Knowledge-Information-Service Era Changes in Work and Education and the Changing Role of the School Counselor in Career Education

Career Development Quarterly, March, 2001 by Kenneth B. Hoyt, Pat Nellor Wickwire

The major reason this is important is that it provides a rationale and a vehicle for helping kindergarten to Grade 12 teachers change their behavior in ways aimed at increasing classroom productivity. Of all the possible ways of motivating teachers to participate in career education, none is likely to be as effective as convincing teachers that, if they use a "classroom-as-a-workplace" approach, pupils are likely to increase the amount they learn. Furthermore, unless and until classroom teachers change their behavior, it is highly doubtful that anything resembling education reform will take place.

Professional school counselors are among the best equipped of all educators to help classroom teachers adopt and implement this approach. The teaching-- learning process can be thought of as including two equally valuable components: (a) transmitting substantive material to pupils and (b) motivating pupils to learn that material. By helping teachers to change in both of these ways, counselors can make major contributions to education reform.

Need to Emphasize Importance of Work Values

The days when most persons made and maintained one occupational choice during their entire working lives are past. Instead, more and more workers are finding themselves displaced from their current occupations because of changes made in their employment organizations. Many such workers are unsuccessful in their attempts to find new employment calling for the same job skills. Instead, it is becoming more and more necessary for such persons to acquire other sets of specific occupational skills for success in other occupations (Drucker, 1994).

Some persons interpret this to mean that, when persons change occupations, they are, in effect, changing careers. Most career education advocates would reject that interpretation. Instead, they would look for the kinds of work values found in both the old and the new occupations. To the extent that similar work values are present, the transition from one occupation to another becomes easier and more effective.

The term work values is interpreted by most career education advocates to mean the set of values that makes a particular kind of work seem important and worthwhile to the individual--reasons why the individual devotes attention and energies to the work tasks in which he or she engages. Development of work values is best thought of as part of the maturation process for each person. People express their work values to others in many ways, sometimes through words and sometimes through actions. In any event, such values are typically stated as a set of reasons for working, expressed in terms of the nature of one's occupation and in terms of the benefits to the individual.

Examples of work values stated as reasons for wanting to work include the following:

* Work is a way for the individual to explain to others who he or she is.

* Work is a way for the individual to recognize why it is important he or she exists.

* Work is a way for the individual to have his or her importance recognized by others.