Making Sense of Career After Resettlement: Tensions Between Meaning Systems and Career Support for People with Refugee Backgrounds in Australia

The Australian Context

Australia has participated in UNHCR resettlement since 1977 and remains a prominent resettlement country (UNHCR, 2022). Within this context, supporting refugees’ employment pathways is both a social imperative and an economic opportunity, requiring attention to how labour market structures, employer practices, and settlement systems shape refugees’ access to meaningful work (Koirala, 2016; Newman et al., 2022; Ortlieb & Knappert, 2023).

Careers and Career Development for Refugees in Post-Resettlement Contexts

Twentieth-century vocational guidance and early career counselling often framed careers as relatively linear sequences of paid work, shaped by expert-led matching and decision-making models (e.g., Parsons, 1909; Williamson, 1939). Contemporary perspectives, however, increasingly conceptualise careers as dynamic, non-linear, and socially situated life projects shaped by people's shifting positions within cultural, relational, and geographic contexts (McMahon & Abkhezr, 2024, 2026). Career development, in turn, is understood as unfolding across the lifespan and across life domains, incorporating environmental pressures, relationships, and responsibilities beyond paid work (Richardson, 2012), and shaped through evolving self-awareness and changing circumstances across multiple systems (Patton & McMahon, 2021). This broader framing is especially important in refugee resettlement contexts, where disrupted trajectories, settlement pressures, and urgent livelihood needs can narrow opportunities not only for longer-term reflection but also for career planning as an ongoing developmental practice (Abkhezr, 2026b). At the same time, policy and service responses often prioritise job placement and employability, creating tension with career development as a broader, culturally situated, and sustainable process of meaning-making, longer-term reflection, and career planning (Hartung, 2013) that hinges on the emergence and maintenance of a career identity (Meijers & Lengelle, 2012). This tension is particularly visible where agencies prioritise rapid entry into short-term ‘survival jobs’ over longer-term developmental pathways that could offer a sense of continuity and identity development (Lumley-Sapanski, 2019).

It is imperative to consider the limited applicability of concepts such as careers and career development across diverse cultures and economically developing countries (Arulmani et al., 2020). The modernist assumptions underpinning mainstream career theory and practice often privilege autonomy, linearity, and self-directed choice, which can sit uneasily alongside refugees’ pre-migration world of works and meaning systems (Abkhezr, 2026b; McMahon & Abkhezr, 2025). In many global south contexts, livelihoods are shaped by informality, subsistence economies, and collective obligations, rendering Western notions of careering less resonant (Abkhezr et al., 2024; Ribeiro, 2020; Sultana, 2020). Sultana’s (2020) work is useful here in specifying how, in many cultural contexts, work can be organised through spirituality and community, including understandings of work as a transcendental calling, interdependence and duty to the in-group and extended family responsibility, rather than individual self-actualisation and self-expression along with actively contributing to societal advancement. Moreover, for those whose work lives are characterised by underemployment, multiple jobs to sustain a livelihood, or prolonged unemployment, the term ‘career’ may feel distant or misfitting, particularly when livelihood is organised around informality, religion, collective obligations, and survival priorities (Arulmani & Kumar, 2023; Blustein et al., 2019; Sultana, 2020; Yazdankhoo et al., in press).

A key conceptual and practice-relevant gap remains in career development scholarship concerning how people with refugee backgrounds in post-resettlement contexts conceptualise ‘career’ and ‘career development’. Less is known about how these meanings inform their engagement in career planning, and whether they align with or diverge from the assumptions embedded in host-country career support frameworks. Evidence suggests that employment pathways are more likely to succeed when refugees can access comprehensive, well-resourced counselling and guidance, alongside support with language, credential recognition, and navigation of host-country systems (Ortlieb & Knappert, 2023). At the same time, Australian higher education and employment-support landscapes often default to generic career services, with targeted career guidance and counselling for culturally and linguistically diverse migrants and refugees remaining both uncommon and under-resourced (Newman et al., 2022). Policy recommendations, therefore, increasingly call for recognising refugees as an equity subgroup, with dedicated funding for tailored, scaffolded career guidance and transition support. Against this backdrop, the present study foregrounds refugees’ narrated understandings of ‘career’ and ‘career development’ as they are negotiated in context, to inform more culturally responsive and contextually meaningful career support. This focus also resonates with recent efforts to reposition career development within broader sustainable development agendas. Sustainable development has increasingly been framed as a fourth paradigm for twenty-first-century career science and practice, extending the field beyond individual differences, individual development, and life design towards greater attention to social systems, decent work, quality education, health, equality, sustainable communities, and human security (Hartung & Di Fabio, 2024). From this perspective, career interventions can no longer be limited to helping individuals adapt to existing labour-market conditions, but are also called to support people in designing active lives that contribute to sustainable and equitable development (Guichard, 2022). For people with refugee backgrounds, whose working lives may be shaped by displacement, disrupted education, survival needs, family responsibilities, and constrained access to decent work, these developments sharpen the need to understand how career and career development are locally conceptualised before assuming what sustainable or meaningful career support should involve.

Engaging Refugees in Career Development Research: Ethical Starting Points

These conceptual and service gaps are not only practical issues but also ethical ones, because they raise questions about how needs are defined, whose meanings are centred, and how career support is conceived in research and practice. The Integrative Ethical Lens (IEL; Abkhezr, 2026a; Abkhezr et al., 2024) offers a pragmatic way to hold together the field's social justice commitments with a care-informed orientation that foregrounds voice, context, and relationality. The IEL treats care (as informed by an ethic of care; Gilligan, 1982; Noddings, 1984; Tronto, 1993) as the “sine qua non for social justice” (Abkhezr, 2026a, p. 3), offering a bridge between social justice values and goals, addressing a key ethical gap to facilitate context-responsive career research and practice. The IEL operationalises care through Tronto’s (1993) four elements: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness, understood as a cyclical process of ethical engagement in career research and practice (Abkhezr, 2026a). Responsiveness, in particular, highlights the need to co-define needs with those we seek to support, guarding against paternalism and extractive forms of ‘helping’ that unintentionally override local knowledges that could inform development of future practices. Attentiveness, includes an obligation to honour and cultivate people's narratives, and a deliberate curiosity about how they make sense of their lives and futures (McMahon et al., 2026).

Applied to refugees’ career development, this care-informed stance obliges researchers to work with multivocal narratives as situated knowledge, rather than treating meanings as singular, stable, or easily transferable (Abkhezr, 2026a). Crucially, the IEL also reframes how knowledge should be produced in research with communities who have historically been spoken about more than spoken with, positioning participants as epistemic partners and active contributors to knowledge production (Gutiérrez, 2018). This framing clarifies why the present study centres refugees’ understandings of jobs, careers, and career development in post-resettlement contexts, and treats these understandings as situated knowledge that should inform how ‘career support for refugees’ is conceived and enacted.

Accordingly, this study aims to explore a sample of people with refugee backgrounds’ perspectives and understandings of jobs, careers, and career development in Australia, and to consult with them about existing career supports, perceived gaps, and complexities related to seeking career support. To operationalise this IEL-informed orientation, we adopted a qualitative design that prioritised an egalitarian researcher–participant relationship and a collaborative, trust-oriented approach, supporting participants to articulate culturally grounded knowledges, priorities, and future possibilities (Abkhezr et al., 2020; Sultana, 2023). In doing so, the study generates situated insights to strengthen tailored and targeted practice, and inform policy beyond short-term job placement cycles, while also modelling the practical implications of IEL-informed strategies (Abkhezr, 2026a).

Recruitment and Participants

Purposive sampling, followed by snowball sampling, was used to recruit participants. Inclusion criteria consisted of adult refugees under 40 who had migrated to Australia through humanitarian visa programs at least two years ago. Seven participants (five females, two males) were recruited through educational institutions and community organisations. As shown in Table 1, participants varied in their countries of birth and transition, age at arrival, time since resettlement, and educational trajectories in Australia, including schooling, Technical and Further Education (TAFE) institutions, and university participation. These contextual details are important for interpreting the findings within a narrative inquiry approach, as they locate participants’ accounts within particular migration, settlement, and educational histories and assist readers in considering the transferability of the findings to other contexts.

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Table 1.

Participants’ Demographics.

						Countries
Pseudonym	Gender	Age at Interview	Arrival Year	Age at Arrival	Education in Australia	Birth	Transitional
Raela	Female	26	2005	6	School, TAFE*, University	Afghanistan	Pakistan
Latifa	Female	33	2011	19	University	Afghanistan	Pakistan
Madia	Female	24	2015	14	School, University	Somalia	Eritrea
Mahi	Female	38	2018	31	TAFE	Iran	Turkey
Baher	Male	29	2008	12	School, University	Afghanistan	NA
Khine	Male	21	2023	19	University	Myanmar	Malaysia
Hira	Female	20	2018	13	School, University	Pakistan	Afghanistan

Note. Pseudonyms are used to protect participants’ anonymity.

* TAFE institutes are the largest providers of vocational education and training.

Data Collection Tools

Each participant completed one semi-structured narrative inquiry interview. An interview protocol (Appendix A) was developed to support narrative inquiry into participants’ pre- and post-resettlement life-career stories, drawing on prior qualitative research with refugees in Australia (Abkhezr et al., 2020, 2021). The protocol comprised two sections. Section 1 foregrounded participants’ migration journeys, including education and employment trajectories. Section 2 focused on participants’ conceptions of ‘career’ and ‘career development’, and invited reflections on perceived community career needs and feasible support strategies. Given the study's focus on conceptual resonance or misalignment, participants were first invited to articulate their own meanings, then to reflect on an academic definition to surface resonance, contestation, and reframing. Participants were first asked open-ended questions to elicit their own understandings of jobs, careers and career development, before being presented with a formal definition of ‘career development’ from the literature (Wolfe & Kolb, 1980; as cited in Patton & McMahon, 2021) to prompt reflection on its relevance to participants’ lived experiences and subsequent recommendations (see Appendix B).

Data Collection Procedures

Following ethical approval (Ref Number: 2022/194), recruitment materials were circulated through multiple channels. Interested individuals received a participant information sheet and consent form and returned signed forms before the interview. They were reminded that participation was voluntary and that withdrawal could occur at any time without consequence, including no impact on academic standing where relevant. Participants received either minimal course credit (where applicable) or a $AUD25 gift card as a token of appreciation for their time.

Interviews were scheduled at participants’ preferred university campuses. At the outset, the interviewer provided a brief orientation emphasising the consultative intent of the interview, positioning participants as experts in their own lives and outlining the collaborative nature of the process to support rapport and reduce power imbalances. The first section was conducted in a participant-led manner, allowing individuals to narrate migration, education, and work trajectories at their own pace. Broad prompts and follow-up probes were used to encourage narrative detail and elaboration, with attention to employment histories, aspirations, and plans. Building on this established partnership, the second section invited participants to articulate their understandings of concepts such as ‘job’, ‘career’, and ‘career development’, and to reflect on perceived gaps and needs in relation to career support within their communities. When participants were presented with the academic definition of ‘career development’ (Wolfe & Kolb, 1980; as cited in Patton & McMahon, 2021), they were explicitly informed there were no right or wrong answers, and were encouraged to share points of resonance, surprise, disagreement, or new insights, linking these reflections to earlier narratives. The interview then shifted towards consultative reflection, inviting participants to offer locally grounded suggestions and recommendations regarding career support strategies, accessibility, and service gaps for refugees and migrant communities. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and de-identified (mean duration = 75 min). Participants received a de-identified transcript draft for review and the opportunity to request revisions; none requested changes.

Data Analysis

Transcripts were analysed using a two-stage narrative analytic approach, combining within-case narrative profiling with cross-case narrative thematic synthesis organised across four analytic domains aligned with the study questions (jobs/careers; career development; career support; obstacles and recommendations) (Clandinin, 2022; Creswell, 2013; Riessman, 2008). In Stage 1, each transcript was read holistically and repeatedly to develop a narrative profile for each participant, attending to temporality (pre-/post-resettlement), sociality (relational, cultural, and institutional influences), and place (migration and resettlement settings) in line with narrative inquiry (Clandinin, 2022). These profiles were used to preserve narrative coherence and contextual grounding when moving into cross-case analysis and reporting.

In Stage 2, the second author generated initial codes across transcripts and organised them within the four domains, noting links to participants’ situated meanings and conceptions. Cross-case synthesis proceeded through reflexive thematic processes of collating coded extracts, developing provisional themes (analytic threads) within and across cases, and iteratively refining theme boundaries through review and discussion between authors (Braun & Clarke, 2006, 2019). Across multiple rounds, the authors consolidated overlaps, clarified the distinctiveness of themes, and agreed the final thematic structure and illustrative extracts. Finally, within-case comparisons of participants’ conceptions of career development before and after engagement with the academic definition were integrated into the write-up to examine how meanings were affirmed, extended, or contested, while retaining links to participants’ broader life-career narratives (Riessman, 2008).

Researchers Positionality

As lead researcher, I bring to this study my positioning as a [blinded for review] academic and practitioner who has lived outside [blinded for review] for over two decades while maintaining strong personal, familial, and cultural ties to the contexts in which I grew up. A key reflexive dimension in this project is discursive–linguistic. I began as a [blinded for review] and later became a career-development researcher working primarily in English, which has required ongoing translation and negotiation of terms such as ‘career’ and ‘career development’ across moral, cultural, historical, and institutional worlds. This movement across languages and contexts heightens my attentiveness to how Western career discourse centres on individual agency, planning, and self-directed progression, while other traditions have often organised meanings of work around livelihood, spirituality, duty, and family or communal obligation. These frames are neither singular nor static. [blinded for review] meanings of work, for example, have been continually renegotiated through modernising projects, education, migration, and transnational flows, producing layered and sometimes contradictory understandings alongside enduring traditions. These experiences sensitise me to how some young people with refugee backgrounds from the MENA region may not readily locate themselves within dominant career language. Accordingly, I approached participants as lived-experience experts, treated their accounts as situated knowledge, and remained alert to how my assumptions and wider societal narratives might shape interpretation.

In this research, I (Elyse) draw on my psychology training while recognising my developing expertise as a novice researcher. I paid attention to how my social position, background, and emotional responses could shape engagement with participants’ stories. As a young, white, Australian-born Honours student who progressed directly from secondary school to university, I acknowledge that my experiences differ markedly from those of refugee participants. Throughout the study, I reflected on assumptions and potential biases to remain open and curious, and the process strengthened my commitment to valuing diverse perspectives and advocating for inclusive practice.

Trustworthiness

Trustworthiness was established using Lincoln and Guba’s (1985) criteria of credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability, which address the truth value, applicability, consistency, and neutrality of qualitative findings (Stahl & King, 2020). Strategies were embedded across the research design, data collection, and analysis. Credibility was supported through sustained engagement with the research context, iterative discussions between authors during recruitment, data collection, and analysis, and voluntary member checking, whereby participants reviewed de-identified transcripts and could request revisions. The narrative inquiry design, together with the integrative ethical lens, further strengthened credibility by foregrounding participants’ voices, contextual meanings, and narrative coherence. Transferability was addressed through detailed description of the research context, participants, and methodological processes, enabling readers to judge applicability to other settings. As is consistent with qualitative inquiry, transferability rests with readers’ assessment of contextual similarity. Dependability was supported through documentation of methodological decisions, interview protocols, analytic steps, and theme development. Regular supervisory and research meetings functioned as audit and reflexive checkpoints, enhancing transparency and coherence across coding and interpretation. Confirmability was strengthened through ongoing reflexive practice, including critical attention to researcher assumptions, positionality, and potential biases. Analytic interpretations were discussed collaboratively to ensure they remained grounded in participants’ accounts. Collectively, these strategies supported rigour and transparency across the study.

Perspectives on Jobs and Careers

Participants did not treat ‘jobs’ and ‘careers’ as interchangeable labels, but narrated them as qualitatively different forms of life engagement, shaped by the practical demands of resettlement and the need to balance immediate livelihood with the possibility of longer-term direction. These distinctions were shaped by settlement realities or family expectations, including the need to secure income quickly while also trying to imagine longer-term trajectories in an unfamiliar context.

Perspectives on Career Development

When asked to define ‘career development’, participants first drew on lived experience and then revisited these ideas after engaging with an academic definition. This two-step process made visible both shared assumptions and points of divergence, particularly around contextual pressures, responsibilities, and the role of planning.

Perspectives on Career Support Services

Participants’ accounts suggested that ‘career support’ was most visible within education settings and that, where services existed, they were often experienced as brief, informational, or oriented towards job acquisition rather than longer-term career development. Importantly, limited awareness was not simply an information deficit; it was also tied to pre-migration contexts where the discipline category of career counselling was unfamiliar or absent.

Experiences of Accessing Services: Brief, Mixed, and Sometimes Helpful

Participants’ Recommendations

Participants’ recommendations centred on making career support more accessible, culturally responsive, and developmentally timed. Suggestions ranged from early education and system navigation to community-anchored mentoring and practical opportunities to build language and workplace confidence.

Jobs, Careers, and the Search for Stability After Disruption

Participants’ accounts reinforced a pragmatic distinction between jobs and careers. Jobs were typically narrated as time-bound, task-based, and contingent, and as a mechanism for financial survival within the immediate demands of resettlement. Careers, by contrast, were narrated as longer-term, self-aligned and future-oriented pathways, associated with growth, branching possibilities, and a sense of identity continuity or reconstruction. This distinction echoes arguments that work participation is often organised around both meaning and necessity, particularly for populations navigating constrained opportunity structures (Blustein, 2006; Duffy et al., 2016).

‘Career’ operated as a symbolic counterpoint to prolonged uncertainty. While participants described jobs as insecure and provisional, career was associated with reduced fear of loss, and the possibility of stabilising the self within a new system. Interpreted alongside the literature on protracted displacement and the psychological costs of liminality, ‘career’ can therefore be read as more than an occupational category; it becomes a narrative resource for imagining continuity, control, and belonging after disruption (Brun, 2015). This distinction between jobs as survival-oriented and careers as more stable, meaningful, and self-aligned also aligns with scholarship on decent and meaningful work. Decent work has been framed as a human rights issue, with restricted access undermining basic needs for survival, social connection, and self-determination, particularly among marginalised groups (Blustein et al., 2018). Meaningful work, by contrast, refers to a more aspirational experience of significance, with access to both decent and meaningful work shaped by macro-level, organisational, and individual conditions (Blustein et al., 2023). Read through this lens, short-term jobs may support immediate survival, but not necessarily enable sustainable, meaningful, and dignified life-career trajectories after resettlement (Hartung & Di Fabio, 2024).

At the same time, participants’ conceptions of career largely gravitated towards paid employment, with limited attention to unpaid, volunteer, or community-based roles, despite the importance of such roles in settlement and social capital building. This paid-work gravity may partly reflect the structural realities of post-resettlement life, in which immediate income needs narrow the horizon of what is imaginable, and therefore, services commonly prioritise rapid job placement over longer-term career development (Arthur et al., 2025; Shergold et al., 2019). It may also reflect the enduring influence of pre-migration worlds of work and cultural meaning systems, in which work is often understood primarily in relation to livelihood, an activity to fulfil family and community responsibility, and collective survival, rather than as a sphere for self-expression, self-actualisation, or broader social participation. Read in this way, the limited salience of unpaid or volunteer roles does not simply suggest a narrow understanding of career, but rather highlights the tension, noted earlier in this manuscript, between Western notions of careering and the alternative moral, cultural, and economic logics through which work and future pathways may have been previously understood.

Career Development as Learning, Reflection, and Contextual Negotiation

Before engaging with the academic definition, participants narrated career development through experiential and developmental language: journey, learning, skill acquisition, relationships, and reflection. These emphases align with contemporary career development perspectives that foreground lifelong learning, self-awareness, and ongoing adaptation within multiple systems and changing circumstances (Wolfe & Kolb, 1980; as cited in Patton & McMahon, 2021). They also align with narrative approaches that treat career development as meaning-making across life roles and contexts, rather than as a linear sequence of job moves (Hartung, 2013; McMahon & Abkhezr, 2024, 2026).

The definition prompt functioned as an analytic hinge by revealing not only resonance and contestation but also a reframing effect. Before the prompt, several participants described career development in relatively linear terms (e.g., progressing through study, jobs, and positions) while locating family expectations, gendered/community norms, survival needs, and caregiving responsibilities as barriers outside career development. Post definition-presentation, many expressed a kind of relieved recognition; elements they had treated as obstacles were explicitly included as part of the career development process, particularly the contextual pressures and the convergence of personal and professional life (Patton & McMahon, 2021; Richardson, 2012). This suggests the definition offered language that some participants experienced as more reflective of their lived realities, and supports its continued relevance for career development in post-resettlement contexts where livelihood, relational obligations, and work-life transitions are deeply intertwined (Abkhezr, 2026b; Sultana, 2020).

Participants’ reflections on career planning further sharpened this tension. Planning was narrated as possible and as necessary, but also as unevenly accessible, dependent on guidance and the perceived legitimacy of imagining long-term futures while settlement pressures remain acute. Planning was sometimes narrated as an emerging right, particularly for younger participants who contrasted post-resettlement possibilities with gendered restrictions in pre-migration settings. This finding resonates with scholarship highlighting that resettlement can expand formal opportunities while intensifying relational tensions as families negotiate shifting cultural norms and identities (Hawkes et al., 2021; Yazdankhoo et al., 2026).

Career Development Support as Unevenly Visible and Often Job-Facing

Participants’ accounts suggested that career development support was most visible within education settings and that awareness beyond schools, TAFE, and university was limited. Where services were encountered, they were often experienced as brief, informational, or oriented towards entry-level job acquisition rather than long-term career awareness, planning and development. This aligns with concerns that refugee-serving systems frequently default to job placement and rapid labour-market entry, while career development support remains limited and unevenly resourced (Arthur et al., 2025; Goopy et al., 2020; Newman et al., 2022).

Participants’ accounts suggest that limited awareness of career support was not merely an information gap. Rather, help-seeking was shaped by emergent meanings of pre-migration and transit contexts in which ‘career guidance’ or ‘career counselling’ did not exist as recognisable professional categories, upon which ‘career support’ remained unfamiliar, culturally distant, or even stigmatised. These narratives extend the study's conceptual framing by showing how service non-use may reflect not only access barriers, but also a mismatch between institutional assumptive categories and participants’ prior meaning systems (Abkhezr, 2026b; Yazdankhoo et al., in press). In this sense, the findings problematise mainstream assumptions that career services become relevant simply by being made available, because availability does not guarantee perceived usefulness and accessibility. From an IEL perspective, this foregrounds responsiveness as an ethical and practical requirement (Abkhezr, 2026a); that career support cannot presume shared meanings of ‘career’, ‘counselling’, or ‘guidance’, but must be developed through attention to multiple voices that co-define needs, based on relational trust, and locally grounded understandings of ‘what support is for’.

Recommendations for Moving Beyond Job Placement

Aligned with calls to move beyond short-term placement cycles towards developmentally scaffolded career support (Arthur et al., 2025), participants’ recommendations offer a four-part, provisional practice-facing framework that directly addresses the service gap identified earlier.

Implications for Theory

These findings contribute to career development theory in three ways. First, they reinforce that ‘career’ and ‘career development’ operate as culturally situated constructs rather than universal descriptors. Participants’ accounts illustrate how dominant career language can function as both an aspirational resource and a potential misfit, depending on its alignment with lived experience, settlement demands, and where individuals are situated in the ongoing process through which pre-migration meaning systems are gradually negotiated and, to varying degrees, reshaped in the host-country context (Abkhezr, 2026b; Yazdankhoo et al., in press). This supports ongoing theoretical work that critiques Western-centrism and calls for contextual sensitivity, including attention to how work meanings are organised through duty, family responsibility (Ribeiro, 2020; Sultana, 2020), and livelihood needs and how they may evolve.

Second, the findings lend support to the IEL (Abkhezr, 2026a) as a pragmatic bridge between care and justice in vocational psychology. Participants’ limited awareness of services, the unfamiliarity of ‘counselling’ as a category, and their emphasis on co-ordinated, encouraging, culturally responsive support collectively underscore the ethical necessity of ‘attentiveness’ followed by ‘responsiveness’, for co-defining needs with communities rather than imposing presumed solutions (Abkhezr, 2026a; Abkhezr et al., 2024). In this study, the IEL provides a coherent interpretive frame for understanding why ‘more services’ is insufficient if services are conceptually misaligned or delivered in inaccessible ways.

Third, participants’ framing of ‘career’ as a departure from uncertainty invites a theoretical refinement; for refugee populations, career discourse may function as a narrative technology of stability and belonging, not merely a developmental construct. This interpretation extends work on disrupted trajectories by highlighting that the desire for progression can be inseparable from the desire for predictability and social anchoring after arrival in a host-country (Brun, 2015; Ghosn et al., 2021).

Implications for Practice

For practitioners, the most immediate implication is the need to avoid assuming shared meanings of core constructs. Career counselling with refugees should begin with careful elicitation of clients’ own language for jobs, careers, development, and planning, and should treat these meanings as situated knowledge. Narrative approaches are well suited here as they foreground story, context, and relationality, enabling practitioners to work with the person-in-context rather than treating counselling activity and assessment categories as culturally neutral (McMahon & Abkhezr, 2024).

A second practice implication concerns the developmental timing and location of support. Participants’ emphasis on early career education suggests that services should be designed as scaffolded encounters rather than one-off workshops. In schools, TAFE, and community organisations, this may involve curricular, co-curricular, and informal activities that gradually introduce young refugees to the host society's meanings and expectations around work, career development, labour-market navigation, and long-term planning, rather than assuming these concepts are already familiar or shared. In universities and workplaces, dedicated supports can help counter the tendency for generic services to miss culturally and contextually specific needs (Newman et al., 2022). Such scaffolded support also reflects a sustainable career-development agenda, where support is not only directed towards individual employability, but also towards expanding access to decent work, quality education, social participation, and longer-term life-career security. In this sense, career development can contribute to sustainable development by attending to meaningful work across wider social systems (Hartung & Di Fabio, 2024). It can also support individuals and groups in designing active lives that respond to economic, social, and ecological challenges, rather than merely preparing them to fit existing labour-market arrangements (Guichard, 2022). For refugee communities, this suggests that sustainable career support should be culturally responsive, family- and community-engaged, and developmentally timed, while opening possibilities for participation, contribution, and stability beyond short-term job placement.

Third, participants’ recommendations point to a combined intervention logic: mentoring plus practical exposure plus navigation knowledge. Mentoring programmes that connect newly arrived people with near-peer role models from similar backgrounds can support motivation and raise the visibility of possible pathways (Arthur et al., 2025; Ortlieb & Knappert, 2023). Mentoring is likely to be most effective when linked to concrete opportunities such as work placements, volunteering, and supported introductions to professional networks, alongside explicit system navigation education (Ortlieb & Knappert, 2023).

Finally, the findings underscore the ethical importance of encouraging and strengths-based approaches that account for cultural responsivity among teachers and practitioners. Discouraging messages were described as capable of dampening aspirations, whereas culturally attuned support was positioned as enabling. Based on IEL, this entails that competence and responsiveness of the career counsellors extend beyond technical knowledge, and include relational and cultural competence, and an openness to genuine dialogue with clients’ communities’ situated expertise (Abkhezr, 2026a).

Implications for Research

The findings point to research priorities. First, conceptual research is needed on how refugees understand and conceptualise career language. Future studies could examine the linguistic and cultural portability of terms such as career, development, counselling, and planning, including how meanings shift across languages and resettlement stages. Such work could also examine how concepts such as sustainable careers, decent work, meaningful work, and active lives travel across languages, migration histories, and resettlement contexts, particularly among communities whose understandings of work may be shaped by survival, family responsibility, disrupted education, and collective obligations. Context-sensitive and comparative qualitative designs (e.g., Cohen-Scali et al., 2022), alongside participatory action research (Bradbury, 2015) and social design-based experiments (Gutiérrez, 2018), mapped into longitudinal qualitative designs are well-suited to tracing how career meanings shift over time as settlement stabilises.

Second, intervention research is needed to test and refine the practice directions articulated by participants. Co-designed programmes that integrate navigation workshops, mentoring, and language-rich opportunities should be evaluated for outcomes such as educational persistence, qualification upgrading, and movement beyond low-status work. Evaluation could include outcomes that refugees value, including belonging, collective responsibility, social confidence, and perceived stability, rather than rapid job attainment alone, aligning with calls to move beyond job placement metrics in refugee employment policy and practice (Arthur et al., 2025).

Third, future research should attend to within-group diversity. Although participants shared patterns of meaning-making, their accounts also suggested differences shaped by age at arrival, gender, family expectations, and time since resettlement. Larger and more heterogeneous samples, and comparative designs across visa categories, origin and settlement contexts, could clarify how opportunity structures and cultural negotiations shape career development trajectories (Hebbani & Khawaja, 2019). Research including practitioners and organisational stakeholders alongside refugee participants could illuminate how institutional assumptions about ‘career support’ are produced, sustained, and shifted.

Limitations

Several limitations should be considered when interpreting these findings. The study involved a small purposive sample, and participants were predominantly recruited through education settings, which may have shaped the prominence of education-based career support in their accounts. Participants’ willingness to engage in an interview about career meanings may also indicate a higher level of reflection or interest than might be present in the broader refugee community. In addition, interviews were conducted in English, and although participants were able to communicate their meanings, linguistic nuance and culturally specific concepts may have been constrained.

A further limitation relates to interpretive judgement within narrative and thematic synthesis. While credibility and confirmability were supported through reflexivity, iterative analysis, and collaborative review, narrative work inevitably involves interpretation, particularly when accounts contain ambiguity or culturally embedded meanings. Future research could strengthen interpretive accountability by incorporating community-informed review of themes and interpretations, alongside the strategies used to enhance trustworthiness (Stahl & King, 2020).