Les parcours d’insertion à l’épreuve du travail sur soi

This article proposes analysing the “atypical” routes of students: active adults who, in resuming studies, are obliged to go through a professional reconversion. We will be concentrate on a specific programme of a French university, the DUFA, a university degree in adult education, whose primary vocation is to facilitate professional bifurcations thanks to particular training programmes. The article’s goal is to show that for these students, as opposed to what many persons in charge of these institutions affirm, the principal pitfall of such insertion is often astonishing and of subjective nature: as a long as a work of “identity latency” is not passed, is not achieved, the motivation is often lacking and the insertion, even when it takes place, proves to be unstable/shortlived. After some elements of statistical contextualizing, we will study in detail, using qualitative techniques (interviews and in-depth life stories), various logics and expectations about the actors concerning the training we recommend through a typology, but especially the various facets of the “one’s work on oneself” carried out by these students