You Can't Choose What You Can't Hold
Why we start Job Exploration Counseling by helping students hold work up and look at it, not by handing them a questionnaire
This is the first thing I’ve published here, so let me say plainly what Lincoln Square Coaching does and why I think it’s worth writing about.
We deliver Pre-Employment Transition Services, the work that’s supposed to happen before a young person with a disability is ever asked to commit to a job, a path, or a plan. Specifically, this piece is about Job Exploration Counseling: one of the five required Pre-ETS activities, and the one most often reduced to a worksheet. I want to walk through how we actually launch it. Not where we do it, but how. The where changes from one group to the next; the how is the part worth writing down, and the part that travels.
Here’s the short version of my argument: career exploration that starts by asking students what they want to be is starting in the wrong place. You can’t choose what you can’t hold. So before we explore careers, we spend several weeks building the handful of concepts a student needs in order to recognize themselves inside of work. Six of them: strengths, teams, tasks, people, setting, routine. That’s the whole curriculum spine. Everything else hangs off it.
Why the usual approach fails
The spine is portable. It works with almost any group, Pre-ETS or not, a class of six or a room of thirty. What adapts is the delivery: the pacing, the materials, the amount of movement. The core stays consistent. But the place it earns its keep, and the place the conventional approach fails most completely, is the group where the stakes are highest. So picture that group: a 12:1:1 classroom. Students on alternate assessments, earning Skills and Achievement Credentials. Reading levels vary widely, and for some students print isn’t the way in at all. Several are already holding down real worksites, typically based within the school itself: library pages, IT support, kitchen helpers, paraprofessional work in elementary classrooms. They are motivated and genuinely inquisitive, and you can watch the curiosity arrive the moment the activity stops feeling like a test. They are also young people who have spent a long time being assessed.
This is the part that matters. If you hand this group a standardized interest inventory, you don’t measure their interests. You measure their reading level, their test fatigue, and their well-earned suspicion that the adult in the room is sorting them again. The instrument fails before it begins. Not because the students lack interests, but because the format asks them to demonstrate self-knowledge they haven’t yet had the chance to build, in a register (printed, evaluative) that has rarely worked in their favor.
David Blustein’s Psychology of Working framework names what’s underneath this. Work, in that view, isn’t just a slot in the economy; it meets fundamental human needs: survival, yes, but also social connection and self-determination. And the framework is unusually honest about the fact that for a lot of people, particularly people pushed to the margins, volition is constrained. The choice was never fully theirs. Students with disabilities have often had their work lives planned for them or done to them. This gap is structural, which is exactly why WIOA carved Pre-ETS out as its own resourced function instead of leaving it to chance, and why the rehabilitation counselor is the role built to work inside it: trained in vocational development and disability, working with one student or one small group at a time rather than to a class, mandated to grow self-determination rather than deliver content toward a credential. That is not a fix for something educators can’t do. It is a different job, done alongside the one they are built for. So if our very first move in “job exploration” reproduces that dynamic, adult-driven and evaluative and low-volition, we’ve confirmed the thing we’re supposed to be dismantling. The way we ask tells the student where they stand before they’ve said a word.
Self-awareness is built, not surfaced
The reframe I work from is that career exploration begins with self-awareness, and self-awareness, for these students, is not lying dormant waiting to be surfaced by the right questionnaire. It has to be built: through doing, through showing, out loud and on paper and in motion, over time.
This is where Robert Kegan’s constructive-developmental work does a lot of quiet labor in how I design. Kegan’s distinction between what we’re subject to and what we can hold as an object is, I’d argue, the entire game in transition work. Many of my students are subject to their work experience. They live it, they do it well, but they don’t yet have a way to step back and look at it. A student who has been a library page for a year knows that job in their body. What they often can’t yet do is hold it up, turn it over, and work out what about this fits them, and what that says about other work they haven’t tried. Our job is not to deliver information. It’s to build the meaning-making capacity that lets lived experience become something a student can examine, hold at arm’s length, and use. The classroom, in Kegan’s language, is a holding environment: structured enough to support that move, generous enough not to rush it.
So we build these first. Six concepts, one at a time, introduced and reinforced across weeks:
Strengths: what comes naturally to you. We start here on purpose. Many of these students have spent years hearing about what they can’t do. The first concept of the entire service is an asset.
Teams: a group of people who each do a different job to make something work. This reframes a workplace as a set of roles, not a single verdict you pass or fail.
Tasks: what you actually do in a job.
People: who you’re around while you do it.
Setting: where it happens, and how that place feels.
Routine: how a whole day flows from start to finish.
None of these requires reading. All of them can be entered through a student’s own worksite. And together they do something specific: they give a student the parts list for noticing themselves inside of work. That’s the precondition for everything that comes after.
What authoring actually requires
Mark Savickas’s Career Construction theory holds that we don’t find a career so much as author one. We make meaning of our vocational behavior and shape it into something with a theme. Savickas tends to describe that shaping as narrative, a story the person tells. He is right about the act and, I think, too narrow about the channel. Telling is one way to author a self. It is also the way that has always favored the students who were already favored by every instrument that came before. For the students this work exists for, leaving the channel unexamined is not neutral; the unexamined default is verbal, and the verbal default quietly rebuilds the hierarchy the rest of this method exists to take down.1 So I hold onto Savickas’s claim and widen it: authoring is construction, and construction can be spoken, drawn, built, sorted, acted out, or pointed to. When a student lays out that they like work where the tasks change but the people stay the same, and a routine that starts early, whether they say it, draw it, or move themselves to it, that student is not picking from a menu. They are constructing a vocational identity in real time. The six concepts are not content to be tested. They are the materials that make that construction possible for students who have rarely been handed any.
This is what authoring looks like when it is not routed through words, and so the design of how we teach is not incidental. It is the intervention. Every activity is low-floor and high-ceiling, so every student can participate fully regardless of reading level or assessment track, without anyone being singled out. Materials are visual-first. There is deliberately no assessment feel; engagement is built to feel natural, even game-like. Movement is purposeful, never filler. And we anchor relentlessly to the worksites students already hold, because their lived experience is the richest asset in the room and ignoring it to teach abstract “career content” would be its own kind of disrespect.
That design is, in the end, an application of Michael Wehmeyer's work on self-determination, the most evidence-backed predictor we have of strong post-school outcomes for students with disabilities. Self-determined action is volitional and agentic: the student is the causal agent in their own life. You do not produce that by talking about it, and you do not require the student to talk in order to do it. Wehmeyer's model of self-determined career decision-making locates the agency in a cycle, not a sentence: the student sets a goal, acts on it, sees what happens, and adjusts.2 That cycle runs the same whether the goal is spoken, drawn, or walked across a room. So you produce self-determination by building a service where the student is doing the choosing at every step, which concepts to explore, which jobs to go deeper on, which preferences to claim and in whatever form claiming takes for them. By the time these students reach a personal career snapshot, several weeks in, it is not a form an adult handed them. It is something they authored, in the channel that was theirs, and chose to author.
How we launch the service
So when people ask how Lincoln Square Coaching launches Job Exploration Counseling, the honest answer is: not with a test. We launch it by spending the early weeks building six concepts into a shared way of seeing, inside a holding environment designed for volition, anchored to the work students already do, so that the self-awareness career exploration actually depends on is built rather than assumed.
The order matters. Self-awareness makes self-determination possible. Self-determination makes an authored career possible. And an authored career, not an assigned one, is the entire point of doing this work with these students at all. The work isn’t a warm-up for the bridge to adult life. The work is the bridge.
That’s the thesis I’ll be writing from here. I’ll be sharing more of these as the service continues: case studies, session designs, the things that worked and the things I had to throw out. If you do this work too, I’d genuinely like to hear how you start
More soon,
Joseph
This is where Blustein's emancipatory-communitarian commitment, which he draws from Isaac Prilleltensky, does real work. The test of a practice is not whether it is elegant but whether it moves power toward the people a system has pushed to its margins. A career method that admits only verbal authoring fails that test before it starts: the students with the least access to the dominant mode get the least access to authoring their own working lives, again. Treating the channel as a justice question, not a matter of pedagogical taste, is what makes the widening non-optional rather than a nice-to-have.
The Self-Determined Career Decision-Making Model, developed out of Wehmeyer and Mithaug's broader self-determination work. It frames career decision-making as a self-regulated problem-solving sequence the person drives: set a goal, take action, evaluate what happened, adjust. Its usefulness here is precisely that the cycle is mode-independent. A student does not have to be able to describe a decision to be its causal agent, which is what keeps a non-verbal authoring channel rigorous rather than letting it become a lowering of the bar.