Career Counseling Is Personal Counseling

Despite many changes that have occurred in the field of career counseling, counselors continue to rely on models of counseling that emphasize the rational, informational aspects of career decision making. The author argues that career counselors need to pay more attention to the affective, psychological issues confronting clients with career problems. The impact of significant psychological variables that influence career decision making are discussed: developmental stages and tasks, identity formation and status, self-concept, psychological needs, and internal barriers.     

Toward Trauma-Informed Career Counseling

The Adverse Childhood Experiences study (Felitti et al., 1998) showed that early adversity can have a profound lifelong effect on personal development, social relationships, coping methods, and career trajectories. The authors review critical findings related to trauma-informed counseling practices, discuss literature linking trauma and career theories, and consider how career counseling could address the effects of adverse childhood experiences using trauma-informed practices. An integration of trauma-informed practices with career counseling using narrative and other approaches is proposed. The proposed integration holds implications for incorporating trauma-informed practice in career counselor preparation programs and in career counseling practice.     

Constructivist Counseling for Career Indecision

Twentieth-century vocational guidance has been an objective enterprise in which counselors have studied and treated career indecision by abstracting and objectifying it. This article describes how the logical positivist perspective on indecision as an objective phenomenon has evolved over the course of this century. Then, the article explains how constructivist counselors view indecision as clients' subjective attempts to give meaning to crisis points in their lives. This view permits a conceptualization of career counseling as a process of articulating a client's life theme. The article concludes with a case study that illustrates a life-theme approach to counseling for career indecision.     

Role Induction in Career Counseling

Many vocational psychologists advocate addressing career as well as personal concerns in career counseling. However, some clients may have inappropriate expectations toward career counseling and may not be prepared or want to discuss personal issues. This study examined whether perceptions of the career counseling process could be modified with the use of role induction. Results indicated that, whereas role induction was associated with perceptions of students' own career concerns, gender was a strong influence in perceptions of counseling overall and in the stigma associated with a holistic perspective on career counseling.     

Integrating Career and Personal Counseling

Career and personal counseling are inextricably intertwined. Career problems have a strong emotional component. Career indecision and procrastination may be better interpreted as zeteophobia, the fear of career exploration. Trait and factor theory pictures career counseling as unrealistically simplistic and leads neophytes to view it as boring. Training all counselors to integrate career and personal counseling would lead to better service for clients.     

Client Expectations About Counseling and Involvement During Career Counseling

A within-counselor design was used in which the authors analyzed audio recordings of career counseling interviews with clients who had relatively positive and relatively negative expectations about counseling. Both of the clients who had relatively positive expectations about counseling were rated significantly higher on a global measure of level of involvement.     

Dilemmatic Constructions of Career in the Career Counseling Interview

Thirty career counseling interviews were recorded and inductively analyzed using a discourse analytic method. Findings indicate that clients in this setting present various dilemmatic themes of career in their talk. Three types of dilemmas were pervasive: uncertainty versus certainty, interests versus practical, and focus versus options. The findings suggest that career theorists and practitioners might find it useful to address the dilemmatic processes evident in “career talk.”     

Career Counseling Practicum: Transformations in Conceptualizing Career Issues

The authors describe how their participation in a doctoral-level career counseling practicum has influenced their perceptions of the relationship between career and personal counseling, attitudes toward career services, and career interventions skills.     

Career and Personal Concerns Expressed by Career Counseling Clients

In this study, the authors used case notes to classify client concerns that surfaced during career counseling with adults in a university-sponsored community counseling center. A two-stage classification system was developed and used to estimate the frequencies of occurrence for career and personal issues that surface during career counseling. The authors concluded that a substantial overlap exists between the content of career counseling and that of psychotherapy.     

Developmental Career Counseling with Teenage Parents

Although teenage parenthood is recognized by many counselors as a developmental identity crisis, it rarely has been viewed as a developmental career crisis. This article suggests developmental career assessment and counseling procedures for use with teenage parents.     

The Cross-Cultural Applicability of the Career Decision-Making System

This article presents construct and concurrent validity data for the Career Decision-Making System for participants from three different countries who speak three different languages. The interest profiles of people performing similar jobs in two countries show substantial comparability.