Career Guidance for Unaccompanied Young Migrants. A Report on an Italian Experience

Abstract

Unaccompanied foreign minors are migrant children without their parents, relatives, or other adults. In Italy, especially in Sicily, an increasing number of young, non-European Union foreigners arrive daily in search of a new life and work opportunities. Despite this increasing phenomenon, interventions to support young migrants in career projects are infrequent and occasional within the host communities. With the aim of developing a career guidance intervention suitable for unaccompanied foreign minors, we propose a case study presenting a career guidance intervention for a group of unaccompanied foreign adolescents. The framework is the life design paradigm. The conductors of the activities were career counsellors, with the support of a cultural mediator and/or an educator. The setting of the interventions was individual and small groups. The instruments and procedures were predominantly qualitative. This paper includes a discussion of the strengths and weakness of this intervention, including the results of the post-intervention evaluation and the follow-up after one year.