The focus of the career choice process is on the students who are making the transition from lower secondary level to VET or general upper secondary level schools. Various actors (parents, peers, teachers, career counsellors, etc.) and institutions (school, vocational information center, training companies) are involved in this process. Expectations and ideas are brought to teachers by all actors involved in the process. At the institutional level, this happens through the location of career orientation in the Curriculum “Lehrplan 21”, and the goal formulations described with it. In addition to knowing the challenges in the education and career choice process, the handling of frustrations and the inclusion of one's own possible solutions (cf. Department of Education Canton Bern, 2022, p. 30) are formulated as goals. This means that students should reflect on their experiences and actions in the career choice process, re-evaluate them and, ideally, transformative learning should take place. Through the implementation of vocational orientation in schools, the career choice process is initiated and accompanied by teachers. Teachers thus come into focus, as they are supposed to impart the competences for career choice to the students through the planning and design of lessons (Driesel-Lange et al. 2020). The competence mediation model Dreer 2020) names four central dimensions here, which make the tension between the role expectations of teachers in the career choice process visible. Along the dimensions of teaching, organization, cooperation and the dimension of professional actor, the spectrum that teachers are supposed to cover ranges. What is striking here is the varying commitment of teachers (Neuenschwander, Schaffner 2011) in the career choice process and the statement that qualified teachers can make a relevant contribution to shaping quality career guidance at school (Bylinksi 2010, Deeken 2008).

The digibe project (digital support in the career choice process), funded by the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation SERI, supports the career choice process by making reflection tasks on career orientation available online to schools and investigating "the effect of digitally supported reflection in career orientation at lower secondary level" (cf. SERI).

In the current project, there seems to be evidence that the role of the teacher and the understanding of the role of teachers could have an influence on the career choice process of students. So far, too little is known about teachers' understanding of their role in the career choice process in this respect. The focus will be on the design of career choice lessons by the teacher as well as on the question of which role or roles teachers assume in the career choice process. This assumes that the teacher, depending on the design of the lesson or the role taken on, is perceived as a helpful resource not only in the career choice process, but especially in the process of reflection by their students.

The above-mentioned question describes a first qualitative part of the survey, which asks teachers about their role and understanding of their role. The sample size depends on the number of teachers in the digibe project. The project covers the school years 9, 10 and 11 with three cohorts, whereby the first cohort is already in the second year of the study and is accompanied over the entire duration of three years. The teachers who are in the 10th year of school with their class are surveyed, as the curriculum here explicitly provides lessons for the subject of vocational orientation in most of the German-speaking cantons of Switzerland. The teachers were interviewed by means of guided telephone interviews. The interviews were analyzed using content-structuring qualitative analysis (Mayring 2014). A deductive coding system is used, which includes roles of instructing, career coaching, guiding or coordinating identified in advance with definition and anchor examples. This coding system will be further developed during the study through inductive categories. To minimize misinterpretations, samples from the interviews are analyzed in the team and possible deviations are jointly interpreted (Mayring 2014). In order to comprehensively document all steps of the analysis of the interviews and to enable retracing, the software MaxQDA will be used.

At the time of submitting the abstract, no results were available yet, but it is expected that teachers will comment on their role in the career choice process and that these roles can be described and, if necessary, new roles can be formulated. In a second part of the survey, it is planned to ask the students how they experience their teachers in the career choice process and which roles the teachers take on. In the presentation, we will present first results and discuss them against the background of the four central dimensions of the competence mediation model (Dreer, 2020).

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