'I'd rather talk to someone I know than somebody who knows' - the role of networks in undergraduate career decision-making

This article is based on an action research project that involved working with undergraduates to improve the way they engage in the process of career decision‐making. The article focuses on the role networks play in career decision‐making. It analyses the students’ rationale for utilising particular forms of social capital and examines how they have responded to interventions aimed at influencing their attitude to different sources of advice. The study made use of questionnaires, interviews and observations and found that the interventions, which utilised techniques such as unfreezing and analogical encoding, encouraged the students to adopt a more critical approach to the different sources of advice available to them. However, a reluctance to deal with the unfamiliar, and a lack of proactivity, meant that undergraduates may fail to utilise high quality sources of advice. The study concludes by discussing how these barriers to accessing social capital can be overcome.