When someone can confidently tell their career story — explain where they’ve been, what matters to them, and where they’re heading — career exploration often becomes easier.
Networking conversations become more natural.
Job interviews feel less like a performance.
Even exploring new directions can feel more focused and manageable.
But getting to that point isn’t always straightforward — especially if you’ve had a varied or non-linear career path.
That’s where narrative career counselling can be helpful. It’s an approach that supports people to reflect on their experience and find a clear, authentic way of talking about their work and direction.
Rather than starting with formal career assessments, a session might begin with a simple invitation:“Tell me about where you're up to. Where would you like to begin?”
From there, we explore your story — the roles you’ve held, the decisions you’ve made, what’s shifted over time, and what you’re curious about next. The aim isn’t to force everything into a perfect arc — it’s to find a version of your story that feels right to you, and that you can share with confidence.
This approach is grounded in career construction theory, which sees a career not as a series of jobs, but as an evolving story we create to make sense of our lives and work.
As Mark Savickas puts it:
“Career stories tell how the self of yesterday became the self of today and will become the self of tomorrow.”
When you start to feel more confident telling your career story… a lot of the steps of career exploration and job searching become easier.
I support people to explore and shape their career stories — and talk about them with confidence.
Are you having trouble explaining part of your career journey?
Do you find it hard to make where you’ve been sound logically connected to where you want to go?
References
McIlveen, P., & Patton, W. (2007). Narrative career counselling: Theory and exemplars of practice. Australian Psychologist, 42(3), 226–235. https://doi.org/10.1080/00050060701405592
Savickas, M. L. (2005). The theory and practice of career construction. In S. D. Brown & R. W. Lent (Eds.), Career development and counseling: Putting theory and research to work (pp. 42–70). Wiley.
