The field of Career counseling has gained increased recognition over the past several years and was developed to meet the needs of a society during the industrial age shift from rural to urban living and has extended its focus during other transitional periods of changes in how and where individuals work and live (Firman, 2014). Fundamental to career counseling movement is Frank Parsons, who is considered the father of the career guidance movement (Zunker, 2012).
Career development is considered a crucial aspect of life where an abundance of research has been conducted over the past years to explain its significance. Change is an inevitable part of life thus making it important for individuals to know and understand how their decisions affect their career choices. Individuals are constantly experiencing growth which ultimately results in them making changes in life. Accordingly, career development is viewed as a continuous process occurring from birth until death.
Many factors are hypothesized to contribute to individuals’ career choices in life, including environmental, personal, family, financial, economic and health related issues. Consequently, many theories and counseling models have been postulated to explain the field of career development counseling. Developmental theories, Social learning and cognitive theories as well as Person in environment perspectives focus on an individual’s unique development, according to stages and tasks, contextual interactions and learning experience (Zunker, 2012).
The Person in environment perspective assumes that individuals seek to achieve and maintain a positive relationship with their work environments (Zunker, 2012). It also postulates that clients’ concerns do not exist completely within themselves but instead are embedded in the person in environment experiences (Zunker, 2012). This allows counselors to obtain a life story from clients in order to understand their personal career and the direction of their vocational behavior (Zunker, 2012).
This will further enable counselors to determine how individual clients fit into the work role and how the work role fits into the client’s lifestyle (Zunker, 2012). Additionally, this will help to modify the client’s set of constructs, thus providing them with the autonomy of career development. In a class handout on chapter 3 of the text, “Career counseling: A holistic approach”, Zunker (2012), discusses five career counseling models, namely: Trait and factor; Person-environment fit; Developmental, Learning theory; Cognitive-Information processing; and Multicultural Career counseling for ethnic women.
Both Trait and factor and Person environment fit approaches involve cognitive and affective processes and incorporates clinical information and qualitative data in the appraisal process. Similarly, Person environment fit encompasses abilities test and a values questionnaire where ability and value patterns of occupations are compared with workers. Similarly, in my module 2 assignment discussion, I argued that the various theoretical underpinnings governing career counseling has either supported it as being a continuous or discontinuous process.
The Developmental model for instance, views career counseling as a continuous process, maintaining that individuals have different career development needs which must be met at the varying developmental life stages (Zunker, 2012). Equally, the Learning theory of career counseling is the most comprehensive approach and posits that each individual’s unique learning experiences over the life span are most influential in the career choice process (Zunker, 2012).
This is further substantiated by Erikson’s psychosocial stages of development theory which theorized that individuals have different conflicts that they must resolve as they go through each of eight stages from birth through death where unsuccessful resolvement results in negative outcomes. On the other hand, career counseling being a discontinuous process is supported by the Trait factor theory/Person environment fit which postulates that individuals’ traits are matched with specific occupations.
As a result of traits being stable characteristics, one could argue that the career counseling process is simplistic and short lived as it seeks to discover the person-environment fit to enhance self-knowledge and promote career selection (Zunker, 2012). Conversely, the Cognitive information processing approach model as a seven step sequence, is suitable for use with individuals, groups and curricular programs and necessitates a comprehensive understanding of cognitive information processing (Zunker, 2012).
Correspondingly, Multicultural career counseling model for ethnic women allows for a means of comparing techniques used to identify specific needs of a special group of clients and the methods and materials used in the counseling process (Zunker, 2012). Accordingly, from the read course material, the intake interview incorporated within career counseling includes identifying information, the presenting problem, current status information, health and medical information, health and medical information, family information, social/cultural issues, some career choice and career development information, and clients’ goals.
The discussion of self-reported information may provide important observations of clients’ current status. Assessments are used to assist clients in identifying careers and occupation based on their interests and skills and are usually derived from tools such as, Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), Values Inventory worksheet, Strong, Campbell and Career Compass Assessments. The MBTI was developed to assist clients in identifying their personality preferences, increase clients’ ability to work with others as part of a team and provide insight on ways to improve their professional relationships.
In my midterm essay entitled “How important is the application of a holistic approach to the success of career counseling and development? ” I provided a detailed look at the biopsychosocial model as use for a holistic approach. The biopsychosocial model, as an integrated approach, looks at the interaction of biological, social and psychological influences on clients’ behaviors. The biological influences identified as impacting one’s behavior include inherited genetic vulnerability, immune system response, nutritional deficiencies and biochemical imbalances (Zunker, 2012).
These biological influences could further lead to the onset of psychological disorders for predisposed clients as well as other health related problems. Also, clients’ psychological influences such as behaviors, emotions and cognitions ultimately affect their development where they may experience problems in different life roles as a result of increase vulnerability of a severe emotional reaction to stressful life events such as a job loss or death of a loved one (Zunker, 2012).
Other interacting psychological forces include distorted beliefs, poor self-concept and perceptions of isolation from peers (Zunker, 2012). According to Zunker (2012), “a client’s emotions and faulty cognitions are either reinforced or diminished in the interaction process that drives behaviors” (p. 120). Faulty cognitions lead to dysfunctional thinking, result in poor decision making, poor self-concept and low self-esteem, affect clients’ ability to work collaboratively with counselors and may lead to the onset of psychological disorders, all of which inhibits the career development process.
Within the social influences lies family and friends, life events, environment, social and religious organizations. Social pressure to succeed, lack of social support and prior social interactions experience could lead to the development of anxiety which may consume individuals thus destroying their ability to function optimally in all life roles (Zunker, 2012). Social vulnerability factors such as clients experience of being rejected by an authority figure inevitably affect career development.
Likewise, in my Scholarly paper “The Impact of Multiculturalism on Career Counseling”, a study done by Byars-Winston and Fouad (2006), sought to assess the importance of cultural factors and their impact on the multicultural value of career counseling from the perspective of a counselor. Byars- Winston et al. , (2006) further examined the Culturally Appropriate Career Counseling Model and offer an expansion of the model through incorporating metacognitive processes.
Culture is believed to play a significant role in individuals’ career decision making, but the extent to which it does remains unknown. It is therefore imperative that career counselors try to understand clients’ concerns within their cultural context in an attempt to better understand how the differences in experiences affect their development and career choices or the limitation thereof.
For career counselors to incorporate effective interventions when working with racial and ethnic minorities, they have to include the life experiences, worldview, and multiple identities of the client into identifying problems and in formulating interventions. Conversely, legal and ethical issues exist in career counseling and can occur when counselors who are not competent in using specific assessments and instruments, administer them to clients, displays poor judgement, lack knowledge of professional organizational standards, and does not employ culture centered approaches in their practice.
Best practice within this competency implies, familiarizing self with legal and ethical guidelines for the field, making responsible decisions regarding use of and suitability of career assessment instruments, having competency of basic tenets incorporated in each theory and using only ones you are able to execute well, and become familiar with diversity and multicultural issues that are common to the field of career counseling. Integral to meeting the competency being discussed were discussion board assignments, essays, scholarly papers and course readings for the course Career counseling.
I really enjoyed pursuing the online course career counseling as I felt I was able to obtain a wealth of knowledge from it as it is an area prior to completing this degree, I had limited information and understanding in. Despite meeting the requirements for this competency, I believe competency specific materials were limited and affected my ability to establish complete competency in this section. Moving forward, I would love to develop a more profound knowledge of assessment tools and techniques employed within the field of career counseling.