The role of career guidance and counselling on the career choice and career decision making of immigrant students in Finnish upper secondary schools.

Guidance and counselling in secondary schools plays a major role in the students’ career choices. In Finland, career education and career guidance are a required components and included in the curriculum of upper secondary schools. This means that the students are eligible for individual guidance and group counselling (Skovhus &Thomsen, 2020, p.253). Thus, this research sets out to study the guidance counselling experiences of immigrant students in upper Secondary schools. My purpose is to investigate the role of guidance counselling in the career decision making of immigrant students. This study adopts the phenomenographic research method which includes an investigation of the role of guidance and counselling in career choices of immigrant students in upper secondary schools in Finland and bringing out similarities and differences from the cases studied. My study found out from the five participants that guidance and counselling are a vital part of education at the level of upper secondary schools. This practice is very much appreciated especially by immigrant students who began their studies in different countries before immigrating to Finland. Some of them see it as a novelty but appreciating the practice of guidance and counselling as it instils in them the consciousness of making guided choices about their future careers. The practical conclusion is that the practice of guidance counselling should be reinforced especially for students just arriving to Finland from diverse educational backgrounds.