Training Counselors to Use Computer‐Assisted Career Guidance Systems More Effectively: A Model Curriculum

A model graduate training curriculum that emphasizes the counselor's role in assisting clients in the effective use of computer‐assisted career guidance (CACG) systems is described. This 4‐module graduate training program emphasizes client readiness and exploration using CACG systems, skill building and simulation exercises, and service learning with career clients. The study is evaluated from the perspectives of counselor educators, counselor trainees, and career clients. Findings from 4 institutions support the efficacy of a model curriculum for graduate training and the beneficial outcomes of using CACG systems under appropriate conditions.     

Effect of Brief Staff‐Assisted Career Service Delivery on Drop‐In Clients

Brief staff‐assisted career counseling services based on cognitive information processing theory were evaluated using 138 drop‐in clients who completed pre‐ and postintervention self‐report measures of knowledge about next steps, confidence in making next steps, and anxiety about career concerns. Significant changes occurred in each dimension and were significantly associated with the quality of career adviser interaction. Participants rated the experience as highly positive. Decreases in anxiety about career concerns were unrelated to the intervention. Implications include that a brief service delivery model yields positive outcomes for many clients but requires adjustments in organizational culture, physical environment, practitioner approaches, and client expectations. Future research should examine relational variables related to decreased anxiety with a brief service delivery model, the degree to which this approach works with specific career needs, and client attributes leading to successful versus unsuccessful outcomes with this model.     

Influencing Client Expectations About Career Counseling Using a Videotaped Intervention

Realistic client expectations about career counseling are essential to positive client outcomes. The authors investigated a videotaped intervention designed to influence participants' expectations about career counseling using a pretest/posttest experimental design. As measured by the Expectations About Counseling‐Brief Form (H. E. A. Tinsley, 1982), undergraduate participants who watched the videotaped intervention significantly increased their expectations of personal commitment to career counseling and decreased their expectations of counselor expertise compared with participants who watched a control videotape. A secondary hypothesis, that changes in expectations would positively affect attitudes toward career counseling as measured by the Attitudes Toward Career Counseling Scale (A. R. Rochlen, J. J. Mohr, & B. K. Hargrove, 1999), was not supported.     

Expanding Career Options and Optimizing Abilities: The Case of Laura

The authors present a case of a 15‐year‐old Mexican American adolescent girl who is uncertain about her educational and career future. The ecological model of career development (E. P. Cook, M. J. Heppner, & K. M. O'Brien, 2002) is applied to the case. The authors suggest career counseling interventions for this client and discuss potential concerns and issues that may arise in career counseling with this client.     

The Separate and Combined Effects of SIGI or DISCOVER and a Career Planning Course on Undecided University Students

Research to consider the effectiveness of computer-assisted guidance systems (CACG) and credit career planning courses was conducted during the 1988 spring semester at Pennsylvania State University and the University of Virginia. The research methodology included use of a four-group pretest-posttest design at each university. Group treatment conditions using undecided university students were the following: (a) CACG use by students enrolled in a career planning course, (b) students enrolled only in a career planning course without CACG use, (c) CACG use by students enrolled in an introductory business or psychology course, and (d) students enrolled only in an introductory business or psychology course. Participants (N = 112) were in first through fifth semester standing and were assigned randomly to CACG use conditions.     

Culturally Appropriate Career Counseling With Gay and Lesbian Clients

This article details the current knowledge regarding the provision of culturally appropriate career services to gay and lesbian clients. It is divided into 5 parts: history and context for the delivery of career counseling services to gay and lesbian clients, counselor self‐preparation for working with gay and lesbian clients, client‐focused interventions useful for counseling with gay and lesbian clients, program‐focused interventions useful for addressing the special issues that this group presents, and appropriate advocacy or social action interventions. Issues of multiple cultural identities and the intersection of lesbian and gay issues with race and ethnicity are also addressed.     

Self‐Help Career Services: A Case Report

Self‐help career services represent an important form of career intervention rarely described in the literature. Using a case‐report approach, the author describes this type of career intervention, which was guided by cognitive information processing theory and Holland's ( 1997 ) typological theory. The report offers an example of appropriately identifying client readiness to engage in career counseling using a 3‐tier model for service delivery composed of direct, brief, and self‐help interventions. It also demonstrates an effective method for translating theory to practice, a particularly critical need in the career development field. The outcome of the intervention supports a differentiated model of career services that increases client accessibility to those services.     

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.     

The Relation of Negative Career Thoughts to Depression and Hopelessness

Although some research literature focuses on the integration of mental health and career counseling, there has been little that examines both areas in relation to depression and hopelessness. This study investigated the relationship among dysfunctional career thinking, depression, and hopelessness in a sample of 139 undergraduate and graduate students seeking drop‐in or individual career counseling services at a university career center. The authors found that two aspects of dysfunctional career thinking, decision‐making confusion and commitment anxiety, accounted for a significant amount of variance in depression. Decision‐making confusion also accounted for a significant amount of variance in hopelessness. Implications for counseling practice include the need for more careful screening of career clients who present with high levels of anxiety and negative thinking. Future research could involve more diverse client populations, such as unemployed adults, and explore the use of additional screening measures to assess the intersection of career and mental health issues.     

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.     

Innovative Moments in Career Construction Counseling: Proposal for an Integrative Model

This article advances understanding of career construction counseling (CCC) by viewing it through the lens of the innovative moments model (IMM) of how clients construct change. The IMM conceives clients’ narrative transformations as resulting from counselors prompting and clients reflecting on exceptions to a problematic self‐narrative (i.e., innovative moments; IMs) that emerges in counseling dialogues. On the basis of intensive IMM analysis of CCC case studies, the authors propose an integration of the 2 models that describes the sequence of client change in IMs across the 3 phases of CCC. This proposal provides both conceptual and assessment tools that make it possible to describe and analyze the process of client change through life‐designing dialogues. The authors illustrate the integrated framework with vignettes from case studies and conclude by suggesting research to examine the validity and usefulness of the client change sequence and interventions for using this pattern of change to foster client transformation.     

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.     

Applying the Happenstance Learning Theory to Involuntary Career Transitions

The happenstance learning theory (HLT) proposes a model of career counseling that helps clients to build more satisfying personal and work lives. Although reflective listening remains an essential part of the process, HLT is an action‐oriented approach to helping clients to both create and benefit from unplanned events. Success is measured not by what happens during the counseling interview but by what the client experiences in the real world during and after counseling. A case study illustrates how HLT might be applied with a client who has been laid off after 20 years on the job.     

Assumptions Regarding Vocational Counseling

Vocational counseling interviews involve the client and counselor in viewing each other, as the term inter-view indicates. As counseling begins, counselor and client view each other's assumptions about the nature of counseling processes and outcomes. Clients have assumptions about the kind of help they need to make occupational choices, what they can expect of counselors, what they can expect from any tests used, what they may be asked to do, and what will occur in the total process. Counselors need to understand the kinds of results clients expect from vocational counseling. Many assumptions, when held by either clients or counselors, lead to client (and possibly counselor) dissatisfaction with counseling because the assumptions build false anticipations for the client. Essentially, both clients and counselors often expect more definite outcomes and less effort from each party than is reasonable. This paper is written to promote counselors' reflections on their own and their clients' vocational counseling assumptions.     

Integrating Relational Perspectives in Career Counseling Practice

Sweeping changes in the world of work are transforming the very fabric of career counseling practice as clients cope increasingly with work uncertainty, including unemployment, underemployment, and precarious work. The authors describe how relational perspectives (Blustein, 2011 ; Flum 2015 ; Richardson, 2012 ; Schultheiss, 2003 ) can be infused in career counseling, with a focus on the concerns of an increasingly stressed and anxious client population. To provide a framework for the application of relational perspectives, the authors integrate and present existing relational theories and frameworks in 4 tenets that have particular relevance for career counseling practice. An in‐depth case analysis is provided to illustrate how relational perspectives can be integrated in working with clients experiencing uncertain work and associated relational challenges.     

A Study of Clinical Change in Individual Career Counseling

This study examined the clinical significance of career counseling effects. Participants were 111 university students (83% women) who participated in individual career counseling sessions at their university. All participants completed the French version of the Outcome Questionnaire–30.2 (OQ‐30.2; Lambert, Finch, Okiishi, & Burlingame, 2005) immediately before the 1st session (pretest) and at the beginning of the last session (posttest). The OQ‐30.2 assesses 3 client life domains: subjective discomfort, problems in interpersonal relationships, and problems in social role satisfaction. Using Jacobson and Truax’s (1991) statistical approach to assessing clinical change, the authors compared clients’ pretest OQ‐30.2 scores with their posttest scores. Among clients with a “dysfunctional” score (n = 59) at the study’s inception, 34% recovered and 14% improved, whereas 41% of clients with functional scores (n = 52) at the study’s inception improved. The results suggest that individual career counseling can make a difference in the lives of many clients; they also highlight the importance of further outcome research that accounts for possible variability in clients’ responses to career counseling.     

The Independence of Aptitudes,Interests, and Career Beliefs

The importance of client beliefs in career counseling depends on their ability to add unique information about the client over and above that contributed by aptitudes and interests. The Career Beliefs Inventory was administered to 200 Australian students in grade 10 together with measures of Holland's RIASEC interest themes and scholastic aptitudes. The correlations between scales from the three domains showed clearly that beliefs made a contribution distinct from that provided by aptitudes and interests. Even though the results may reflect possible sampling or method variance, career beliefs in this sample added unique information to that traditionally used in career counseling.     

Mediating the Self: The Case of Sue

This article is a response to the case study presented by M. C. Rehfuss (2003) regarding a client, Sue, who is experiencing discord in her career as a mediator. A conceptualization of the client and additional areas for client exploration are presented. Five steps of a constructivist career counseling approach are applied to the case to assist Sue with experiencing optimal functioning in her career through her proactive commitment to her life theme of mediation.     

Constructivist and Social Constructionist Career Counseling: A Delphi Study

Constructivist and social constructionist (SC) career counseling approaches direct attention to individuals as authors who construct their identities and careers in relation with others. Often contrasted with positivist or modern approaches, distinguishing features of these relatively new approaches have not yet been explicitly identified. Panel members in this Delphi study comprised the 9 most‐cited authors on the topics of constructivist and SC career counseling, 8 of whom completed all 3 rounds of questionnaires. They offered views about definitions of constructivist and SC career counseling and identified distinguishing and essential features of these approaches in terms of theoretical underpinnings, counseling processes, client–counselor relationships, and range of applicability. The defining features and the range of applicability identified in this study may serve to guide practice, training, and supervision. A research agenda including development of fidelity measures and evaluation of the efficacy of these approaches is proposed. Controversial issues are discussed.     

The Past,Present, and Future of Career Counseling in Taiwan

The development of career counseling in Taiwan during the last 40 years suggests priorities for future development. Although many of the basic constructs of career counseling are used in Taiwan, cultural differences are also apparent. At the earliest stage of career development in Taiwan (1960–1980), career guidance was managed through vocational centers and government agencies. The focus was almost exclusively on school‐aged youth seeking employment. At the middle stage (1980–1990), the terms for career counseling were being translated into Chinese, and trained Career Counselors were returning from study abroad. The emphasis was primarily on educational systems. At the present stage (1990‐present), career counseling was provided to adults outside the school setting and corporations were organizing their own career counseling services. The future presents many conflicts between Western and Asian values, traditional or modern demands, and self or family interests. Technological advances in testing and information sciences provide opportunities and problems for career counselors.