The average Job Club participant started work in fourteen days, compared with fifty-three days for the matched control group. Ninety percent of the participants had jobs after two months, compared with 55 percent of the controls. Participants also earned an average of $2.73 per hour, compared with $2.01 for the no-treatment controls. The cost of the program was only $20 per client, not including professional time. Although Azrin et al included in their calculations only those participants who did not drop out before five sessions, thus confounding client motivation with treatment success, the results are still quite remarkable.
In a second study, Azrin and Philip (1979) compared the Job Club procedure with a standard rehabilitation program to promote job seeking.
In a larger-scale study, Azrin et al (1980) randomly assigned one-thousand welfare clients from minority and at risk populations to either a Job Club or the usual services as a control. After twelve months, 80 percent of the Job Club participants had jobs, compared with 59 percent of the controls. Costs per placement were $167, but again it was difficult to know how dropouts were treated. Nonetheless, success of this magnitude with nontraditional clients is virtually unprecedented in the field of career intervention. Another study (Azrin et al., 1982) further documented the effectiveness of the Job Club. Data of this magnitude and thoroughness are rare indeed.
The Clinical Application of Job Search Methods
In spite of the evidence favoring a highly structured job search, most clients will initially avoid systematic methods and rely on informal approaches. This is so in part because of time pressure to implement a decision and in part because of the anxiety (and therefore avoidance) that the initiation of the search generates. Informal methods have a firm place among search techniques, but through avoidance behavior may be used to the exclusion of other methods, as the following excerpt from a case illustrates. The client, Donna, is very unhappy in her present job in retail sales administration; she has extensive, successful writing and presentation background, and feels a great sense of urgency about leaving. We had narrowed alternatives to several traveling sales positions. The job under consideration during the session from which this excerpt was taken was in pharmaceutical sales. As the passage illustrates, having to write even a simple cover letter produced enough anxiety to cause Donna to avoid the task. Thus we composed the letter during the session:
COUNSELOR: Do you have access to a typewriter?
CLIENT: I have a friend who does word processing. When you send stuff out for this pharmaceutical job, do you have to send out a cover letter?
COUNSELOR: Yes.
CLIENT: That's a problem; I haven't spoken to you about writing them.
COUNSELOR: Well, let's write a cover letter after we've finished this, O.K.?
CLIENT: I hate to write; well, eventually I'll have to get into this. I know what I want to say in my head, but what gets down on paper just doesn't mesh.
Even though Donna knew she had to engage in an aggressive job search, she avoided any structured behaviors, instead favoring informal sources (e.g., friends and acquaintances), where the possibility for rejection or failure seemed lower. Indeed, in spite of vigorous attempts to persuade her to do otherwise, Donna accepted a job on a tip from a friend that had little relationship to the areas we had discussed during our sessions.
In summary, although informal methods are the most commonly used search strategies, they are by no means universally effective. Highly assertive methods, which are appropriate in some situations, are also inappropriate in others. Perhaps the best technique is a hybrid search composed of formal and informal methods, but with a careful analysis of the barriers and problems in the market one is trying to enter. This analysis is the element of success in Azrin's Job Club: a careful study of the behaviors likely to lead to a successful job search and a systematic intervention to insure a high rate of those behaviors.
Future Possibilities in the Study of Career Information Retrieval
The proportion of professional effort devoted to problems in career information acquisition and processing, and to subsequent search behaviors is very small, considering their importance to the quality of clients' decisions. There are many more studies of counseling techniques and interventions, yet comparatively few on basic processes such as search and information. There are a few bright lights on the horizon, however. If clients do act as personal scientists in formulating and testing career-relevant hypotheses (Blustein & Strohmer, 1987), then it should be possible to study the process by which they form and evaluate their options. Further, a recent book by Vondracek, Lerner, and Schulenberg (1986) drew heavily on the work of J. J. and E.J. Gibson on the psychology of perception. J. J. Gibson (1966) argued that the visual world is scanned for information and that to an extent visual systems had to be self-guided to "home in" on visual information. An individual's perceptual field (environment) becomes increasingly differentiated as that person learns what to attend to and what to ignore. Each object in the perceptual field has a certain affordance-or whatever the perceiver presumes the environment will offer, good or bad-associated with it that links the perception to the action that follows it (E.J. Gibson, 1988). Perceiving, according to E.J. Gibson, is "active, a process of obtaining information about the world. We don't simply see, we look". The environment makes demands upon an individual that require action for survival. The individual must draw information from the array presented and use it to shape insights and to direct actions toward survival. In career decision making, much the same situation pertains. To the degree that career choice influences survival, much is at stake in these decisions. Developing a science of career information is an essential next step in the survival of a scientific approach to career intervention.
Several seemingly disparate programs of empirical research-information-seeking, cognitive complexity, differentiation and integration of cognitive structures, personal hypothesis testing, and realistic preview--all portray the information--gathering and retrieval process as a complex person-environment transaction with a quasi scientific basis, rather than a simple assimilation of commercially available sources of information. Recommendations to promote information retrieval have been discussed, as well as the few formal approaches to information and job search that now exist.
