Abstract
Context: Amid profound transformative processes across the labour market, the need for comprehensive career guidance that systematically includes self-employed forms of work is coming into sharper relief. Despite an increase in relevance of self-employed gainful employment, both in the labour market as a whole and also in educational theory, this topic has yet to find its way fully into regular lessons within schools in Germany offering general education. This article addresses this gap, examining upper secondary school students’ ideas about self-employment and entrepreneurial work. The aim is to establish a didactic foundation for broadening conceptual ideas of Economic Education within the school system
Approach: Conducted as part of Selbstverantwortete Erwerbsarbeit [self-responsible gainful work] SEVEA project, this exploratory study aims to integrate self-responsible gainful work into career guidance and economics lessons. The study is based on guided interviews with twelve pupils at three participating project partner schools in the German federal city state of Bremen. The evaluation was carried out using Mayring’s qualitative content analysis (cf. Mayring 2015), supported by a theory-based category system on key dimensions of professional and entrepreneurial independence, as recommended in European competence frameworks and curricula (cf. European Commission 2017).
Findings: The results show that students primarily associate self-employment as an income option with autonomy, responsibility and higher risks. Personal and social skills – such as assertiveness, organisational skills and self-confidence – are mentioned most frequently, while economic knowledge plays a subordinate role. Self-employment is perceived as a potentially attractive yet uncertain option. Forms, such as intrapreneurship or hybrid forms of employment, are largely absent from young people’s minds. Their perceptions also reveal distorted judgment of risk, idealised images of independence and uncertainties in the conceptual classification.
Conclusions: The study highlights that career guidance must be understood more as a design-oriented learning process that aims not only at matching work with personal characteristics (‘matching’), but also at self-realisation (‘creating’) within an employment relationship. The results provide concrete guidance for the development of didactic concepts that use everyday ideas as a starting point, specifically address misconceptions and systematically integrate entrepreneurial thinking.
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