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Distinguishing Career Counseling From Psychotherapy

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Among the characteristics that have always distinguished career problems from personal or interpersonal problems, and, therefore, career counseling from psychotherapy, the four most critical are as follows:

  1. The social environment forces adjustments in individual career aspirations and impedes sharp changes in choice patterns.

  2. The principle of congruence (person-environment fit) is considered in some way in nearly all theories of career development.



  3. The public has come to inspect a special career intervention technology of interest inventories and computer interventions that is independent of most theory positions and results in a more structured and predictable course of intervention than is generally the case in psychotherapy.

  4. Career development proceeds both continuously and discontinuously, and requires certain critical choices at a predictable number of transition points (e.g., high school graduation), as well as the continuous formation of a vocational identity through a series of small but serial choices (Osipow, 1983).
These four differences between counseling and psychotherapy will be described in more detail below. When practiced as a dyadic intervention, career counseling overlaps with psychotherapy. The extent of overlap between the two is an important question for the field. Other career interventions, however, bear few similarities to psychotherapy. The parent theory bases differ in significant ways. On the other hand, the practice of career intervention without an understanding of the social psychology of career selection and implementation and the influence of lifestyle on careers (Gysbers & Moore, 1987) can result in a sterile and meaningless exercise for the client and for the counselor. We are just beginning to understand the overlap between career intervention and psychotherapy, but we should not overdraw the relationship at the expense of the unique contribution of career development theory and practice to modern psychology.

Career Intervention Broadly Defined

In contrast to the belief that career counseling is merely a subset of psychotherapy, a second and broader definition of career intervention is any activity designed to enhance an individual's ability to make improved career decisions (Fretz, 1981; Spokane & Oliver, 1983). This position recognizes that career counseling is too narrow a term to encompass the wide array of career strategies now in use, including short-term groups, classes, workshops, and self-guided inventories (Myers, 1986). The broader view is not without its problems, however. Since career intervention includes a large and diverse assortment of strategies, it is increasingly difficult to summarize and understand them well enough to predict their effects on the client (Lunneborg, 1983). Perhaps because of this practitioners have simply eclectically chosen those strategies that made sense for the client at hand, rather than developing a more systematic model of career intervention. This eclecticism in turn may have slowed the emergence of a practical model to guide counselor practice. Rounds and Tinsley (1984) argued that until the range of career intervention is narrowed, there will be little progress toward understanding the psychological processes underlying career counseling.

The full range of strategies offered in a hypothetical comprehensive counseling center (Bishop, 1979; Brandt, 1977) broadly defines career intervention. These interventions are ordered along two dimensions of treatment intensity; the amount of time invested by the counselor and the amount of time invested by the client. The treatment array was first implied by Magoon (1980), who noted that a complete array of interventions varying in the time investment required from both the client and the counselor would soon be offered in most comprehensive counseling centers. The system also owes a debt to Brandt (1977), who used three major classes of treatments (one to one, small group, and programmed self-instruction) and the developmental nature of the presenting problem (twelve possibilities) to organize the diverse array of career interventions offered in the typical college counseling center. Treatments that vary in intensity have also been found to vary in effectiveness (Oliver & Spokane, 1988), which shows the need for some selection according to the severity of the client's problem. The client may participate in brief career interventions by utilizing audiotapes, handouts, self-paced work stations, or the Self-Directed Search (Holland, 1985b) with no assistance from a counselor. The client may also elect to complete an intake process and be assigned to a counselor for a set number of one-to-one or group sessions. Other clients may take either semester-long classes or brief workshops.

To extend the prevailing narrow, dyadic view of career counseling, the NCDA formed a task force to identify a set of counselor competencies that would provide the broadest possible definition of career intervention and demonstrate the wide range of knowledge and expertise, leadership activities, and direct and indirect service that a career counselor might perform. The traditional psychotherapeutic definition of career intervention is wholly contained in the direct services component/ implementation cell. The NCDA competencies are an excellent diagnostic device for counselors who wish to expand their professional role or educate administrators about a more inclusive and appropriate role they themselves may serve.

Some Definitions

A few definitions may help clarify the specific nature of career intervention. The interpretation to be used in this volume follows that of Spokane and Oliver (1983), which states that a career intervention is "any treatment or effort intended to enhance an individual's career development or to enable the person to make better career-related decisions" (p. 100). We shall refer in this book to three principal career interventions-techniques, strategies, and programs-as defined below.

Career intervention: Any activity (treatment or effort) designed to enhance a person's career development or to enable that person to make more effective career decisions.

Technique: A time-limited application of career intervention principles designed to accomplish a focused goal or to alter a specific vocational behavior. A career life line and a vocational card sort are examples.

Strategy: A philosophy or plan of action, or a group of techniques intended to change the vocational behavior of an individual, group of individuals, or an organization. Career counseling of an individual by a single counselor is an example.

Program: An organized compilation of techniques or strategies with specific and well-defined objectives that is designed to alter systematically the vocational behavior of a group of individuals in a specific behavior setting (e.g., school, work, or community) over time.

Summary

Career interventions can be defined broadly as any direct assistance to an individual to promote more effective decision making, or more narrowly focused, intensive counseling to help resolve career difficulties. Several psychotherapy theories have been misapplied to the career counseling situation and ignore the four characteristics of career situations that differentiate career counseling from psychotherapy: forced adaptation by the social environment, person-environment fit, special career technology, and continuous and discontinuous development. There is a full range of career interventions that varies by level of both counselor and client investment of time and energy.
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