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Career Intervention versus Career Counseling: A Definitional Dilemma

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The literature offers two definitions of career intervention: The first views career counseling as a variant of psychotherapy that is practiced in dyadic interactions between a counselor and a client, and invokes psychotherapy theory in an attempt to explain and improve client outcomes (Rounds & Tinsley, 1984). The second and more inclusive view of the career intervention process defines career intervention as any activity designed to improve an individual's ability to make improved career decisions. Williamson and Bordin (1941) promoted this restrictive position when they placed the following three constraints on their definition of career counseling:

  1. the efforts must be individualized;

  2. testing alone was not to be considered counseling; and



  3. counseling was not self-analysis, nor was it based upon interview data alone.
In the most restrictive dyadic sense, career counseling is practiced largely in college counseling centers and by a few private practitioners, which serve, respectively, a small number of college students or those adult clients who are able to pay for psychotherapeutic interventions. Counseling centers, normally overburdened with clients, are constantly looking for alternate ways to provide services that do not require one-to-one interventions. The costly nature of traditional career counseling led Lunneborg (1983) to conclude that although it was still productive, this form of intervention had simply become too expensive and therefore was unusable for centers with large constituencies. Time-limited therapy is common in these places, and diversification of the types of treatment is now a necessity, not an innovation. Oliver and Spokane (1988) likewise found that although individual counseling was more than twice as effective per hour as other forms of intervention, it was four times as expensive.

An additional and important problem with traditional one-to-one career counseling was outlined by L. S. Gottfredson (1986), who listed certain groups (e.g., racial minorities, women, and the handicapped) who are at high risk for developing career problems yet either cannot afford to pay premium prices for such assistance or are simply unlikely to seek it out. A final problem with psychotherapeutic models of career counseling is that they assume that there are no substantial differences between personal and career intervention other than the focus of the therapy. While there is certainly some overlap in the process and method of the two kinds of intervention, some differences between the two are also clear.

Misapplications of Psychotherapy Theory to Career Situations

A scattering of early articles considered career counseling to be a subset of psychotherapy (Bixler & Bixler, 1945) or social casework (Grumer, 1949), outlined some general principles of counseling (Dolliver 8c Nelson, 1975; Morrill 8c Forrest, 1970), or described career counseling as it was then practiced (Samler, 1953, 1966, 1968); an occasional piece delved more deeply into model building (Thompson, 1960). Most of these early efforts lacked the power to explain the change process in career counseling, however, and were difficult to relate to theories of career development. Yet since they failed to spawn full-fledged models or theories of career counseling, to fill the void career development theories were stretched for intervention implications. Because the development theories could not explain the counseling process, psychotherapy theories were thus invoked. Paterson (1964), for example, proposed a client-centered view of career counseling that largely ignored the reality of the labor market. Most recently Keller, Biggs, and Gysbers (1982) have applied cognitive theory, Dorn (in press) has applied social influence theory, and Watkins (1984) has applied Adlerian theory to career counseling. Although these extrapolations make some sense, the theories are borrowed rather than generated from career data, and the fit is rarely optimum, considering the uniqueness of the career situation. Only Bordin (1986) and Krumboltz and Thoresen (1964) have used psychotherapeutic theory (psychoanalytic and behavioral, respectively) with a visible or enduring impact on how career counseling is conducted.

Bordin, who applied psychoanalytic principles to career counseling, argued that clients could best confront career problems when anxiety was minimized. Career problems, according to Bordin, raised conflicts, which then produced substantial anxiety that interfered with the counseling process. This view was also offered by Pepinsky and Pepinsky (1954), and the role of anxiety in career decision making has since been confirmed several times (Mendonca 8c Siess, 1976).

Krumboltz's work, in which he used behavioral methods to stimulate information seeking, stands as one of the few successful attempts to build a career intervention model from actual situational requirements, even though his cognitive-behavioral prototype has the shortcomings of a purely cognitive model in which environmental constraints during career implementation are largely ignored. Krumboltz converted his early work into a theory of career development rather than of career intervention, thus providing more help to theorists than to counselors. Most recently, however, Krum-boltz (1983) has suggested that a personal private belief system may govern most career decisions and that these beliefs are not easily tapped by traditional methods. An integration of his latest work on private beliefs with the social learning model he described earlier (Krumboltz, 1976) should account for both environmental constraints and individual career behavior.

Most of the early efforts to find an acceptable therapeutic model of career counseling failed to provide coherent direction for practitioners, partly because of the misapplication of psychotherapy models to career situations and partly because of the restrictive view of career counseling as an intensive, dyadic interaction, a conceptualization that rarely reflected the focused, short-term reality of practice. Crites (1981) has thoroughly catalogued these efforts at model building, but although the structure he provided-trait-factor, client-centered, psychoanalytic, developmental, behavioral, and comprehensive models-is useful, the client-centered and psychoanalytic models share certain shortcomings that account for their failure to offer an acceptable model of career intervention (e.g., inattention to social constraints). The behavioral model shows promise but has not been fully fleshed out, and the developmental model applies well to some preventive and instructional interventions, but is difficult to use in individual and group settings.

Career interventions are rarely designed within the framework of a single theory (for a refreshing exception, see Healy, 1982). Crites's comprehensive prototype comes the closest to the current practical model, but his eclectic synthesis was more theoretical than practical; furthermore, its translation to counseling practice has not been easy for either students or professionals.
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