The text aims to analyze and to discuss the ways in which youngsters, nowadays, have been constructing ways, narratives and life projects from the new configurations assumed by work. It presents, initially, the central theoretical conceptions that guided the research: the contemporary life, the changes in the work environment, the youth and its life projects. It then displays the empirical study conducted through semi-directed interviews, with high middle class youngsters from Rio de Janeiro, university students and trainees in a big company from the same city, whose testimonials were analyzed by the content analysis and discourse analysis. Finally, the text presents and analyzes the main themes found in the testimonials: (1) the perceptions and experiences related by the interviewed subjects on the period they were trainees, which referred, in a direct or indirect way, to an apprenticeship of personal construction and/or adequacy to a particular “profile” valued and recognized in the current labour market, (2) the “contacts”, that emerge as facilitators for the insertion and permanence in the labour market and (3) the approach of entrance into adult life and the conception of future presented by the youngsters as a mosaic of possibilities, that was based, in fact, in a conception of “prolonged present”.
Young adults; Work; Life project; Adult life