Practice and research in career counseling and Development—2005

Career Development Quarterly, Dec, 2006 by Thomas F. Harrington, Theresa A. Harrigan

This article reviews professional literature published in 2005 related to career counseling and career development. The literature is divided into 4 broad areas: professional issues, career theory and concepts, career interventions and practice, and career assessment and technology. The authors summarize and discuss the implications of the findings for career counseling practice and research.

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Writing this review provided constant discovery. The career field is large, diverse, and specialized, and authors who contributed articles came from around the world. In fact, our search identified 40 education journals that included career articles but were not used in this review to enable us to concentrate on constructs central to the field. We followed the structure of the major topics within the four general areas that previous annual reviews adopted: professional issues, career theory and concepts, career interventions and practice, and career assessment and technology. These four areas provide continuity with previous annual reviews. The quantification process of key concepts that we adopted led to a weighting of topics and the eventual subheadings used in writing. Some articles covering several topics were integrated into a broader area to permit a more comprehensive treatment of a subject. Other articles were not included in the review. Eventually, we selected 190 articles.

We hand-searched the major career journals published in the United States: The Career Development Quarterly, Journal of Vocational Behavior, Journal of Career Development, Journal of Career Assessment, and Journal of Employment Counseling. We conducted a keyword search of all American Counseling Association (ACA) journals and of selected American Psychological Association (APA) journals. Included in this annual review are career-related articles from the Professional School Counseling, Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Development, Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, Journal of Counseling & Development, Counselor Education and Supervision, Journal of Counseling Psychology, The Counseling Psychologist, Journal of College Student Development, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of College Counseling, College Student Journal, and the Journal of Rehabilitation.

We conducted a literature search using the same career-related keywords in other social sciences, business, and education fields. Regarding the education field, 8 excellent career-specific articles were identified as were school administration and higher education journals that had poignant and significant contributions directly related to career development. Unfortunately, contributions from these 42 journals were not included in this review because of space limitations. We did include articles from Community, Work and Family; Journal of Family Issues; Human Resource Management Review; Journal of Organizational Behavior; Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology; Psychology Bulletin; Human Relations; Journal of Occupational Health Psychology; Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research; Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology; and Psychological Reports.

Reflecting the globalization of the career field, the following international journals were searched for keywords and included in the review: International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance, Canadian Journal of Counselling, Japanese Journal of Developmental Psychology, Career Development International (British), South African Journal of Psychology, British Journal of Guidance and Counselling, Perspectives in Education, Journal of Organizational Psychology, International Journal for the Advancement of Counseling, Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, and Journal of Youth Studies.

Professional Issues

Life Span Development

Youth. Hartung, Porfeli, and Vondracek asserted that childhood is a vital stage in career development. The focus of recent research has been on adolescence, overlooking experiences of childhood in life-span vocational psychology. They called on investigators to "study the gestalt of vocational development through inquiry that links developmental periods rather than isolates them piecemeal according to specific age periods" (Hartung et al., p. 411) and return attention to childhood influences on vocational development.

Hartung, Porfeli, et al. presented a comprehensive literature review as an impetus for childhood vocational development research. The review was organized across five dimensions: career exploration, career awareness, vocational expectations, vocational interests, and career maturity/adaptability. They examined each category from various perspectives including developmental progress, gender and self-role influences, race-ethnicity contextual factors, and psychological correlates. Conclusions from the review included the following: grade school children have a preliminary understanding of the concepts of interest and abilities, and they may explore the working world and state career aspirations (career exploration); young children (ages 3 to 5) demonstrate basic knowledge about occupations and occupational status and have attitudes, often stereotyped, about appropriate occupations (career awareness); children are aware of racial and socioeconomic class barriers to occupations, which leads to a widening gap between their aspirations and expectations (vocational expectations and aspirations); vocational interest patterns begin in childhood with age-related increases toward realistic interests (vocational interests); and children move from fantasy-based to reality-based orientations in career decision making as they near adolescence (career maturity).