Life Design approach represents a new paradigm for career counseling and development in the 21st century augmenting 20th-century Person-Environment (P-E) fit and developmental models by focusing on making meaning through work. Life Design emerged from work by an international group of scholars and practitioners in seven countries to better account the complexities of work and careers brought about by today’s economic conditions, globalization, and the digital revolution (Savickas et al., 2009; Nota & Rossier, 2015). People today experience a new social arrangement of work that moves from permanent to more temporary jobs, from linear to dynamic career trajectories, and from specific career knowledge to lifelong learning. Moreover, it emphasizes the need to support people to become expert in co-construction and Life Design processes, to anticipate and deal with career transitions, and to consider the hope for a foreseeable future, optimism, future orientation, and resilience, useful to individual’s future planning and behavior, and career adaptability, that is a modern world workers’ essential resource to manage frequent career and life transitions.
According to Life Design approach, the research project is articulated in three phases.
The first phase was aimed at the validation and development of instruments to assess the variables above described. In this respect two questionnaires were developed: ‘Vision about future’, to assess hope, optimism and negative view towards the future and ‘Design My Future’, to assess the Youth resilience and future orientation. . Explorative and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) were used to analyze factor structure, evaluated convergent and discriminant validity. Multi-group Confirmatory Factor Analysis procedures was conducted to verify the factorial structural across gender.
The second phase was finalized to investigate the relationships between career adaptability, positive variable, that is, hope, optimism, future orientation, resilience and life satisfaction. This phase was characterized by the development of different research projects, aiming to test the positive variables mediating role inside the adaptability and life satisfaction report.
1. In the first study, a cross cultural work, in collaboration with the University of Lausanne, 537 young Swiss adolescents and 727 young Italian adolescents were involved in order to assess the mediating role of hope and optimism in the relationship between career adaptability and life satisfaction relatively to both Countries. The conceptual model across countries was also verified.
2. In the second study 120 adults with disability were involved in order to investigate the mediating role of hope in the relationship between career adaptability and life satisfaction.
3. In the third study 152 (62 fathers and 90 mothers) parents of children with intellectual disabilities were involved to investigate the mediating role of resilience in the relationship between career adaptability and life satisfaction.
Structural Equation Models (SEM) were conducted for the studies to test the models indicated above and to define the structure of the relationships between the considered different variables.
The third phase of the project was focused on the development and implementation of an online method based on the Life Design's theoretical principles.
In order to evaluate the effectiveness of intervention, a study was conducted with 200 middle school students: 100 of the participants were assigned to the traditional intervention group and 100 were assigned to the on-line intervention group aiming to increase their level of career adaptability and life satisfaction. A variance analysis with repeated measures was carried out to evaluate pre- and post-test differences between the two intervention groups on levels of adaptability, life satisfaction, and wishes toward the future. Results indicated that students in the on-line intervention group showed higher levels of concern, control, curiosity and life satisfaction than those in the traditional intervention group. Also, they suggested that intervention increased students’ narratives wishes, richer in aspects useful for a career design more in tune with our times.
Overall, the results underline the importance of preventive career education activities focusing on strengthening career adaptability, which in turn can sustain the development of positive expectations towards future and life satisfaction concerning both adolescents and adults.
