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Career Counseling: Introduction

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Concurrent with the development of vocational psychology as a scientific discipline (Crites, 1969), there has emerged during the past half century the related yet distinct practice earlier known as vocational guidance and more widely called career counseling. More precisely, a historical survey of vocational guidance and career counseling reveals not one but several different approaches to assisting individuals with their choice of a life's work. Dating from Parson's (1909) tripartite model for "choosing a vocation," the trait-and-factor approach to career counseling dominated the field during the 1930s and 1940s. In the latter decade, however, its tenets were seriously questioned by Rogers' (1942) system of nondirective or client-centered counseling as applied to career decision making (Covner, 1947; Combs, 1947). By the fifties, still another orientation to career counseling was being articulated within the conceptual framework of psychoanalytic theory (Bordin, 1955) and exemplified by case studies (Cautela, 1959). Embracing elements from each of these but embellishing them with concepts and principles drawn from developmental psychology, Super (1957) proposed a broadly based developmental approach to career counseling in which decision making is viewed as an ongoing, life-long process. Most recently in the history of career counseling, the focus has been upon the application of behavioral principles to the analysis and modification of information-seeking and other decisional behaviors (Krumboltz and Thoreson, 1969).

Substantive statements of each of these approaches are available to the career counselor but nowhere are they collectively compared and contrasted. Nor have they been critically analyzed across common dimensions of theory and technique to identify their relative strengths and weaknesses, so that their strengths might be synthesized to provide a conceptual and experiential basis for formulating a comprehensive approach to career counseling. Indeed it would appear that now, possibly more than ever before, there is a need for comprehensive counseling maximally applicable to idiosyncratic combinations of counselors and clients in a great variety of settings. Given the contemporary emphasis upon career education, with one of its principal objectives being the facilitation of career development, career counseling appropriate to students at any and all grade levels in the elementary and secondary schools assumes critical proportions. At the same time, in many colleges and universities across the nation, recent surveys have established that, in this period of job scarcity and hard money, the psychological service students request more than any other is career counseling. The Army and Air Force, too, have felt the need to institute transitional career counseling programs for returning and retiring servicemen to aid them in readjustment to civilian life, and the Veterans' Administration continues to offer career counseling through many of its hospitals and other services. Industry also has found a new role for career counseling with the hard-core unemployed, the work-alienated and the executive in mid-career crisis.

That any one approach to career counseling is applicable to these diverse populations and situations is unlikely, just as there appears to be no one type of psychotherapy which is universally effective (Kiesler, 1966). What is needed is a system of career counseling sufficiently comprehensive so that it approximates as closely as possible the uniqueness of each client-counselor dyad. These dimensions are neither exclusive nor exhaustive, but they are central to all kinds of career counseling. In this paper, each approach will be descriptively reviewed on each dimension (proceeding down columns). Then in a later paper, the several approaches will be critically analyzed dimension by dimension (reading across rows), and an attempt will be made to synthesize them into a comprehensive approach to career counseling which is maximally applicable to various combinations of client/ counselor parameters.



Approaches to Career Counseling

The term approach as applied to career counseling refers to a relatively well-articulated model and method of assisting individuals in making decisions about their lifelong roles in the world of work and in solving problems which' arise in the course of the choice process (Crites, 1969). The model of an approach is defined along the temporal continuum which career counseling spans, beginning with the diagnosis of a client's problem, proceeding through the process of client-counselor interviews or interactions, and culminating in certain outcomes. The model, then, is a theoretical explication of the assumptions and propositions which are made about the principal components of any approach to career counseling. In contrast, the methods of an approach are the specific procedures used to implement the model of career counseling and include interview techniques, test interpretations and use of occupational information. The models and methods of career counseling vary widely from one approach to another, as an analysis of each on these dimensions makes clear. The various approaches to career counseling are briefly reviewed in this order: (1) Trait-and-Factor; (2) Client-Centered; (3) Psychodynamic; (4) Developmental; and (5) Behavioral. Limitations of space preclude an extensive discussion of the models and methods; therefore, only the central concepts and practices have been selected for the summary which follows.

Summary

Each of the approaches to career counseling which has been reviewed makes a unique contribution to the ways in which clients can be assisted in their career decision making. From the trait-and-factor orientation, the model of "matching men and jobs" is as viable today as it was in yesteryear, and it finds expression, in one form or another, in most of the other approaches. The client-centered point of view has heightened the career counselor's sensitivity to the role which the client should play throughout the decision-making process and has highlighted the implementation of the self-concept in an occupational role. The psychodynamic framework broadens even more the scope of career counseling to encompass motivational constructs and conflicts within the context of interacting aspects of personal and career development, incorporating procedures from both the trait-and-factor and client-centered approaches for its implementation. Equally systematic, but with greater emphasis upon maturational than motivational factors in decision making, developmental career counseling accepts the client at whatever vocational life stage he/she has reached and attempts to increase the career maturity of the client by providing relevant co-native and cognitive learning experiences. And, behavioral career counseling, whether direct or indirect, theoretic or pragmatic, has made counselors aware, as they have never been before, of the actual behaviors which they and their clients are striving to change. The task is now to synthesize these several theoretical and procedural contributions, each of which has its unique value but none of which is sufficient, into a comprehensive approach to career counseling that has both generality and specificity in its applicability. In a later paper, a "provisional try" will be made to accomplish this task.
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