Career counseling
Career counseling is a type of advice-giving and support provided by career counselors to their clients, to help the clients manage their journey through life, learning and work changes. This includes career exploration, making career choices, managing career changes, lifelong career development and dealing with other career-related issues. There is no agreed definition of the role of a career or employment counsellor worldwide, mainly due to conceptual, cultural and linguistic differences. However, the terminology of 'career counseling' typically denotes a professional intervention which is conducted either one-on-one or in a small group. Career counseling is related to other types of counseling. What unites all types of professional counseling is the role of practitioners, who combine giving advice on their topic of expertise with counseling techniques that support clients in making complex decisions and facing difficult situations.
Name
There is considerable variation in the terminology that is used worldwide to describe this activity. In addition to the English-language spelling difference between US and UK, there are also a range of alternate terms which are in common use. These include: career guidance; career coaching; guidance counseling; personal guidance; career consulting and a range of related terminologies. This frequently leads writers and commentators to combine multiple terms e.g. career guidance and counselling'' to be inclusive. However, care should be exercised when moving from one terminology to another as each term has its own history and cultural significance. An alternate term is 'career guidance'. This term is sometimes used as a synonym for career counseling, but can also be used to describe a broader range of interventions beyond one-to-one counseling.In US government offices, employment counselors generally focus on the acquisition of work, actually getting a job, which is the desired result of the career development, training and education process. They may also work for community based organizations, or for profit and non profit businesses that are engaged in helping people find jobs. Salary and Working Conditions are quite diverse. Employment Counseling has its historical roots with the US Department of Labor.
Career development professionals may work in a variety of settings but usually work in offices where they can conduct private interviews with clients and in classrooms or boardrooms where they conduct group sessions. Depending on the organization, their hours of work may include some evening and weekend work.
Benefits and challenges
Benefits
Empirical research attests the effectiveness of career counseling. Professional career counselors can support people with career-related challenges. Through their expertise in career development and labor markets, they can put a person's qualifications, experience, strengths and weakness in a broad perspective while also considering their desired salary, personal hobbies and interests, location, job market and educational possibilities. Through their counseling and teaching abilities, career counselors can additionally support people in gaining a better understanding of what really matters for them personally, how they can plan their careers autonomously, or help them in making tough decisions and getting through times of crisis. Finally, career counselors are often capable of supporting their clients in finding suitable placements/ jobs, in working out conflicts with their employers, or finding the support of other helpful services. It is due to these various benefits of career counseling that policy makers in many countries publicly fund guidance services. For example, the European Union understands career guidance and counseling as an instrument to effectively combat social exclusion and increase citizens' employability.Career counselors assist job seekers in developing structured job search plans designed to meet the demands of modern labor markets. Research indicates that clients who follow such plans submit more applications, receive more job offers, and achieve higher employment rates than those without them. Tailored job search advice has also been shown to increase interview rates, particularly for individuals experiencing long-term unemployment. Furthermore, participation in structured job search programs makes job seekers more than 2.5 times as likely to secure employment compared to those who do not participate. Career counselors can therefore apply these evidence-based approaches to improve job seekers’ motivation, broaden access to employment, and address disparities faced by diverse populations.
Challenges
One of the major challenges associated with career counseling is encouraging participants to engage in the process. For example, in the UK 70% of people under 14 say they have had no careers advice while 45% of people over 14 have had no or very poor/limited advice.In a related issue some client groups tend to reject the interventions made by professional career counselors preferring to rely on the advice of peers or superiors within their own profession. Jackson et al. found that 44% of doctors in training felt that senior members of their own profession were best placed to give careers advice. Furthermore, it is recognised that the giving of career advice is something that is widely spread through a range of formal and informal roles. In addition to career counselors it is also common for psychologists, teachers, managers, trainers and human resources specialists to give formal support in career choices.
Similarly it is also common for people to seek informal support from friends and family around their career choices and to bypass career professionals altogether. In the 2010s, increasingly people rely on career web portals to seek advice on resume writing and handling interviews and to do research on various professions and companies. It has also possible to get a vocational assessment done online.
History and new approaches
Career counseling has a history going back at least as far as the late nineteenth century. An important defining work for the field was Frank Parsons' Choosing a Vocation which was published in 1909. Parsons was strongly rooted in the American progressive social reform movement, but as the field developed it moved away from this origin and became increasingly understood as a branch of counseling psychology.While until the 1970s a strongly normative approach was characteristic for theories and for the practice of career counseling, new models have their starting point in the individual needs and transferable skills of the clients while managing biographical breaks and discontinuities. Career development is no longer viewed as a linear process which reflects a predictable world of work. More consideration is now placed on nonlinear, chance and unplanned influences.
This change of perspective is evident in the constructivist and social constructionist paradigms for career counseling. The constructivist/social constructionist paradigms are applied as narrative career counseling that emphasizes personal stories and the meaning individuals generate in relation to their education and work.
Postmodern career counseling is a reflective process of assisting clients in creating self through writing and revising biographical narratives taking place in a context of multiple choice from a diversity of options and constraints. The shift moves from emphasizing career-choice to empowering self-affirmation and improving decision-making. They have "shifted from a sole focus on the individual, to an explicit recognition of contextual factors, to a perspective that might be best described as a 'person-in-complex-social-and-economic-systems' focus." Postmodern career counseling theories include Mark Savickas's Career Construction Theory and Life Designing Paradigm as well as David Blustein's Psychology of Working Theory, which was developed to "address the roles that economic constraints and being marginalized could play in an individual’s choices, or lack of choices, about work, his or her ability to adapt to work, and ultimately in him or her finding decent work".
Recently this approach is widely applied in Australia such as in Athlete Career and Education program by the Australian Sports Commission and Scope for artists by Ausdance.
Vocational theories
There are several types of theories of vocational choice and development. These types include trait and factor theories, social cognitive theories, and developmental theories. Two examples of trait and factor theories, also known as person–environment fit, are Holland's theory and the Theory of Work Adjustment.John Holland hypothesized six vocational personality/interest types and six work environment types: realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, and conventional. When a person's vocational interests match his or her work environment types, this is considered congruence. Congruence has been found to predict occupation and college major.
The Theory of Work Adjustment, as developed by René Dawis and Lloyd Lofquist, hypothesizes that the correspondence between a worker's needs and the reinforced systems predicts job satisfaction, and that the correspondence between a worker's skills and a job's skill requirements predicts job satisfaction. Job satisfaction and personal satisfaction together should determine how long one remains at a job. If there is a discrepancy between a worker's needs or skills and the job's needs or skills, then it is ideal for one of them to change in order to best suit the needs of each overall.
Social Cognitive Career Theory has been proposed by Robert Lent, Steven Brown and Gail Hackett. The theory takes Albert Bandura's work on self-efficacy and expands it to interest development, choice making, and performance. Person variables in SCCT include self-efficacy beliefs, outcome expectations and personal goals. The model also includes demographics, ability, values, and environment. Efficacy and outcome expectations are theorized to interrelate and influence interest development, which in turn influences choice of goals, and then actions. Environmental supports and barriers also affect goals and actions. Actions lead to performance and choice stability over time.
Career development theories propose vocational models that include changes throughout the lifespan. Donald Super's model proposes a lifelong five-stage career development process. The stages are growth, exploration, establishment, maintenance, and disengagement. Throughout life, people have many roles that may differ in terms of importance and meaning. Super also theorized that career development is an implementation of self-concept. Linda Gottfredson also proposed a cognitive career decision-making process that develops through the lifespan. The initial stage of career development is hypothesized to be the development of self-image in childhood, as the range of possible roles narrows using criteria such as sex-type, social class, and prestige. During and after adolescence, people take abstract concepts into consideration, such as interests.