When the working alliance perceived by the professional development advisor influences the autonomy of the job seeker

This study focuses on the support provided to Job Seekers (JS) by France Travail (FT). The service sector is facing significant changes in particular regarding the quality of service provided. FT offers personalized support and responsive follow-up to empower JS in their job search. This change has a direct impact on the work of the Professional Development Advisor (PDA). We explore the implementation of this new service through the analysis of registered follow-up interview conducted by the PDA with the JS. We seek to better understand how the working alliance developed during this interview can promote the JS’s autonomy. We measured the relationship between the perceived working alliance by each of the communication partners and the JS’s autonomy. Thus, 22 professional development advisors and 41 job seekers were questioned on their perception of the working alliance (i.e. purpose, means and quality of the relationship) developed during the interview. These 41 interviews were then analyzed to determine the job seeker’s autonomy based on his positioning during the interview. This positioning was understood through discourse analysis focusing on three indicators: the occupation of the interlocutory space by the job seeker, the focus of the discourse on the job seeker, and the control of action by the job seeker. Results reveal that only the working alliance perceived by the PDA is significatively correlated with the positioning of JS. More precisely, the correlation is significative with the goals of the working alliance perceived by the advisor, the perceived quality of the relationship is partially correlated and the perceived means is tendentially correlated. In other words, the more the working alliance perceived by the PDA increases the more the job seeker’s occupation of the interlocutary space increases, the more the focus on the discourse on the job seeker increases and the more the control of action by the job seaker also increases. Since the perception of the working alliance by the advisor appears to be a lever for the autonomy of job seeker, we propose to train the advisor to use language strategies during interviews to change the positioning of job seeker.