Adaptable Careers: Maximizing Less and Exploring More

Today, young adults are expected to decide between educational, vocational, and job options and to make the best choice possible. Career literatures emphasize the importance of young adults' career decision making but also acknowledge the problems related to making these decisions. The authors argue that career counselors could support clients' intuitive processing of career information and help their clients to develop a positive and flexible view of the self and the environment while diminishing concerns about accountability for and irreversibility of career decisions. The authors argue that career adaptability rather than decision making should become the focal concept of career theory and practice.     

A Cognitive Approach to Career Services: Translating Concepts Into Practice

This article provides counselors with concept-based materials that clients can use to understand and structure the career problem-solving and decision-making process. Clients can use this knowledge to solve immediate career problems, transfer the knowledge to future career problems, or generalize the knowledge to other types of personal, social, and family problems.     

The Meaning of Work and Love: Career Issues and Interventions

Examining concepts about work and love can help people increase their career success and life satisfaction. Career counselors may initiate this examination by eliciting clients' concepts about work and love. After hearing a client's ideas about work and love, counselors can compare this personal meaning to the social meaning of work and love. When this comparison reveals dysfunctional beliefs about work and love, counselors can link these beliefs to their client's career concerns. Such a linkage typically provokes a cognitive dissonance that motivates clients to modify their beliefs. Counselors can facilitate meaning modification by using client-centered and social influence techniques.     

Appraising Cultural Identity in Career-Development Assessment and Counseling

Career-Development Assessment and Counseling (C-DAC) systematically bridges career theory and practice. Integrating differential, developmental, and phenomenological methods, the C-DAC model uses a comprehensive career assessment battery to help clients explore their roles, developmental stages and tasks, career attitudes and knowledge, values, and interests within their unique life contexts. The authors recommend elaborating the C-DAC model to formally appraise cultural identity in step one of the model and to consider cultural identity concerns throughout the C-DAC process. This should help counselors more clearly understand how cultural factors influence people's career development and vocational behavior.     

Career Counseling in the Future: Constructing,Collaborating, Advocating

Helping individuals adapt to changing environments is a major strength of career development practice. Additional strengths are a solid theoretical framework, effective assessment tools and technology, and a clear professional identity. Areas of weakness include the lack of integration of contextual factors into career intervention strategies, poor communication between practitioners and researchers, insufficient attention to underserved populations, and inadequate training in counselor education programs. Changes in the economy and in social structures require that people possess adaptive skills; therefore, career counselors should expand their efforts to help clients construct their lives, collaborate with other professionals, and advocate for clients.     

Technostress: Implications for Adults in the Workforce

The use of technology can enhance workplace efficiency, productivity, and flexibility; yet, technological tools can have negative effects on individuals’ cognitive, psychological, and physical health, as well as on organizations (e.g., lowered employee satisfaction, decreased employee commitment). The use of information and communications technologies (ICT) adds to existing work stress. The authors reviewed recent literature to identify ICT trends, define key terms, and gain insights to improve awareness of ICT issues related to career development, health and wellness, and job security. The potential for inquiry as it relates to career exploration, development, and advancement is relevant to counselors and clients in today's workplace. Research is needed to examine the effects of technostress across different industries, to identify workers at greatest risk of adverse effects, to explore the impact on career decision making, to help clients develop personal coping resources, and to determine strategies for career professionals to collaborate with workplace managers.     

A Person‐Centered Perspective to Welfare‐to‐Work Services: In Pursuit of the Elusive and the Unattainable

Because of changes in legislation regarding the U.S. welfare system, there is an urgency now that has never before existed, except perhaps during the Great Depression, for career counselors to advocate for those of their clients who are on welfare and for their minor dependents. E. B. Lent (2001) has revitalized the debate over the role Rogers's person‐centered perspective should play in career development with welfare‐to‐work (WTW) clients. The usefulness of such an approach with today's clients was explored within the context of inherent limitations of Rogers's person‐centered perspective. Potential ethical conflicts for career counselors working with WTW clients were identified.     

Using Sand Tray to Facilitate College Students' Career Decision‐Making: A Qualitative Inquiry

Career decision‐making can be a challenging and stressful process for college students, and career counselors can be instrumental in helping college students to ease this process. Sand tray, an expressive, play therapy technique, offers career counselors a potentially useful method in this regard. The authors examine the use of sand tray to promote the career decision‐making process. Four undergraduate college students engaged in a sand tray intervention designed to promote career decision‐making. In the final session, students participated in an interview and had the opportunity to review and reflect on their sand tray photographs. Results of a phenomenological‐based analysis revealed 5 themes: (a) initial skepticism, (b) helpfulness, (c) awareness, (d) self‐expression, and (e) continued work. Career counselors may use this unique, creative approach to help clients who are stuck in the career decision‐making process. Future research may include examining the use of sand tray with other interventions, as well as examining intervention effectiveness on career outcome variables.     

Counselors' Perspectives on Using the Career Style Interview With Clients

The authors investigated counselors' perspectives on using the Career Style Interview (CSI) with clients who had career concerns. Participants were a purposive sample of 34 counselors who had been trained in and who had used the CSI with clients. The findings indicated that the counselors viewed the CSI as a helpful and positive career counseling intervention. It was most effective at identifying clients' life themes and assisted them with making meaningful career decisions. Implications of these findings for career counseling practice and research are also discussed.     

Creative Use of the Career Construction Interview

Designed as part of an individual career construction and life design counseling intervention, the Career Construction Interview (CCI) and My Career Story (MCS) workbook aid career counselors and other career service providers in helping clients construct, deconstruct, and reauthor their career stories. Recently, some career counselors have developed ways of using the CCI and the MCS in group settings. In this article, the author offers 3 additional ways to use the CCI and, thereby, add creativity to the career counseling process. These 3 ways include use of written exercises, career collages, and career portfolios. The article concludes with a call for career practitioners to continue to think creatively in using the CCI with clients.     

Career Development With Lesbian and Gay Clients

Trends in career counseling with lesbian and gay clients are reviewed along with discussions on considering lesbian women and gay men a different cultural minority. The role and direction of career development with lesbian and gay clients is presented based on current information regarding employment discrimination, the decision to pass as heterosexual on the job, counselor and student training issues, age-related factors, and differences between gay men and lesbian women with respect to careers. Concrete suggestions are made to career counselors who wish to prepare themselves to work with this group or to extend their effectiveness, and suggestions for services are also presented.     

Applying Decision Theory to Career Counseling Practice: The Sequential Elimination Approach

This article provides career counselors with a practical procedure, based on decision and information processing theories, for assisting clients in making career decisions. The proposed procedure, which is derived from the sequential elimination approach, considers the individual's limited cognitive and material resources and provides specific guidelines aimed at facilitating career decision making and increasing the quality of the process and its outcomes. The proposed procedure has been found useful in making various types of career decisions.     

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.     

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.     

Important Events in Career Counseling: Client and Counselor Descriptions

The authors used a content analysis system to classify career‐counseling participants' responses to questions about the helpfulness of their recently completed counseling experiences. Both clients and counselors most frequently identified client gains associated with self‐exploration and with emotional support as most helpful. Members of both groups frequently identified ineffective counselor‐selected activities as least helpful. Clients rated their experiences as significantly more effective than did their counselors. The authors discuss implications of these results for the validity of the content analysis system and the nature and practice of career counseling.     

The Relationship Between Counselor Verbal Response Modes and the Working Alliance in Career Counseling

The authors examined the use of counselor response modes in career counseling, including the overall proportion of each response mode and the relationship of each response mode to the working alliance. Participants were 19 counselors‐in‐training and 26 clients in 78 sessions, making this the largest reported study of career counselor response modes. Seventy‐nine percent of the counselor responses were information, paraphrase, or close‐ended questions. None of the categorized counselor responses was significantly and positively related to the working alliance, although counselor self‐disclosure had a significant negative correlation with the alliance. The type of self‐disclosure used was largely irrelevant or self‐deprecating.     

Career Development of Women of Color and White Women: Assumptions,Conceptualization, and Interventions From an Ecological Perspective

Current career counseling practices are based on certain assumptions about clients and their career development, and these assumptions implicitly reflect male, western European experiences and worldviews. These assumptions may not reflect the general life priorities and specific role commitments of many women of color and White women. An ecological perspective on career counseling is proposed to conceptualize the dynamic interaction between the person and the environment. This perspective holds promise for assisting career counselors in their work with women of color and White women.     

Multicultural Career Counseling: Theoretical Applications of the Systems Theory Framework

Increasing recognition of cultural influences on career development requires expanded theoretical and practical perspectives. Theories of career development need to explicate views of culture and provide direction for career counseling with clients who are culturally diverse. The Systems Theory Framework (STF) is a theoretical foundation that accounts for systems of influence on people's career development, including individual, social, and environmental/societal contexts. The discussion provides a rationale for systemic approaches in multicultural career counseling and introduces the central theoretical tenets of the STF. Through applications of the STF, career counselors are challenged to expand their roles and levels of intervention in multicultural career counseling.     

Individualized Career Counseling Outcome Assessment: A Case Study Using the Personal Questionnaire

Career counseling has evolved to include practices that attribute a central importance to context variables and meaning‐making processes. Accordingly, there is a need for client assessment tools that consider the subjectivity and cultural specificity of clients and the interface between their work and life concerns. The idiographic assessment of outcomes, which uses individualized measures that involve clients in the definition of person‐specific items, is a promising approach. This article explores the use of the Personal Questionnaire (PQ) as an individualized outcome measure that complements standardized outcome career measures. The authors identify the factors leading to the emergence of idiographic assessment in career counseling, review existing research relevant to the need for the PQ, and present a case study of career construction counseling that illustrates how the PQ helps counselors to obtain sensitive and contextualized assessments of career counseling outcomes, guides interventions, and facilitates meaning making.     

Attachment and Self‐Efficacy in Career Search Activities: A Structural Model

The author integrated attachment theory with social cognitive career theory (SCCT) to examine how attachment styles influence the career search self‐efficacy activities of interviewing, networking, job searching, and personal exploration. Using an undergraduate sample (N = 275, 81% women), the author tested a structural model. Results indicated that anxious attachment style was negatively related to interviewing self‐efficacy, whereas avoidant attachment style was negatively related to networking, job searching, and personal exploration self‐efficacy. Theoretical implications based on these findings provide support for an integrative model of attachment theory with SCCT. Career counselors are encouraged to consider clients’ attachment styles when working with individuals who are searching for employment. To help address the limitations of the study, future researchers could test the applicability of the current model with a more diverse sample.