Trio-ethnography to reflect career adaptability in higher education toward gamification

Abstract

Career adaptability is increasingly critical as a buffer against uncertainty in both the labour market and professional identity formation in a context characterised by anxiety, nonlinearity and incomprehensibility. The flexibility of a Business Administration (BA) degree also becomes a challenge for BA students to identify and make decisions which align with personal competence and industry demand. Using trioethnography, we explore how to embrace career adaptability for BA students in higher education toward gamification. After hosting a gamification workshop for BA students, we used sharing circles of an indigenous approach to form our research. Our diverse research team is four Vietnamese scholars and one Myanmar scholar based in Vietnam. Central to our paper are three distinct voices: local and international students in the BA major, lecturers in the BA program, and a career coach.  We shared cultural artifacts, such as images and objects, to form our discourse. Our dialogues and conversations are rooted in three key topics: responsive curriculum for value co-creation, creative pedagogy to nurture confidence, and trust-based collaboration in a shared problem space. The synthesis of Career Construction Theory and Hope-Action Theory explained how career learning is an iterative process of action, reflection, and adaptation. Through our creative lens, we reveal multiple facets of our experiences and capture emerging issues in higher education for sustainable career development.