comprehensive, secondary, and higher education. In Finland in particular, career guidance is embedded in the curricula of these institutions and provided as group lessons and interventions as well as a service for individuals. Career guidance in Finland is also provided by labour market services, trade unions, and private businesses, but our focus in the present study is on career guidance provided by educational institutions.

Among various guidance and counselling occupations, career guidance is the most professionalized one in the Finnish context, with master’s degree requirements, strong national steering from the Ministry of Education under the policies of lifelong guidance and national recommendations for ethical practice and competence requirements (Toni and Vuorinen 2020). The Finnish lifelong guidance system is internationally viewed as exceptional for its solid legislation, strategic leadership, cooperation, professionalization, and delivery. Diverse administrative sectors cooperate in developing guidance and counselling services, and educational institutions are committed to a lifelong guidance policy and target setting (Kettunen et al. 2023; Kettunen 2024).

Career guidance is directed at helping clients to deal with issues of study, career, educational, and work-related transitions, and life planning. This is done in a holistic and client-centered manner, addressing also psychosocial issues. In the Nordic context, “guidance” has been recently the chosen term, rather than “counselling”, to highlight the connections to pedagogical institutions and pedagogical theoretical frameworks, and to refer to the variety of ways of conducting guidance: not only in one-to-one consultations, but also in groups, classrooms, and communities, and connected to various activities such as work or hobbies (Hooley et al. 2018; Haug et al. 2020).

In the theoretical development of career guidance, the so-called matching approach, at the heart of the modern career theory (cf. Holland 1997) was criticized and replaced by postmodern approaches to career guidance and navigation of life’s transitions. The postmodern approach, epitomized by the life design approach (Savickas et al. 2009) and constructivist counselling (Patton and McMahon 2017), emphasizes the socially constructed nature of topics of career guidance. This approach, widely supported and taught in Finland, is skeptical towards professional “diagnostics” of the individual. Therefore, assessments of the client in conversation tend not to be explicitly addressed in the prescriptive career guidance literature nor are they, to our knowledge, systematically addressed in Finnish career counselling training – as opposed to practices like questioning, advice giving or formulations.

The clients in career guidance are viewed as the authors of their own career stories. The meanings of these stories are seen as being constantly open for negotiation from different vantage points. Professionals are considered supporters of this work, “fellow travelers”, aiding their clients, but not telling clients what they should do, and especially not “who they are”. This way of portraying the professional-client relationship is recognized in many central career counselling approaches (Patton and McMahon 2017; Peavy 2000; Rogers 1961; Savickas et al. 2009). Another relevant point in this paradigmatic shift is the heightened attention given on career skills and aptitudes, i.e., career adaptability, both in theory and in practice (Savickas 2013), as opposed to matching clients to vocations based on the professional’s diagnostic opinion.

In practice, career guidance typically deals with clients’ perceptions of themselves, their interests and strengths, and professionals participate in shaping these meanings. Thus, despite the skepticism in counselling theory towards diagnostic description of the client, there is a constant practical need in career guidance encounters for talking about the personality, character, and interests of the clients. In other words, they need to define “who the client is”, for the practical purposes (Erickson and Shultz 1982). Career decisions are intertwined with institutional processes of selecting people to positions in society. Furthermore, clients themselves may define their career issues in terms of learning about the self, or “finding oneself”. This is perhaps the reason for the blooming interest in the career guidance field for tools that generate representations on clients’ motivations, strengths, characteristics, or interests – tools such as the Reiss Motivation Profile (Reiss 2004). The use of such psychological tools is generally not included in the training of career guidance professionals, but there is a market for such tools offered by the private sector.

It is therefore not surprising to find positive assessments about clients in career guidance interaction. This study provides a first understanding of how positive assessments are used in career guidance interactions.

In the following section, we locate our study in the tradition of conversation analytic research on guidance and counselling settings, and review conversation analytic literature on praise and its institutional uses. In Section 3, we present our data and the analytic procedure, after which we proceed to our analytic findings in Section 4. Our conclusions are discussed in the final section.

2 Literature review

Various forms of guidance, counselling and coaching have been in the radar of conversation analytic research (Stivers and Sidnell 2012) since the 1990s, for instance HIV and AIDS counselling (Peräkylä 1995) genetic counselling (Pilnick 2002; Lehtinen 2005), health promotion group counselling (Logren et al. 2019), coaching (Fleischhacker and Graf 2024) and supervision of learning processes (Vehviläinen 2009a, 2009b, 2012). Career guidance, however, has received only scarce attention (cf. Vehviläinen 2001, 2003). Vehviläinen (1999) studied career guidance in labour market interventions in the 1990s. Her studies showed that the core project in such counselling encounters was to elicit personal experiential reports on interest or preferences from the client, and to connect them to advice for potential career steps and action plan items. This core project is apparent also in our current career guidance data.

Assessments are everywhere in our social activities: we constantly assess objects, people, places, and situations together with others as part of our social life and its practices. Thereby we maintain social solidarity and attachments to each other or separate ourselves from others. Assessments are turns of talk that evaluate persons, things or events, and as first position turns, they make relevant an agreement or disagreement response by the recipients (Pomerantz 1978, 1984). Agreement is typically treated as the preferred (expected and un-problematic) response.

In this paper we are interested in a specific type of assessments: positive assessments (praise) of the co-participant of interaction. In the literature on positive assessments of the co-participant, the terminology varies between compliments (Pomerantz 1978), praise (Etelämäki et al. 2015; Pillet-Shore 2012) and positive feedback (Weiste 2018). Etelämäki et al. (2015) discuss the potential ritualistic nature of praises in everyday situations, but they also point out that there are ways of showing that the compliments are sincere and occasioned. When people gather, praises form a way to construct sociability and mutual affiliation, for instance by complimenting food, location, and each other’s appearances. In institutional settings, such praises may sometimes happen, too. They may be treated as off-agenda sociability, outside the actual institutional task (Vehviläinen 1999: 131). Here, however, we are interested in the way in which praises contribute to the very institutional tasks of career guidance.

In studies of everyday conversations in US English, positive assessments of the co-participant have been shown to be influenced by the preference organization in two ways, which are relevant for this study. Contrary to the general rule mentioned above, there is a preference for disagreement following other party’s self-critical talk i.e., self-deprecations (Pomerantz 1984). There is also a dispreference for self-praise (Pomerantz 1978; Pillet-Shore 2015). Thus, praises involve contradictory constraints: preference for agreement in assessment adjacency pairs and dispreference of self-praise. (Keisanen and Kärkkäinen 2014; Pillet-Shore 2015; Pomerantz 1978). There are many ways to deal with this interactional bind, such as appreciation, scaled-down agreements or qualifications, response compliments, or focussing on some other aspect of the prior turn (Etelämäki et al. 2015; Pomerantz 1978).

In institutional settings, praise is used to perform specific institutional tasks. In learning settings, praises are a tool to reinforce the activity or performance that is sought for, for instance when praising a pupil for the correct answer to an exam question, thereby closing the sequence and moving along the agenda (McHoul 1978). Weiste (2018) discusses such reinforcing use of praise (or “positive feedback”) when occupational therapists receive clients’ descriptions of their progress. She points out that such use of praise performs relational work, when professionals show appreciation and convey positive affect to the client. Praises also occur in therapeutic settings to empower clients by validating their reports of their progress in arriving at personal goals (Jager et al. 2015; Shaw and Kitzinger 2012). All these cases portray praise as practitioners’ way of providing professional validation or confirmation on pupils’ or clients’ actions. As this type of praise is typically located in the third position, after an initiation by the professional and a response by the client, it is also a powerful tool to gear the interaction along the institutional agenda. As already stated, it has the dimension of relational work by building rapport.

This use of praise also runs the risk of overstepping the boundary set by clients’ right to epistemic ownership of their experience. For instance, Weiste (2018) points out that clients in occupational therapy resist the positive feedback when it fails to take into account the client’s own problem-indicative perspectives. Thus, we expect that praise requires a balancing effort on counsellors’ part between exercising professional authority and orienting to the epistemic authority of clients.

There is a wealth of research on “the talking cure”; i.e., counselling, guidance, psychotherapy, and coaching, showing that in these settings, forms of professional influence are constrained by the overall goal of orienting to clients’ epistemic authority. Professional intervention must be carried out in such a way that it is maintained that clients have authoritative knowledge of their own lives and selves (Peräkylä et al. 2008; Stukenbrock et al. 2021; Weiste and Peräkylä 2013; Weiste et al. 2016). Especially, guidance and counselling practices have been shown to contain balancing between professional influence and clients’ own epistemic authority (Pilnick 2002; Vehviläinen 2003).

The topic of praise is new to the study of career guidance interaction. To our knowledge there is no published conversation analytic research on the matter (although see master’s thesis by Ravantti 2023). Thus, we set out to find out how praises contribute to the institutional activity of guidance, and how the abovementioned issue of epistemics is practically dealt with.

3 Data and method

Our data was collected in the context of special training for career guidance at the University of Eastern Finland. Special training degrees in Finland are research-based and work life-oriented training programs (30 ECTS) that are targeted in areas that undergo rapid change and expansion, and where there is urgent need for professionals with updated knowledge. Thus, the practitioners in the data, although in training, are typically experienced practitioners in some type of career guidance or other guidance, seeking further education and skills. The data is collected as part of a 5 ECTS module “Interaction in client encounters” and the participants perform analyses on their own conduct and view the material together as a group. We gathered 16 video recorded and one audio recorded career guidance sessions with 15 student-clients and 9 professionals, among them professional career counsellors and student advisors. Informed consent was obtained from the participants.

Our data set is a compilation of career and study guidance encounters within schools and universities.^[1] Career guidance counsellors in Finland are trained to work in comprehensive schools as well as in secondary or higher education. The main activities in career guidance are similar in all these settings: discussing the client’s or student’s strengths and interests, concerns and problems, aiding them in decision-making and providing information and advice on potential directions. Two of the encounters were in English, and the rest of them were in Finnish. The Finnish cases were analyzed from the original data. As our analysis does not attend to grammatical details of the Finnish language, in the analysis we refer only to what is said in the translation. The original data extracts are presented in Appendix 1.

There is some variation in the data in terms of the phase of the process: most of the data come from the first (sometimes the only) encounter and the student/client has sought help from the service with a career issue. There are others where the process is more extensive, and the participants share a longer history (esp. secondary education settings), and in these cases the encounter may have been initiated by the professional, as a routine check-up.

Conversation analysis is used as our analytical approach. We view conversation analysis as both a theory of interaction and an approach and methodology for studying interaction as an orderly, turn-by-turn accomplishment of the participants. When applied in an institutional setting, it shows how the institutional encounters are co-constructed by the participants’ turn-by-turn actions and how the institutional relevancies shape the interactional practices of the participants (Stivers and Sidnell 2012).

We first identify all praise-response sequences (N = 25) where the counsellor is praising the client, and the client responds. Roughly half of the sessions include such praise sequences. We then perform a detailed case-by-case analysis on this collection, using the following analytic questions:

1. In which institutional activities do the praises of clients occur?

2. How do clients respond to the praises?

3. How is epistemic authority oriented to in these sequences?

It should be noted that as our focus is on the institutional activities that can be identified from the verbal actions, we pay attention to the embodied action only when it is relevant to our analytical argument. We acknowledge that this leaves out various aspects of what is happening in the interaction.

4 Data analysis

Before focusing our analysis on the institutional uses of the praises, we examine what is being assessed in praises and find that the topical content of the praise falls into two categories. First, clients are praised for their “career adaptabilities”: their ability to consider, plan and execute activities that are relevant to career planning, or their ability to verbalize career issues and their own skills. For instance: “you have found about these (=career options) very well.” Second, praises address what might be considered “strengths”: characteristics or interests, such as “just like you said (the fact) that you see different angles on things and that things are not so straightforward or black and white, that is a very important work life skill.”

A great deal of the interaction in career guidance is dedicated to identifying these strengths or interests and establishing their connections to potential future activities and decisions (Vehviläinen 1999). This classification already reveals that praise seems tightly connected to the institutional tasks of career guidance. Indeed, the contexts for the praises in our analysis are all connected to key career guidance activities: (1) mapping the client’s situation (N = 9); (2) expressing a professional opinion the client’s strengths (N = 13); and (3) assisting in decision-making (N = 3). We now examine each of these contexts.

5 Conclusions

As our analysis demonstrates, praise is part and parcel of career guidance interaction. It is embedded in the key tasks of the counsellor: to expose and foster the client’s “career adaptabilities”, i.e., skills and motivations to do “career work”, and to articulate and reinforce strengths that could point to potential career directions or decisions.

Firstly, praise is used when mapping the client’s situation and trying to identify what the “guidable” concern is. Praise identifies issues that the client has done well and are, therefore, not pursued at that moment. Praise is located in the third position, right before moving on to exploring another issue. Such praise also conveys that the client already has some career skills. Secondly, praise is used in moments where the counsellor has mapped the situation and is tackling the client’s issue. Praise is used to convey a professional evaluation of the client’s strengths, and it counters the client’s self-critical opinions. Such praise formulates the client’s situation in professional terms and paves the way for potential advice that can be built on this understanding. It may also validate the client’s positive self-evaluation. Thirdly, praise is used to topicalize the client’s or the student’s strengths or successes as cues for decision-making. Rather than reacting to any self-reports by the client, these praises are brought up in the first position, and they refer to materials that are available to the counsellor independent of the student’s reports.

These uses of praise have not been identified in earlier research, and they show that praise is used in career guidance as a way to teach the client about their career planning and about their own strengths. As Weiste (2018) points out, when discussing positive feedback in occupational therapy, praise is a way of building rapport and supporting the positive face of the other. This relational aspect has not been the central focus in this article, but we have discussed it elsewhere based on these data (Voutilainen and Vehviläinen 2025).

Our findings confirm that praises often occur in environments where the clients have presented problems or self-deprecations (see also Voutilainen and Vehviläinen 2025). Thus, the praise is often responsive to self-critical talk by the clients. However, there are also cases where this does not apply (see Extract 5). Praises are located in both responsive and forward-reaching positions, as observed by Ravantti (2023).

The counsellors in our data at times invoke the professional voice to comment on their clients’ skills and assets and present factual statements about life of work and study and their requirements. In such cases, accounts and details are offered for the client, as well as references to their own earlier descriptions. However, even in the praises that are offered more in passing (Extracts 1 and 2) the counsellors often show some orientation to being accountable for what they ground the praise on. Peräkylä (1998) has discussed the way doctors, in giving the diagnostic observations to their patients, orient to both their professional authority and their accountability to make their observations available to the client. Something similar happens also with the praises in our data. The praises are, of course, not “diagnoses” as such, but they have a diagnostic nature. They are something the clients may take away with them and use as cues to their career reflections and decision-making. In our data, we can also see that occasionally the counsellors do not explain their observations, for instance “Mother tongues have gone really well for you” or “Your CV is okay”. This variation is due to the local activity-related environment of the turn, but this may also be something that varies between counsellors and their skills. At least, following the theoretical underpinning of career guidance mentioned earlier, the counsellor would be accountable for being as transparent as possible.

Based on our findings, the epistemics of the praise sequences in career guidance point in two directions. First, in career services directed at adult clients, the counsellors’ praises are shown to be based on the clients’ self-reports, and the counsellors orient to their accountability for explicating the grounds for their praises. This is a key orientation in types of guidance in general, to show that the professional’s interventions and professional opinions are grounded in the shared interaction and the clients’ own perspectives. This is obviously relevant in situations where the client and the counsellor have only just met, and the counsellor has scarce knowledge about the client. In our third category, however, the situation is somewhat different. Grades are available in guidance as unproblematic resources for indicating strengths or assets. Also a CV may be treated as a resource that “speaks for itself” and is open to the counsellor’s assessment without the client’s own reports.

Above, we have suggested that some praises are dealt with in passing, while some are offered as “heavier” professional interventions. The clients also orient to this difference in their responses. In the first and the third categories, the praises are received in passing, whereas in the second category, the clients must deal with the praise. In their responses, the clients balance between aligning with the professional opinion and showing they do not overtly agree with praises of themselves.

Our study offers a critical empirical comment on postmodern career guidance theories by showing that in the actual practice of career guidance, the clients are recurrently assessed by the counsellors, and that the assessment have a practical function in managing the agenda of the encounter. In this paper we have focused on positive assessments, which are obviously more common than negative or ambivalent assessments. Future studies could pay attention to how assessments in general function in career guidance and counselling, for example in the school context where institutional aims of the encounter may lead to addressing also something problematic in the client’s or student’s performance. Assessments provide a window to the diagnostic aspects of career guidance and there is more to be explored.