Guiding the Future: Lived Experiences of Guidance Advocates in Facilitating Senior High Students’ Career Choices

This qualitative descriptive narrative study explored the lived experiences of guidance advocates in public senior high schools in Mati South District, Division of City of Mati, as they facilitated students’ career decision-making. The inquiry addressed three aims: to identify the challenges encountered by guidance advocates, describe the coping strategies they used, and develop a career choices program responsive to the findings. Ten guidance advocates from five public senior high schools participated through purposive sampling. Data were gathered through in-depth semi-structured interviews, transcribed verbatim, coded, clustered into subthemes, and organized into major themes. Trustworthiness was strengthened through member checking, reflexive documentation, audit trail procedures, and attention to credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability. Findings showed three challenges: student career uncertainty, family and financial pressure, and weak career guidance support. Student career uncertainty reflected unclear self-direction, fear of wrong choice, and low self-confidence. Family and financial pressure involved limited family income, parent expectations, and practical course choice. Weak career guidance support included limited resources, scheduling barriers, and poor collaboration. Guidance advocates coped through structured guidance practice, resourcefulness and collaboration, and personal well-being protection. Structured guidance practice included prioritizing cases, group guidance, and simple tools. Resourcefulness and collaboration included free resources, professional support, and stakeholder partnerships. Personal well-being protection included work boundaries, emotional pacing, and self-care routines. The proposed career choices program integrated student self-awareness, decision support, anxiety management, family and financial planning, parent engagement, career information development, structured delivery systems, case documentation, school referral networks, and advocate well-being. The study concludes that effective senior high school career guidance requires not only individual counselor competence but also school-wide collaboration, resource provision, and institutional care for guidance advocates.