Studies repeatedly show that career assistance has been the major concern of adolescents and young adults for decades. A recent poll revealed that nearly one in two American workers felt significant job-related stress, and believed that their skills and abilities were not being well used in their current job. Clinical career intervention with adults is now becoming part of community mental health programs. University career development centers frequently offer assistance to the public on a fee-for-service basis, and there are numerous private career counselors. This emerging adult clientele, combined with the adolescent and college-age populations traditionally served, has produced numbers large enough to warrant increases professional attention. The career problems of adults, however, are often more complex than those of adolescents, and may overlap with mental health concerns.
The issue of careers began to attract serious attention from psychologists, sociologists, and counselors at the turn of the twentieth century, when focus was on the study of vocational interests and development on the one hand and on career intervention or counseling on the other. Parson's (1909) classic On Choosing a Vocation and a later, little-known work by Fryer (1925), Vocational Self-Guidance, chronicled the ambitious efforts of social reformers who counseled adolescents (usually males) concerning their career choices. From 1900 through the 1960s, most of the effort in the career field was devoted to the measurement of interests, and the analysis of career patterns and development. The research focused on empirical studies of career development theory rather than on counseling process or outcome, although one or two stalwarts still wrote about career counseling (Samler, 1953; Thompson, 1960). From 1960 to 1980, however, the number of counselors and counseling psychologists in the United States increased, and many of them defined career counseling as their principal role. The sheer weight of career clients forced a shift in the literature on careers away from theory and toward more practical interventions.
There is some indication of a leveling off of interest in career counseling among counseling psychologists in the 1980s (Fitzgerald & Oslpow, 1986; Pinkney & Jacobs, 1985), but because other professionals (e.g., social workers, clinical psychologists, and human resource managers) now consider career development to be their specialty, a sizable professional core with an interest in career psychology has been maintained. The relative decline of interest in career issues among counseling psychologists is troublesome and may result in part from their frustration at having to try to apply thirty-year-old models and practices in their daily work with clients, since the clinical literature has long been practically dormant.
New perspectives on career counseling as a mental health intervention have recently revived interest in questions of clinical practice. In the last eight to ten years, theorists and researchers have refocused their attention on the practice and outcomes of career counseling (Spokane 8c Oliver, 1983). To some degree the steady increase in the number of published outcome research studies of career intervention reflects greater professional interest and perhaps treatment volume. Although we have no reliable estimates of the actual numbers of clients being served by career professionals, the NCDA (1988) poll does indicate a potentially high demand for services.
This increased attention on the practice and process of career intervention should result in more attractive and relevant models for use in clinic; practice, and several books on the subject have recently appeared articles on difficult cases are excellent examples of the application c recent advances in theory and research to specific client problems. The case study approach has also produced interesting findings about the counseling process.
There is much room for improvement, however. Unfortunately, recent volumes on career counseling vary so widely in content and coverage that readers may wonder if different authors are describing the same general domain of behavior. A review of four recent books (Osipow, 1988) suggest; that the approaches offered have little empirical underpinning. Additionally many of the best and most active researchers, most of whom are also practicing counselors, still conduct basic empirical studies of career development to earn tenure or increase their professional standing, rather than writing about their actual interventions with clients. Figler (1984) has stated that career counselors must define themselves by delineating the overlap between psychotherapy and career counseling, clearly establishing their own knowledge base and standards of practice, sharing intervention methods, and defining successful intervention and outcome.
Ginzberg (1984) observed that although some vocational practitioners may operate under implicit theories, these theories are hard to verify, and it is unlikely that any two practitioners use the same theory. Some career counselors are apologetic or defensive because they feel their methods are untested, and they are reluctant to talk about, much less write about, their practices. In a particularly inflammatory statement about the utility of career counseling, Baumgardner (1977) criticized its scientific basis. Responses to his allegations were unduly defensive, but in 1977 the data did not exist to rebut his charges directly. As this volume will show, the data are now available. There is a problem, however, when counselors do not publicly describe their practices and scientists write but rarely counsel. The result is a separation of science and practice that fuels charges of unsystematic and non-scientific procedures. The scientist cannot draw upon the counselor's wisdom, and the counselor does not find the scientific literature relevant. Neither benefits from the other and the client benefits least of all. In their search for practical strategies, counselors rather simplistically extract what they consider to be the essence of a theory (Spokane, 1985), but in the process lose the chance to enhance their clinical work with a model sufficiently complex to suit the difficult cases they encounter.
