Paper short abstract:

This paper presents research on undergraduate transitions into work utilising online digital diaries as a means to tackle the observational challenge of individuals journeying through diverse pathways and reaching different destinations.

Paper long abstract:

Young people’s transitions to work can be non-linear, occur over an extended time period and be influenced by a range of individual, social and structural factors. This makes them a challenging topic for ethnographic observation, as the diversity of individual pathways and destinations means there is no obvious fieldsite. While one solution is to find cohorts engaged in employment support schemes (e.g. Leonard and Wilde 2019), these schemes bring their own narratives of the transition to work as an individual process that obscures the complex social relationships that make up young people and their knowledge and learning that is required for moving into work. This paper presents research on undergraduate transitions into work utilising multimedia digital diaries that sought to tackle this observational challenge. Through prompts that aimed to emphasise how young people and their knowledge are situated in social relationships, the diaries show how young people learn to articulate their skills, knowledges and their self-identity to themselves, before they can recontextualise them to employers in relation to specific job requirements (Wilde and Guile 2025). The paper reflects on the nature and depth of data collected through this method to explore what it can offer and what are its limitations for understanding journeys into work.