Introduction
This article offers insight into how disadvantaged Hungarian Roma young people make decisions about their educational and professional careers, who guides them, and what role career guidance agents, services, and activities play. Career guidance is a lifelong process that, alongside different institutions, intersects with wider social equality issues and should be part of remediating policies. Socioeconomic background and ethnicity have been shown to strongly condition educational trajectories and the transition to the world of work (Blustein et al., 2002, p. 322). Pohl and Walther (2007, p. 537) highlight the interconnected mix of factors such as ethnicity, gender, social background, educational attainment, family support, and region, the unequal distribution of which influences the capacity to cope with the transition from school to work.
Although in recent decades significant effort has been invested into bridging the educational and employment gap between the Roma and non-Roma population (Rutigliano, 2020), disparities between ethnicities remain broad (Center for Policy Studies, 2019). Roma people, Europe’s largest ethnic minority (approx. 10–12 million), are overrepresented in populations exposed to social exclusion, poverty, marginalization, and discrimination (Fundamental Rights Agency, 2018). ‘Roma’ is an umbrella term that includes heterogeneous groups with diverse cultural, linguistic, and territorial identities, and varying rates of social inclusion.
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In Hungary, the Roma population (approximately 700,000 people) is unevenly distributed and concentrated in the most impoverished regions, with limited access to quality education and diverse labour market opportunities (Center for Policy Studies, 2018). Within a highly unjust educational system, social and ethnic selection through discriminative practices is present at all levels, which further magnifies the impact of early performance differences (Radó, 2020). Access to secondary school is very competitive and selective. Discouraging messages, skill gaps, late choices, limited places, and an insufficient understanding of the secondary school system often channel vulnerable students (particularly Roma ones) into the least competitive vocational education and training (VET) courses, which are perceived by their families as being the quickest way to enter the labour market. Racial discrimination against the Roma is widespread in Hungarian society, including in the school system (Center for Policy Studies, 2018). Blaming the Roma for “lacking will and effort to integrate themselves into society” is generalised in public discourse. These and other stigmatising, negative stereotypes affect Roma children’s self-perceptions, and limit their aspirations (Neményi, 2014).
In relation to secondary schools, three-quarters of non-Roma students take a graduation exam, while less than one-third of Roma students do (Kertesi & Kézdi, 2016). Approximately 50 percent of Roma students drop out of secondary education, as opposed to 10 percent of their non-Roma peers. Presently, two-thirds of Roma young people are early school leavers (KSH, 2019). Future labour market opportunities shaped by the secondary school track and subsequent training are significantly more restricted for Roma students. Accordingly, Roma young people’s chances for a successful school-to-work transition (STWT) are significantly worse than their non-Roma peers.
Recent reforms of the Hungarian VET system have focused more on adaptation to labour market needs than on inclusion, integration, or equity objectives (Györgyi, 2019). Scholarships and mentoring services for the most vulnerable pupils have been available, but the quality of implementation is uneven. Access to them is mostly limited by meritocratic requirements, and budgetary outlays have gradually decreased. In some schemes, selection is based on socioeconomic need.
The European Union’s strategic goal of reducing early school leaving (ESL) has been among the main educational and training priorities, as this should foster labour market integration and prevent social exclusion.1 The EU (2013) has identified guidance and counselling, among other areas, as crucial for reducing ESL and “ensur[ing] young people are aware of the different study options and employment prospects available to them […and] provid[ing] young people with both emotional and practical support”.2 From this perspective, career guidance and counselling is understood as a process that begins at an early stage of schooling and intensifies before turning points (Borbély-Pecze, 2017).
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Unlike in other OECD countries, in Hungary “career education and guidance is symbolic” (Schmitsek, 2020, p. 8); it has never become a well-developed area in schools or in education or employment support services; and the National Lifelong Guidance Council was abolished in 2012 (Borbély-Pecze et al., 2021, p. 18). PISA (2015) data show that Hungary is among the OECD countries with the smallest proportion of 15-year-old students participating in career guidance activities (Musset & Kurekova, 2018, p. 51). This fact is even more alarming given that socioeconomically disadvantaged students with a greater need for career guidance tend to have less access to the latter (Mann et al., 2020).
Most studies on career guidance are based on surveys and policy reviews, favouring a practitioners’ perspective, but rarely drawing on empirical fieldwork data. Also, few enquires reflect on career guidance from the perspective of minority youth in vulnerable socioeconomic conditions, and, to my knowledge, none from that of Roma youth. This paper contributes to filling this gap by presenting the views of Hungarian Roma young people about the choices, support, and guidance that helped their school trajectory and STWT. Concretely, this paper is guided by three research questions:
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How do Hungarian Roma young people in disadvantaged socioeconomic conditions make decisions about their careers throughout their schooling and school-to-work transition?
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Who/what helps them make well-informed, relevant decisions at the most important turning points of their education, training, and entry into the labour market?
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Are guidance and counselling agents, services, and activities available to them at relevant turning points of their life-course?
Young people’s decision making has been analysed based on the scope and the strategic vs. improvised character of young people’s decisions, aspirations, expectations, and career development skills elaborated by the time they take pivotal decisions on their early life-course. I search for answers to these empirically grounded questions through a conceptual framework that focuses on external resources (Blustein et al., 2002) and “risk biographies” (Walther et al., 2005). First, I detail the antecedents and the theoretical-conceptual framework. Second, I describe the methodological approach. Third, seven case studies are described. Finally, the article culminates in a discussion and concluding remarks.
Transition through choices and guidance
To frame my inquiry into how Roma young people in disadvantaged socioeconomic conditions make their choices regarding the STWT, I relied on three lines of research: school and career choice, the STWT in a flexible labour market, and guidance as cross-contextual practice.
School and career choice: socioeconomic position and ethnicity matter
School choice as part of broader career development is a complex process embedded in contexts wherein sociocultural and institutional logics interact. Interrelated external and internal factors, or “policies, strategies, contexts, resources and values” (Raveaud & van Zanten, 2007, p. 107) are crucial. The dominant view of social researchers since the 1990s has been that parental school choice is related to differences in the latter’s socioeconomic position and contributes to the reproduction of inequalities. Ball and colleagues (1996) classify parents into three ideal types: privileged/skilled, semi-skilled, and disconnected school choosers. Raveaud and van Zanten (2007) refer to the need to understand general and local school policies and norms in a particular context, as well as to comprehend the social composition related to that context in the form of perceived similarities and differences. Nevertheless, the “resources necessary for making informed choices about schools” are not, or only partly available to many parents (André-Bechely, 2005, p. 271). Schools’ ethnic mix, the geographically unequal distribution of schools, and the different capacity of families to move (Zolnay, 2018) are further factors in choice inequality. Furthermore, schools play a significant role in producing the knowledge that parents use when making school-choice decisions (André-Bechely, 2005).
Willis’s seminal study (1977) focused on young working-class males’ adaption to the capitalist organisation of work. The latter are found to regenerate working-class cultural patterns with respect to working relations through specific, systematically defined “choices” and “decisions”. Similarly, Ogbu (1978) referred to ethnic minorities’ historical adaptation to structural forces (slavery, mistreatment, institutional discrimination, etc.) through “collective responses” based on belief systems regarding societal institutions and the possibility of them “making it” in the face of economic discrimination. Blustein and colleagues (2002) also connect structural factors to individual beliefs and choices, arguing that the STWT is deeply influenced by socioeconomic position. Individuals of lower socioeconomic status tend to express less interest in work as a source of personal satisfaction, experience less success in attaining their aspirations, have less access to quality schooling, guidance, and counselling, receive less strategic parental support, and experience more relational disruption, and engage in a lower level of career exploration and future-oriented planning compared to higher socioeconomic status peers. With all these variables, the authors find that lower socioeconomic status corresponds to weaker outcome indicators. Yates and colleagues (2011) underline that youth with uncertain ambitions experience short-term consequences; they have a higher likelihood of being NEET (not in education, employment or training) than youth with strong ambitions. Sabates and colleagues (2011) highlight that youth who have both low educational aspirations and career expectations (low-aligned ambitions) and uncertain ambitions (i.e., aimlessness, rather than a focus on role exploration) tend to have lower educational and labour market achievement.
Centring on racial/ethnic minorities, Fouad and Byars-Winston’s (2005) meta-analysis affirms that it is minorities’ perception of their poorer career opportunities and stronger barriers (see also Cardoso & Moreira, 2009) that influences their career attainment more than their mainstream peers. Perry and colleagues (2016) warn that minorities and socially disadvantaged youth are less likely to be able to access the social and cultural capital necessary for systematically planning and implementing higher status academic and labour market careers. Misalignment between educational and career ambitions contributes to unattained goals and creates barriers to upward social mobility. O’Reilly and colleagues (2019) go further by demonstrating that the gendered, ethnic, and socioeconomic segmentation associated with the choice of less valued vocational pathways perpetuates transitions into less valued and less well-rewarded occupations. The broad evidence of such accumulated misalignment sheds light on the necessity for targeted career education.
Guidance access and quality
Guidance in this article is defined as “a family of practices” and services across institutions (Vehviläinen & Souto, 2021, p. 5) that is intended to assist individuals when making educational, training, and occupational choices related to managing their careers (Musset & Kurekova, 2018). Ideally, it is a “continuous process that enables citizens at any age and at any point in their lives to identify their capacities, competences and interests, to make educational, training and occupational decisions” (Council of the EU, 2008, p. 2). It is present in formal and informal settings, but not always delivered in a coherent and consistent way by trained experts. Guidance that draws on cultural norms and belief systems (“folk theories”), such as in-family or peer-to-peer guidance, may run the risk of not being adapted to new needs in a changing global world (Van Esbroeck, 2008), or of disregarding within-group differences (Bereményi & Girós-Calpe, 2021; Reid, 2011). Schools should be central agents in the development of career management skills, but in Hungary guidance and counselling have never been part of teacher training courses (Borbély-Pecze, 2017). The Hungarian national curriculum does contain thematic units and subjects related to employment, life-course planning, and further education, yet these units and subjects are not part of a general, personalised service that is available throughout students’ school careers, particularly at turning points (school choice, career decisions, etc.).
Recent guidance theories are reflective of the above-highlighted complexities of STWT and underline the procedural character of guidance as well the necessity of seeing it as overarching systems (Hooley & Sultana, 2016). Furthermore, they put at the forefront individuals’ capacity to interpret and redesign their own careers (Savickas, 2012). In this article, I use “guidance” to refer to a wide variety of services and activities, such as career education programmes, career information provision, individual career counselling, assessment, counselling interviews, direct contact with the world of work (job shadowing, tasters, internships), and other approaches.
Researchers consistently highlight that guidance is fundamental for helping motivate disadvantaged youth to stay in school and obtain adequate qualifications (Schmitsek, 2020). Effective guidance is shown to reduce the risk of dropout and improve work-related factors (work conditions, salary, promotion, work promotion, etc.) (Mann et al., 2020). Moreover, it aids progression through educational stages, enhances motivation and self-management skills, and correlates with higher job satisfaction and better employment prospects and earnings (Musset & Kurekova, 2018). More specifically, guidance received in school positively affects educational, economic, and social outcomes (Hughes et al., 2016). Even a brief but high quality intervention can improve aspirational alignment and career decision self-efficacy (Berger et al., 2019). The quality of guidance is as important as its availability (Mann et al., 2020). A coherent guiding plan, coordination among guiding actors, and the good preparation of guidance professionals are all crucial factors for maximizing its benefits. However, disadvantaged students tend to have less access to career guidance (Mann et al., 2020). Particularly in vocational tracks, within which disadvantaged students tend to be overrepresented, attention to guidance is often weaker than for those on the academic track (Musset & Kurekova, 2018).
Finally, although career guidance can play an important role in reducing social inequalities, it is necessary to contrast individual outcomes with broader structural factors—particularly the way that neoliberal ideology shapes career guidance (Hooley et al., 2018).
School-to-work transition in a changing labour market
School-to-work transition (STWT) is a process that begins at an early age and involves an accumulation of experiences with structural-institutional factors and key agents. Economic recessions and global capitalism have exacerbated early career insecurity, influencing educational and career goals (O’Reilly et al., 2019). STWT tends to be a contingent process, interacting with individual decisions, opportunity structures, and social pathways (Heinz, 2009), including cultural patterns (Walther, 2006). In this sense, the distance between education and employment is growing (Pohl & Walther, 2007), creating situations in which young people are in training or education and unemployment at the same time, experience downward work-to-work transitions, or are inactive (Leschke, 2009).
In this unpredictable transition context, the concept of the “biographization of youth transitions” refers to the experience that young people must “invent adulthoods” while lacking reliable collective patterns of doing so (Thomson et al., 2004). Regarding the conditions associated with making choices, those with fewer resources who are less prepared for decision-making, or who are partly or totally disengaged from the regular transition system, become stuck in what Walther and colleagues (2005, p. 224) call “risk biographies”—which are trajectories that “drift with the tide”, filled with uninformed, unprepared decisions, in contrast to “choice biographies”. On top of this, youth with “risk biographies” are often confronted with their own individual responsibility to find an adequate job.
Below, the data analysis highlights two central aspects of the STWT of the informants: (1) the availability and quality of external guidance resources; and, (2) experience of the “biographization” of their STWT.
Methods
Participants
Data collection was conducted in a city of approximately 140,000 inhabitants in the South Transdanubian region of Hungary. Interviews were conducted with 35 Roma young people. I chose convenience sampling with the following selection criteria for the Roma interviewees: aged between 16 and 35; finished secondary education or an active labour market policy (ALMP) training course; and born, lived, studied or worked in the mentioned city. Of the 34 semi-structured life-course interviews with Roma youth, 18 were women and 16 men. Table 1 provides a summary of the more relevant information about the informants.
Table 1
Selected informants’ data
Name (sex, age) | Place of birth | Parents’ highest empl. status | Highest level schooling | Scholarship | Guidance | Current job |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Krisztián (m, 28) | Town | Small business | Baccalaureate & Adv. VET | VET: scholarship + mentor | VET guidance, mentorship | Roma NGO worker |
Szilvi (f, 24) | City | Skilled worker | Tech. school | VET: 1 yr. sch. + mentor | VET mentor: but no guidance | Roma NGO worker |
Dani (m, 28) | Village | Skilled worker | Baccalaureate & Adv. VET | Elementary & baccalaureate | Continuous, from different sources | Stockbreeder |
Ildi (f, 29) | City | Skilled worker | VET & ALMP | VET: one year only; ALMP | VET: guidance, support | Factory: cleaning |
Juli (f, 23) | City | Skilled worker | Tech. school | VET: Internship compensation | Charity org | Occasional cleaning |
Lali (m, 24) | Village | Skilled worker | Tech. school | VET: labour shortage sch | Never | Factory. Unskilled job |
Andrea (f, 30) | City | Unskilled worker | Baccalaureate & Adv. VET | Elementary | Never | NGO, project leader, mentor |
Procedure
Informants were identified through the snowball technique, through local NGOs, and pre-existing professional and personal networks. Thanks to these techniques the rejection rate was low.
Measure
After informants gave us their informed consent to record the interview, they were asked to describe their childhood, youth and school trajectory with their own words putting emphasis on those events, people and context that they consider relevant. In the next stage, a semi-structured life-course interview was developed, where I flexibly adjusted my questions to the thematic sections of the interview guide, but also providing room for emerging issues and reflections. The main sections included: (a) Family’s socioeconomic conditions, school and work; (b) Childhood and youth, school trajectory, institutional and social relations, support received; (c) School choice, post-compulsory education, work and social participation; (d) Professional trajectory. Length varied between 73 and 115 min.
Data analysis
For the purpose of this paper, I have selected seven cases that involve respondents with a diversity of levels of training, ranging from vocational training to advanced vocational educations: in many aspects of the analysis they are representative of other cases in the database. Using Atlas.ti 8 qualitative data analysis software I conducted multiple rounds of analysis, adding new relevant analytical categories to the previously defined code list. The original categories contained variables inferred from the literature review and empirical observations. I prepared a short summary of each informant’s life-course. The summary served for following the processual perspective of the trajectories and categorising them in broad thematic domains. In this article, we explore the categories identified in the domain of “guidance”. These categories are: “formal/informal guidance mix”; “second-chance formal guidance”; “informal guidance only”. Once these thematic domains were established, corresponding codes were selected in order to understand what life events, institutional and social conditions, agents and feelings are related to those analytical categories.
Results
In all cases I highlight the random and fortunate character of the external guidance resources and their outcomes. All interviewees should have benefitted from any of the services of the main guiding agents (namely, schools, pedagogical services, public employment services, chambers of commerce and NGOs). The common denominator is their belonging to a stigmatized ethnic minority group, their low socioeconomic position, and their experience of some form of discrimination. Our case studies describe the trajectory of those fortunate Roma students who, unlike many others, had successfully finished at least a VET course.
Interviewees’ parents’ highest employment status (using Daniel Oesch’s five-class schema) was clustered as follows: 17 unskilled workers, 14 skilled workers, 1 small business owner, 1 lower-grade service class worker and 1 higher-grade service class worker. Most interviewees described their socioeconomic status during their childhood as poor or very poor. Based on their guidance experiences, I clustered the trajectories into three distinctive groups: (1) “formal/informal guidance mix”, (2) “second-chance formal guidance”, and (3) “informal guidance”. Respondents were all active workers at the moment of interview, following various processes of STWT. The trajectories illustrate three patterns of risk biographies, each with their paradoxes of misalignment and reliance on a limited mix of external resources.
Setting the scene
Fieldwork was conducted in 2019–2020 in a context of a general national labour shortage. In Southern Transdanubia, the employment rate (57.7%) remained less favourable than the country average. Young employable people tend to leave the region for more affluent territories and countries. The conditions of the Roma population in the education system and on the labour market are worse than those of the majority.
Formal/informal guidance mix
Krisztián (28) was born into a Roma community in a medium-sized town to entrepreneur parents who are the only skilled workers in the family. In attending a non-segregated school as the only Roma pupil, he suffered from acts of anti-Gypsyism that traumatized him. Despite his lack of motivation and academic guidance, his parents pushed him to take up technical training in the city—the only individual to do so among his peers within the Roma community. Thanks to the “Útravaló” scholarship he received a mentor-teacher who provided him with strong emotional, social, and academic support during weekly meetings and helped him to choose the best available workshop for an apprenticeship. Krisztián received caring treatment from his supervisor. He described this experience as, “I’m flying”, and underlined the role his mentor played in his early career:
I surely would’ve dropped out or gone in the wrong direction. I would definitely have become a criminal…
At his first workplace he suffered bullying and decided to quit. Later, he fell in love with a Roma university student, daughter of a Roma activist. Her family pushed and guided him to take the high-school graduation exam and access an advanced vocational programme. He joined a Roma Support College, receiving a scholarship, strong peer support, and academic guidance, but no career counselling. His assigned academic mentor, through her patience and acknowledgement, made his advanced studies a smooth experience:
She helped my career, she really wanted me to graduate after this course.
Guided by his fiancée’s family, he engaged in an ALMP offered by the Public Employment Services, and within this programme set up his own training business with the help of a business-mentor.
Szilvi (24) is the only one of 11 siblings who aspired to continue studying, to become a waitress. Despite her unsupportive teachers in a segregated school, she alone decided to study catering because, among her friends, working in a restaurant was considered a good career. She changed schools because of a conflict that arose due to a racist comment by a form-teacher:
…she told one girl that ‘I don’t like Gypsies either’…
She finished the second VET course with excellent results and good apprenticeship experiences, but with no guidance at all, although this would have been the responsibility of her supervisor. After three years of irregular employment, a Roma NGO convinced her to graduate with a high-school exam at an adult education class.
It would be great if I could go to university. I have made many acquaintances here to find out what and how, where to go. I already know that there are scholarships and everything.
Dani (28) was lucky with his elementary school form-teacher, who prepared him well for the entrance exam for a prestigious baccalaureate. Furthermore, an influential distant family member helped him access a pilot talent-nurturing dormitory centre, whose approach was decisive for his future as a professional stockbreeder. This centre was unknown by his school.
After a lot of conversation, they [at the centre] knew what I'd love to do. So, they guided me – like, ‘well, you should go in that direction’ [...] that one year was decisive regarding everything for the rest of my life.
Second-chance formal guidance
Ildi (29), born in a city micro-slum to skilled worker Roma parents, went to the closest primary school where she performed well without any educational or career guidance. However, her form-teacher’s anti-Gypsyist comments left a mark on her:
If you continue like this, you’ll be nothing more than a prostitute with many children.
Family problems led her to enrol in a second-chance programme, where teachers supported her completion of a VET course, and she received a scholarship. She did not receive career guidance and did not know how to carry on, so she began another VET course that was tuition-free. In her own words: “I was just going with the flow”. She took up short-term student jobs in supermarkets and factories, seasonal jobs, or public employment, and abandoned the second VET. She engaged in several short “useless” training courses offered by the Public Employment Services (PES), instead of having career guidance. Thanks to a 12-month, EU-funded ALMP training course on industrial cleaning, she obtained a permanent job with outstanding conditions.
I had no great dreams of becoming a top model, or a singer, or a hotel manager. I had no specific objectives. But I feel I am successful.
Despite her intelligence, Ildi has adjusted her aspirations to fit with the conditions of her immediate environment, in which subsistence is central.
If I got into [started working at] an office for the same money, it wouldn't be better […] They’re taken to task for everything. No, I don't need it. This is calm [a calm environment] for me.
Juli (23) dreamt of becoming a nursery-school teacher, but she was (falsely) told by her teachers that no such training was available in her city, so she gave up her ambition and chose a four-year VET course run by a second-chance school to become a shop assistant:
Maybe I did the wrong thing – that I didn't go for that. After all, I had no other choice than to go into that sales and commerce course.
She contacted a charity organisation, but she had no luck with them either. She, like many other Roma youngsters, was faced with anti-Gypsyism that made choices and access to jobs difficult:
I was told in a tobacco shop that I was not given a contract because I scare the customers away […] then I was shocked when I realized why he had said that – because I am a Gypsy. I resigned from that profession, too.
Finally, she found work in short-term, precarious factory jobs, public employment schemes, and doing cleaning. The local PES registered her without offering any career guidance.
Informal guidance only
Lali (24) performed well in school, but he went into his father’s profession—agricultural machinery mechanic—without receiving any guidance from his teachers. “I don’t know why this particular one”, he recalls about his school choice. In the vocational programme, he was granted a labour shortage scholarship but with no assigned mentor. He does not remember having had guidance classes, due to a teacher shortage. Finally, he finished the training and started working at different unskilled, low-wage jobs, where he often met with discrimination.
Yeah, I would’ve obtained a high-school graduation exam. I really regret not having stayed there, but I said, “That’s enough for me”. I said so.
Although he visited the local PES, he did not receive career counselling or guidance. Despite his earlier good school performance, his highest aspiration is to follow his brother to Germany for work.
Andrea (30) attended a segregated school where her music teacher helped her work towards getting a Roma talent-nurturing baccalaureate, despite her resistance. Andrea alone managed to get accepted into an art school specialized in music. She had learning difficulties, but she took the high-school graduation exam. Unsuccessful three times with the entrance exam to the conservatoire, she started a free-of-charge training course in office administration, and finally ended up working in a call centre:
And I said, I might leave this whole thing…
Years later, thanks to her colleagues’ encouragement, she did an advanced VET in youth work. After many years in parallel jobs, she became a project leader in a large local NGO, also working as a mentor for children and youth. She sometimes feels that she should have followed her dreams:
When I go to the theatre… I had many classmates who were in the right place and who did it. And I watch them on the stage, while I should be singing among them.
She never received professional guidance from PES, but thanks to better-situated peers and colleagues, she managed to obtain a satisfying job with a competitive salary and ongoing training opportunities.
Discussion
Drawing on these trajectories, I discuss below how disadvantaged Roma young people make career-related decisions. Then, I turn to the institutions, organisations, and agents who assist them in decision-making. Finally, I look at how guidance is delivered and what role it plays in young people’s life courses. In each sub-section, I highlight the availability and the quality of external resources of guidance, and the experience of the biographization of their STWT.
How do young people make career decisions and who guides them?
The role of parents’ and close family is crucial, particularly regarding elementary school choice. Nevertheless, only a small portion of the parents in our database were able to go beyond their own training experiences in an earlier school system, thus they mostly limited their guidance to moral, emotional, and economic support. Some semi-skilled chooser parents made informed choices about both elementary and VET schools, trusting in a “good education” as a means of social mobility in a selective school market. Parents’ personal networks may represent a key asset for “decoding the system”, but informants’ families were engaged in socially and ethnically homogeneous networks. In such contexts, school staff logically have a key role in preparing parents for help with career choice (André-Bechely, 2005). However, paradoxically enough, in many cases teachers’ guidance is conditioned by pupils’ academic performance rather than their career interests and aspirations; thus, counselling follows a tracking logic: those pupils who perform well and receive family support are encouraged to engage in academic studies, and low performers with limited family support are directed toward vocational training. Ethnic belonging works as a strong bias. Teachers often have stereotyped ideas and lower future expectations about Roma pupils. Guidance efforts are concentrated at the 7th and 8th grades, mostly through one-off events or series of presentations and school visits that often prove irrelevant, insufficient, or inaccessible to informants looking to define career goals and align their educational ambitions. In a few trajectories, such as Dani’s case, I found stories of successful career guidance in elementary schools. Empathetic and well-intended agents may have appeared in most of the interviewees’ life stories, but they seldom acted as widely informed guides, and their guidance was almost never sustained across institutions and life periods.
As a result, most Roma young people in the study followed tracks that led them to less competitive schools and courses, and eventually to low-paid, insecure jobs, frustrating their social mobility aspirations. Some of the guiding logic behind such choices included:
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School proximity, even if a school did not best match respondents’ aspirations.
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The influence of “folk theories” (cultural beliefs) about “how to make it”, transmitted through informal guidance by peers and community members.
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Reduced motivation with respect to school-related issues and downwardly adjusted career aspirations.
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An attitude of “going with the flow” due to a limited overview and understanding of how qualifications are linked with labour market opportunities; immature career development skills (CDS).
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Making “realistic choices” among courses, believed to be accessible for lower-performing pupils: chiefly, vocational instead of academic tracks.
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The choice of less competitive professional sectors (e.g., agriculture) due to the immediate demands of the local labour market.
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The preference and need for quick labour market access rather than postponing incorporation in the hope of obtaining better conditions due to urgent economic needs.
The observed trajectories also highlight that the logics are mouldable and that any support and guiding action, programmes, or agents can potentially have an impact. Krisztián’s mentor-teachers, Ildi’s second-chance teachers, Szilvi’s NGO contact, and Andrea’s colleagues are some examples of influential agents. The first labour-market experience after finishing elementary or secondary school can also become a turning point in Roma young people’s trajectories that drive them back to school or training.
The labour market structure and chances of access and advancement have profoundly changed in Hungary in the past decades, along with an increase in access to previously unavailable job opportunities abroad. With this, choices have multiplied. Few among the interviewees had developed a professional identity that could resist the attraction of better alternative jobs. The diversity and flexibility of the informants’ trajectories show a biographization trend (Pohl & Walther, 2007) of school-to-work transitions; a process by which they construct their present with the available resources, instead of relying on their parents’ or teachers’ experience. Many have returned to school, finished studies at ALMPs, and abandoned their studies: the concept of “risk biographies” properly describes the unstable process respondents have followed, in which the availability of external and relational resources, as well as related barriers, has altered the course of their careers in an unforeseeable direction.
Who/what helps their choices and decisions?
In the absence of a sustained and well-structured guiding process, I was able to identify a plethora of unforeseen supporting, caring, guiding, and motivating agents or actions that could occasionally achieve positive changes in young Roma pupils’ aspirations and career choices. Mentoring disadvantaged youth has proved to be a particularly effective intervention, even in the short term, as research has already shown (DuBois et al., 2011). I identified institutional, semi-institutional, and informal mentoring of varying quality, frequency, duration, and methodology. Nevertheless, what I could not identify was an overarching, interconnected system that links agents and structures of mentoring. Rather, informants accessed the latter randomly.
For older youths, the family’s guiding role is supplanted by informal and formal forms of counselling through school-, peer,- and labour-market-related experiences. Needs-based and competitive scholarship schemes, a talent-nurturing dormitory centre, and a Roma-majority boarding school are some examples of professional support, but these are a privilege of proportionally very few Roma pupils. What is more important, from our perspective, is understanding how pupils access such opportunities. On the one hand, talent-nurturing centres—that mostly target Roma pupils—actively reach out by visiting villages with Roma populations, and asking schools to identify pupils with talent and aspiration. On the other hand, many teachers in the region are already familiar with the mission of these organisations, and, paradoxically, they also guide those Roma pupils towards these programmes who already have different but well-informed career plans.
Potentially influential guiding agents include non-Roma people from parental or peer networks, older siblings with academic/training experience, friends/peers, subject teachers (in the narrations, the actions of the latter were voluntary, rather than part of a guidance project), scholarship mentor teachers (some were scrupulous and devoted, but others not at all).
The role of NGOs and charity organisations is particularly important, especially in bigger cities, as these organisations can count on a range of human and material resources and varied methodologies. In almost all of the case studies, Roma-focused and other NGOs were present as stakeholders. They offer mentoring, academic and career guidance, training activities, job-search assistance, and even aid labour market integration. EU-funded ALMPs have proliferated, many of questionable usefulness and quality, offering occasional income-providing and labour-market experience for informants, and have proved particularly relevant for young people with uncertain or underdeveloped ambitions. On the other hand, such experiences served as crucial ones with respect to informants’ knowledge about the labour market. Some of the latter experienced racial discrimination and recognized the precariousness of their labour market status as low-skilled workers. In fact, none of them remained in their first profession.
During the fieldwork I could not identify any Roma youths who had benefited from the Career Guidance Division of Regional Pedagogical Services, the Chamber of Commerce, or from any private guidance services others than NGOs. The Public Employment Service has gradually become a bureaucratic office that outsources all guidance services beyond registering and informing beneficiaries about the available ALMP programmes.
In international practice, career guidance processes are normally coordinated through a network of educational institutions, labour market services, and dedicated NGOs and private organisations (Borbély-Pecze, 2017). While these stakeholders all deliver some sort of guidance programmes or activities, fieldwork data do not suggest any coordination among them in Hungary. In these circumstances, Roma young people’s individual responsibility to overcome structural forces becomes crucial. In other words, their STWT depends even more on fortunate events occurring through contingent interactions between past and present individual decisions, opportunity structures, and their social pathways (Heinz, 2009). Hence, these “risk biographies” are constructed through the accumulative weight of earlier uninformed and unsupported decisions (Walther et al., 2005).
Are guidance services available at important turning points?
The analysed trajectories suggest that while school-based guidance services, particularly in elementary and secondary school, reach every student, access to other professional career-related services is contingent and includes activities of widely varying quality, content, and scope.
In the young people’s narratives, career services are not delivered by specialized experts. Guidance is rarely based on a long-term process; rather, it is concentrated in the months before the turning points (education, career, individual choices, decisions) with insufficient follow-up. The latter focuses more on capacities and economic sustainability (such as scholarships or funding) than on competences and interests; it emphasizes a short-term future instead of a longer-term perspective. Those Roma pupils who did not participate in the institutional needs-based or talent-nurturing support schemes rarely perceived that their decisions were based on a structured career path that involved a thorough review of opportunities. Rather, they remember those ad hoc decisions that seemed the most reasonable, the least bad, or the only available opportunities: i.e. “going with the flow”. Nevertheless, in their narratives even discontinuous guidance activities or one-off emotional support influenced them.
With respect to external resources and barriers, the Roma young people’s narratives suggest the following. The latter are:
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Influential: even one-off or short-term guiding activities may influence Roma pupils with a poor socioeconomic background, particularly if available at relevant turning points.
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Substitutive: lacking a coherent institutional life-long guidance system, Roma young people creatively select from among the changing scope and quality of “substituting guidance”.
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Discontinuous: formal and informal guidance is rarely delivered over a longer timescale. It mostly depends on well-intended agents, rather than on institutional policies.
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Disconnected/uncoordinated: guidance agents, services, and activities are disconnected from one another. Few alliances or comprehensive approaches exist and, even if they do, they are due to personal connections rather than formal coordination.
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Segmented: guidance does not always link career guidance with the psycho-social aspects of counselling in a tailor-made, personalised fashion.
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Non-specialised: agents are rarely trained to provide career guidance. The trajectories suggest that teachers’ guidance focuses very narrowly on young people’s competences and aspirations, not on the development of career management skills, or a broader view of opportunity structures.
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Biased: Teachers’ guidance often lacks objectivity, and it leads to early tracking.
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Non-equity-focused: many guidance activities and services are not driven by the principles of educational equity.
All the above findings are associated with the broader institutional and structural dimensions that exist within a process of growing centralisation, changes in ownership structure, reshuffling, and the marketization of schools and other educational services.
Conclusions
This article has explored Hungarian Roma young people’s choices in their educational and early work trajectories from the informants’ own perspectives. The analysis draws on in-depth life-course interviews with young people who had finished at least compulsory education. Instead of being representative of Hungarian Roma, the findings permit generalisation in at least two areas: (a) the fact that career guidance in Hungary is contingent, discontinuous, disconnected, segmented, non-specialized and biased; and Roma young people’s access to it is scarce; and that (b) Roma young people from semi-skilled or disconnected “chooser” families (Ball et al., 1996) lack continuous and coherent guidance and external resources, thus construct “risk-biographies” (Walther et al., 2005) following logics that make evident their deficit of career development skills, and are hardened by experiences of racist discrimination and segregation. More importantly, however, notwithstanding the structural deficits, these “risk biographies” indicate creativity with regard to making the most of the changing source, scope, and quality of “substituting guidance”.
The issue under scrutiny has received much policy attention, as research suggests that guidance and counselling for the most vulnerable youth is an effective means of both reducing early leaving from education and training, and for counterbalancing structural inequalities that are responsible for the ethnic gap in education and work. Nevertheless, in Hungary career education and guidance is symbolic and contingent. In the broader context of career insecurity (O’Reilly et al., 2019), whereby young people need to “reinvent adulthoods” (Henderson et al., 2007), lacking effective guidance relegates them to an even more vulnerable position in an exploitive labour market. Despite this, fieldwork reveals what macro research and policy recommendations often omit: namely, the agency of Roma young people with which they creatively substitute lacking services with alternative support mechanisms that occasionally produce successful individual outcomes.
In Hungary, due to the present deteriorated condition of guidance and counselling services, it would be unjust to blame the guiding agents who work with Roma young people for an overall failure to contribute effectively to reducing early leaving from education and training, and for an inability to narrow the STWT gaps that exist in relation to young people’s ethnic and socioeconomic background. As the article has shown, many one-off, informal, short-term guidance activities can still trigger positive change in young people’s trajectories, even if they do not lead to a more just and equal society. Nevertheless, the contribution of these individual acts will gain efficiency, depth, and relevance once a cross-sectorial lifelong guidance system is developed that is informed by critical social research, and sensibly balances market demands and the goals of social mobility and equity.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Bors Bobély-Pecze, Szílvia Schmitsek, Violetta Zentai, Péter Radó, Vera Messing, Zsuzsa Árendás and also for two unknown reviewers for their valuable suggestions on earlier versions of this paper.
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