Chapter 11 - Career Counseling

Chapter 11

Career Counseling

© 2015. Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.

Career Counseling History

• Historically, career development has been the principal domain of counselors.

• It is through the process and techniques of vocational guidance that the counseling profession was first introduced and implemented in numerous settings. In recent years, how-ever, there has been a gradual yet perceptible shift in emphasis from vocational issues to more personal and emotional concerns (Andersen & Vandehey, 2012).


Career Counseling History

• Career decisions are also looked at in a much broader developmental, relational context (Phillips, Christopher-Sisk, & Gravino, 2001; Schultheiss, 2003), and with a more culturally responsive focus (Flores & Heppner, 2002; Niles & Harris-Bowlsbey, 2012).


Think About Your Own Career Journey

• You are studying to be a counselor and, as such, there are many side effects, ripple effects, and consequences as a result of this choice.

• Certain financial resources are sacrificed to pursue this dream, monies that could be spent elsewhere. Your family and friends are also included as part of this journey, whether they wish to be or not.


Think About Your Own Career Journey

• As you learn and grow and make changes in the ways you think and behave, the effects have far-reaching impact on all your other relationships.

• It would thus be impossible to talk to you only about your ultimate career aspirations without delving into your relationships, your family, your financial situation, your personal values, and what gives your life meaning.


Career Counseling IS Counseling

• In spite of the changes taking place in the field, there is still a myth among many counselors that “real” counseling is personal/emotional and that vocational/ career counseling is somehow a second-class cousin that requires fewer skills and is more “routine.”

• This attitude is not only false but dangerous.


Vocational Chaos

• Individuals who experience vocational chaos (such as unemployment, underemployment, and job dissatisfaction) report high stress, relationship difficulties, and low self-esteem.

• Feelings of uncertainty, anxiety, and fear often associated with these changes.


Everyone Works

• Some receive financial remuneration for their efforts—they sell their time and talent.

• Others work for internal rewards or receive other forms of compensation by way of a cooperative division of labor.


Everyone Works

• Even the children are working—mastering new skills, taking in new knowledge. They may sometimes work in places called play-grounds, but we are not for a moment deceived that these little people are not laboring away at their age-related developmental tasks. They are working their bodies, testing their minds, and learning about cooperation, competition, and million other things they will later find useful after they “grow up” and work in a “real” job.


Benefits of Vocation

• Vocation is very much tied into their sense of identity, self-image, and self-worth.

• Jobs are a measure of status, a major object of devotion of one’s time and energy.

• They are a testing ground for skills and information that have been accumulated over a lifetime.

• They are the source of many friendships.


Satisfaction or Dissatisfaction• People who are satisfied in their work are those

who are often most content with their lives.• Lonely, depressed, anxious, problem-ridden

people—those who seek a counselor’s help—are often those who are not content with their life’s work.

• Career frustration, job stress, and discontent with one’s decisions and current vocational development are thus major preoccupations for many people and therefore a significant part of a counselor’s work.


Some Objectives For The Counselor

• Developmental problems such as career immaturity are resolved by exploring the client’s interests and career alternatives and applying decision-making strategies.

• Situational problems such as job stress are worked on within the context of a supportive, problem-solving relationship to develop alternative responses.


Some Objectives For The Counselor

• Chronic problems such as psychological dysfunctions are resolved in longer-term counseling to initiate more extensive personality changes.


Self-Exploration: What Does The Client Want/Wish?

• long vacations • opportunities for advancement • big money • security • variety of tasks • friendly coworkers • creative opportunities



• physically active • flexible hours • lots of responsibility • status • independence • minimum of pressure



• benevolent boss • power • chance to help people


The World of Work

• The Occupational Information Network or O*Net (www.onetcenter.org), the online service developed for the U.S. Department of Labor, lists 977 job titles.

• Occupations can be searched using six different descriptors (worker characteristics, worker requirements, experience requirements, occupation-specific information, workforce characteristics, and occupational requirements).


The World of Work

• High-growth professions can be accessed separately, with a full array of data regarding growth projections. Every job in the database can be examined in great detail, helping the searcher eventually narrow down the choices to realistic possibilities.

• How many of you have looked up this profession? If so, what did you find out?


What To Teach The Client

• Decision making skills: People must learn to make quality decisions about when and how they should initiate career changes.

• Employable Skills: The goal of all career-counseling efforts ought to be to provide skills for making and implementing decisions throughout the lifetime.


What To Teach The Client

• Life-Coaching Expectations: The coach functions less like a therapist and much more like a personal trainer, consultant, and mentor. Very specific goals are identified. Action plans are set in motion. Rather than waiting on the sidelines for the weekly report he coach follows up progress via the telephone, Internet, and personal visits.


Approaches to Career Counseling

• How do people make career choices? • Which variables are most influential in making

career decisions? • What parts do genetics, the environment, and

cognitive and emotional responses play in career development?


Approaches to Career Counseling

• What makes some people happy and others so miserable in their work?

• How does work fit within the larger context of life satisfaction?

• What roles ought counseling to play in the shaping of career development?


Super’s Contribution

1.People differ in their abilities, interests, and personalities.2.They are qualified, by virtue of these circumstances, for a number of occupations.



3.Each of these occupations requires a characteristic pattern of abilities, interests, and personality traits, with tolerances wide enough to allow both variety of occupations for each individual and variety of individuals in each occupation.



4.Vocational preferences, competencies, situations, and self-concepts change with time and experience, making choice and adjustment a continuous process. 5.This process may be summed up in a series of life stages, characterized as those of growth, exploration, establishment, maintenance, and decline.



6.The nature of the career pattern (i.e., the occupational level attained and the sequence, frequency, and duration of trial and stable jobs) is detected by the individual’s parental socioeconomic level, mental ability, and personality characteristics, as well as by the opportunities to which he or she is exposed.


Super’s Stages

• The pattern of development begins during adolescence with the exploratory stage, in which a person uses fantasy, play, and role experimentation to help clarify the emerging self-concept and moves tentatively onward in the early 20s to a first job.


Super’s Stages

• The establishment stage, through experimenting and trying out various options, helps the person to discover an occupation well suited to satisfy personal needs.

• The self-concept adjusts to fit the stabilized career choice. Stability may or may not last into the maintenance stage.


Holland’s Contribution

• Individuals can be categorized into six different personality types—realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, or conventional—depending on interests, preferences, and skills.

• Environment can also be classified into the same six types and tends to be dominated by compatible personalities.


Holland’s Contribution

• People search for environments in which their personality type can be comfortably expressed; artistic people search for artistic environments, whereas social people look for social environments. The behavior of an individual is determined by the interaction between personality type and environmental characteristics.


Holland’s Personality Types

• Realistic. This person is logical, objective, and forthright. Preference is given to dimensions such as physical prowess, aggression, and domination.

• Investigative. By relying on intelligence and cognitive skills, this personality type is a problem solver.

• Artistic. This is a sensitive, impulsive, creative, emotional, independent, and nonconforming individual who values cultural activities and aesthetic qualities.


Personality Types Continued

• Social. This person is highly skilled at dealing with other people.

• Enterprising. This person uses highly refined verbal skills for leadership and sales professions such as marketing, business, and politics.

• Conventional. This type of person prefers activities that are routine, structured, and practical.


Roe’s Contribution

The family’s interaction:1)emotional concentration on the child, 2)avoidance of the child, or3)acceptance of the child.


Roe’s Contribution

vocational behavior can be coined as•Loving•neglecting•Rejecting •overprotective•over demanding •casual


Mitchell & Krumboltz’s Contributions

• Career decisions should be based not only on present interests and abilities but also on others that can be developed.

• Structured learning experiences can be customized for clients so that they can expand the range of their choices and opportunities.

• Efforts should be undertaken to prepare people for a changing world in which new skills and abilities will need to be developed.


Mitchell & Krumboltz’s Contributions

• Career counseling should be integrated into all counseling efforts rather than just restricted to occupational choices.

• Cognitive restructuring methods should be employed to help people to think differently about their choices and situations.


Gottfredson’s Contribution

• Stage 1: Orientation to Size and Power (ages 3–5). In the first stage, children are learning through observation about play and adult occupational activities.

• Stage 2: Orientation to Sex Roles (ages 6–8) n this stage, children begin the process of sex-role stereotyping and reject career options that appear incompatible with their own gender.



• Stage 3: Orientation to Social Valuation (ages 9–13). As children’s cognitive processing becomes increasingly abstract, they are also becoming sensitive to issues of prestige and social class, and which occupations are associated with status among adults.



• Stage 4: Orientation to the Internal, Unique Self (age 14 and older). At this stage, the decision-making process shifts from narrowing down choices to reflecting on which occupations match one’s emerging sense of identity, abilities, interests, and values.


Client’s Tasks (Campbell & Ungar, 2004)

• Explore dominant story lines and preferred futures.

• Develop flexible goals that reflect positive uncertainty. There is never one way to achieve a life goal, or, as narrative counselors would put it, write the next chapter in your own story.


Client’s Tasks (Campbell & Ungar, 2004)

• Explore creative ways of integrating seemingly multiple and conflicting discourses.

• Develop a contingency plan of the alternative paths available for reaching their preferred futures. Knowing that clients will most likely need to take a variety.


Career Education

• Every learning experience has career implications.

• Skill training is necessary for entry into an occupation.

• Cognitive and experiential ways must be provided in order for students to understand work-oriented values.


Career Education

• Opportunities must be provided for observing work environments. Individuals must have the opportunity to develop experiences and knowledge about the world of work..

• The interrelationships among home, family, community, and societal values should be identified.


Steps

• Define the problem.• Finding and using information. • Creating alternatives. • Developing plans. • Implementing plans. • Know the trends• Know the changes in the workplace


Counseling The Unemployed

• Teach relaxation techniques to reduce the stress of being out of work or looking for jobs in a scarce market.

• Explore with clients where their meaning and identity come from, helping them to differentiate the meaning that comes from career versus from family or other important life pursuits.



• Attend to their marital/partnership and family relationships, which are frequently stressed during difficult economic periods. If families are unable to provide social support, facilitate their finding other sources of community and connection.

• Help them develop effective coping strategies and monitor the potential for self-destructive coping (e.g., substance abuse).



• Facilitate the expression of grief, as they come to terms with the reality of career loss.


Vocational Considerations

• Development through the life stages can be guided partly by facilitating the process of maturation of abilities and interests and partly by aiding in reality testing and in the development of the self-concept.



• The process of vocational development is essentially that of developing and implementing a self-concept; it is a compromise process in which the self-concept is a product of the interaction of inherited aptitudes, neural and endocrine makeup, opportunity to play various roles, and evaluation of the extent to which the results of role-playing meet with approval of superiors and peers.



• The process of compromise between individual and social factors, and between self-concept and reality, is one of role-playing, whether the role is played in fantasy, in the counseling interview, or in real-life activities such as school classes, clubs, part-time work, and entry jobs.



• Work satisfaction and life satisfaction depend on the extent to which the individual finds adequate outlets for abilities, interests, personality traits, and values; they also depend on establishment in a work situation and a satisfying way of life.


Don’t Forget Technology!

• Counselors need to have knowledge of the various computer-based guidance and information systems as well as the services available on the Internet.

• Counselors need to know the standards by which such systems and services are evaluated (by organizations like the NCDA).


Don’t Forget Technology!

• Counselors must be able to ensure that computer-assisted guidance is conducted ethically.

• Counselors need to discern which clients are likely to profit from computer-assisted guidance.

• Counselors must be able to evaluate and select computer guidance systems that meet local needs (NCDA, 2009).


Chapter 11 - Career Counseling

Education

Transcript of Chapter 11 - Career Counseling