Career counseling in the future: constructing, collaborating, advocating - Career Counseling in the Next Decade

Career Development Quarterly, Sept, 2003 by Mei Tang

Career counseling seems to overwhelmingly target college students and to a lesser degree high school students. The centrality of career development across the entire life span is missing from the current research and practice in the field (Vondracek, 2001). The early and late portions of the life span in relation to career development have been poorly understood (Swanson, 1992). Career education is integrated more often into the curriculum at the middle school and high school level but is very rarely included at the elementary school level. The needs of older individuals and the postretirement population are neglected (Vondracek, 2001); information and resources for providing career counseling services to this populations are sparse at best.

Whenever I have asked the students in my career development class how many of them had visited the guidance office in their high schools or the career development center (or counseling center) in their colleges for career counseling services, most of them have answered that they have never done so or sometimes have not even known where the career development center was located. For those who have received service, all they remember is that they were given some types of assessment, and, most often, they do not remember the results or the meaning of them. Underutilization of services and inadequate service seem to be the other two issues that our profession needs to address. University career centers have played an important role in helping undecided students to select a major, but is that enough? Absolutely not. Holland (1996) criticized the insensitivity to clients' career aspirations: "Some counselors don't appear to listen to a client's goals and proceed instead to confront or administer treatments designed to change a person's aspiration without getting informed consent or understanding" (p.3). Making a career decision is simple, but implementing a career choice involves much more, as Krumboltz said in an interview by Feller, Honaker, and Zagzebski (2001).

Double-Edged Sword: External Threats and Opportunities for Career Counseling

In this section, I analyze the external threats to career counseling. I believe that a threat can be turned into an opportunity if addressed. The Chinese character for "crisis" encompasses the meaning of danger and opportunity in one symbol; thus, I discuss the threats and opportunities together.

The changing economy provides both threats and opportunities for career counseling in the future. First, the change in occupational structure and labor demands makes it difficult for career counselors to rely solely on the conventional classification system of job clusters. A great many new occupations require that workers combine traits in a different way than has traditionally been done, possess more adaptive skills, and have the ability to learn quickly to adjust to new environments. The new occupational classification system that will replace the Dictionary of Occupational Titles and incorporate the changes that are occurring in the world of work is yet to be developed and refined (G. D. Gottfredson, 2001). Helping clients understand the relationship between personal traits and environmental requirements is no longer as simple as it once was. Second, today's workforce has witnessed a great change in its composition in the last two decades, and the trend is that the workforce will continue to be diversified, with more women and members of minority groups entering the labor force. The growing but still sparse literature about the career development of people from different cultural backgrounds only provides a very general framework that calls for career practitioners to be mindful of the impact of cultural differences on people's vocational behavior (Leong & Brown, 1995). Career counselors are still not sure exactly how they should intervene in regard to the problems these groups of people face. Moreover, it remains uncertain exactly what the impact is of a more diverse workforce on the work setting for each individual. Third, another social and economic change is the globalization of the economy. With more international companies and even small businesses constantly looking for opportunities to reduce costs--including downsizing and relocation of companies to take advantage of cheap labor--it becomes harder to achieve and maintain work stability. Stress derived from instability and the lack of lifetime employment (Stoltz-Loike, 1996) for individual workers is an emerging theme for the career counseling profession. The global economy also means that career counseling must have cross-cultural validation and an international focus.