Client-Centered Career Counseling

The model for this approach to career counseling stems only indirectly and by inference from the more general system of psychotherapy proposed by Rogers (1942; 1951). In the latter, Rogers had little to say about career decision-making processes, his concern being primarily with the emotional-social adjustment and functioning of the person. Some client-centered counselors (for example, Arbuckle, 1961; Doleys, 1961) have contended that, if a client becomes well-adjusted psychologically, then he/she will be able to solve whatever career problems are encountered without specifically attending to them in career counseling. Other counselors of a client-centered bent, however, have recognized that, although general and vocational adjustment are related, the correlation is less than perfect (Crites, 1969), and thus a separate focus upon career choices can be justified. During the early years of client-centered counseling (the 1940s), when trait-and-factor counselors were attempting to reconcile and synthesize its principles and procedures with established techniques, several extrapolations from the newer approach to traditional career counseling were made (for example, Bixler and Bixler, 1945; Covner, 1947; Combs, 1947; Bown, 1947; Seeman, 1948). There ensued a heated controversy in which the relative merits of the "directive" and "non-directive" orientations were debated loud and long, with seemingly no immediate resolution other than a contrived and tenuous eclecticism awkwardly known as "non-directive" career counseling (Hahn and Kendall, 1947). Not until almost two decades later was an articulate and comprehensive statement of client-centered career counseling formulated by Patterson (1964), although it had been presaged by Super's (1950; 1951,1957) writings on the self-concept and career development. It is primarily Patterson's conceptualization which is drawn upon in explicating the client-centered position on diagnosis, process and outcomes:

1.    Diagnosis. Of all the concepts on which directive and nondirective counselors differed, the divergence in their viewpoints was probably greatest on diagnosis. Whereas diagnosis was the fulcrum of the trait-and-factor approach, it was eschewed by Rogers (1942) as potentially disruptive of the client-counselor relationship:

"When the counselor assumes the information-getting attitude which is necessary for the assembling of a good case history, the client cannot help feeling that the responsibility for the solution of his problems is being taken over by the counselor."



Similarly, although he does not discuss diagnosis directly, Patterson (1964) subscribes to this point-of-view when he states that "the client-centered counselor does not deal differently with a client who has a vocational problem and one who has any other kind of problem." Yet, he argues that career counseling can be distinguished from other types of counseling because it focuses "upon a particular area or problem-in an individual's life" (Patterson, 1964) and facilitates the "handling" of it. Thus, he implies that some determination is made whether a client has a "vocational" problem, but he does not consider this a diagnosis.

2.    Process. Patterson (1964) refers generally to the "process" of client-centered career counseling but neglects to analyze it into distinct stages or phases as does Rogers (1961) for psychotherapy. Extrapolating from the latter, however, as well as from empirical research, it can be inferred that vocational clients enter career counseling at a stage of "experiencing" roughly equivalent to that at which personal clients leave psychotherapy. This is the sixth stage in experiencing, during which a higher level of congruence is achieved by the client, so that he/she "owns" feelings and problems rather than externalizing them: "The client is living, subjectively, a phase of his problem. It is not an object" (Rogers, 1961, p. 150). Clinical impressions of vocational clients, in addition to findings on their general adjustment status (Gaudet and Kulick, 1954; Goodstein, Crites, Heilbrun and Rempel, 1961), suggest that they have reached this stage, on the average, before they start career counseling. Corroboration also comes from a study by Williams (1962), in which he obtained Q-adjustment scores on vocational-educational clients and compared them with [personal] clients from Dymond's (1954) research on client-centered psychotherapy, the pre-counseling mean of the former being 50.53 and the post-counseling mean of the latter being 49.30. From these findings, Williams (1962) concluded that "the adjustment level of personal clients following counseling is approximately that of [vocational-educational] clients before counseling..." Since the vocational-educational clients' post-counseling mean was 58.76, indicating a still higher level of adjustment, it would appear that career counseling largely encompasses the seventh (and highest) stage in Rogers' (1961) schema of counseling process. Patterson (1973) describes this stage thusly: "The client experiences new feelings with immediacy and richness and uses them as referents for knowing who he is, what he wants, and what his attitudes are... Since all the elements of experience are available to awareness, there is the experiencing of real and effective choice."

3.    Outcomes. Implicit in this conceptualization of process are the assumed outcomes of client-centered career counseling. Grummon (1972) notes that:

It is difficult to distinguish clearly between process and outcomes. When we study outcomes directly, we examine the differences between two sets of observations made at the beginning and end of the interview series. Many process studies make successive observations over a series of counseling interviews and, in a sense, are miniature outcome measures which establish a trend line for the case.

At each point along this line and as the overall outcome, the goal in client-centered psychotherapy is reorganization of the self: the client is more congruent, more open to his experience, less defensive (Rogers, 1959). In client-centered career counseling, however, the "successful resolution of many educational and vocational problems (as well as other presenting problems) does not require a reorganization of self". Rather, the goal is to facilitate the clarification and implementation of the self-concept in a compatible occupational role, at whatever point on the continuum of career development the client is. Patterson (1964) cites Super's (1957) revision of the NVGA definition of "vocational guidance" as delineating the desired outcomes of client-centered career counseling:

It is the process of helping a person to develop and accept an integrated picture of himself and of his role in the world of work, to test this concept against reality, and to convert it into reality, with satisfaction to himself and benefit to society.

The methods by which these outcomes are attained presume certain basic attitudes on the part of the counselor. Much as Rogers (1957) emphasized such co-native dispositions as necessary for successful client-centered psychotherapy, so Patterson (1964) has observed that the client-centered approach to career counseling is "essentially an attitude rather than a technique."