"What did you want to become in the past, and what do you want to become now?" Along this central task pupils of eleven secondary classes presented their career aspirations with the help of photos, and explained them in oral presentations. This is the core activity of the project "Visualized vocational aspirations: Potentials of photography for career counselling and vocational preparation (VIBES)" initiated at the Zurich University of Teacher Education (PH Zürich). Insuring themselves of their previous career choices with photos, enables young people and teachers to document the transition from school to vocational education, and from everyday life to school, thus developing a reflected entry point to career choice courses in school.

This contribution presents the project "VIBES" in the context of Swiss secondary school career choice courses. It will unfold quantitative results in the fields of acceptance and impact of the pedagogical model, both in the perspective of pupils and teachers. Qualitative results will be presented by analysing narrative and visual strategies employed by the pupils.

The transition from modernity to current forms of post modernity marks an important shift in career choices of young people. Beck’s theory of individualisation and pluralisation, and his notion of the risk society (1986) describe this de-traditionalisation along with a pluralistic multi-optionalism. For young people at the transition from obligatory school to vocational settings, this means not only to be able to choose from a huge variety of options, but it also means to be forced to take that risky decision for one career or job. In addition Peavy (1998, p. 58) explains that nowadays it is up to career counselling to foster young people in these uncontrollable circumstances, and help them to navigate and to orient themselves within the market of choices. The cooperation between young people, parents, school, career counselling and industry has a central position as they pose aids in decision-making and realisation (Egloff & Jungo, 2009).

One important basis of decision-making and of the process of career counselling is the reflection of ones own career and educational biography. As a pedagogical bridge the project introduced the verbalisation and visualisation of young people`s career aspirations in order to initiate reflection upon their career and educational biography. The basic assumption was that especially at-risk learners (Rummler, 2012) who come from difficult socio-economic backgrounds, who have migration backgrounds, or who are verbally less capable would benefit from a visual approach of presenting career aspirations. It was assumed that those pupils would rather appreciate means of communication that allow for visual storytelling (Holzwarth, 2008).

The approach of storytelling is made with reference to Savickas (2011), McMahon & Patton (2006, p. 9) who used narrative stories in career counselling settings in order to involve clients better into the process of counselling, and in order to seriously relate to their individual biography. Cochran (1997) further elaborated this by introducing the "vocational card sort" (ebd. p. 43ff). In Switzerland the notion of sorting cards along with related issues, tasks, concepts is realised through the visual element of photos. Similar to the concept of photo-elicitation (2002, p. 13) clients are presented with photos from typical job situations as stimuli in order to trigger storytelling processes in career counselling settings (see Jungo, 2011).

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