Career Counseling, History of

First Stage: Job Placement Services (1890–1919)

The focus of the first stage in the history of career counseling was job placement. Frank Parsons, the founder of career counseling, began as a social worker heavily influenced by the work of Jane Addams in Chicago. In Boston, Parsons established a settlement house program for young people either already employed or currently unemployed who had been displaced during this period of rapid change. The placement of these young people into new jobs was one of the initial and most important purposes of this new agency.

Parsons's career counseling model was grounded in simple logic and common sense and relied on the observing and interviewing skills of the counselor. Parsons stated that there are three broad factors in the choice of an occupation: (1) knowledge of self, (2) knowledge of the requirements for success in different occupations, (3) matching these two groups of facts. This largely intuitive and experiential foundation of career counseling formed the basis for Parsons's establishing the Vocation Bureau at Civic Service House in Boston in 1908, the first institutionalization of career counseling in the United States.

During this first stage, an important factor in the establishment of career counseling was the increasing involvement of psychological testing with career counseling. Psychological tests became an important [Page 1446]and necessary part of the first functional stage in career counseling, that is, self-assessment. Testing gave career counseling respectability in U.S. society. Without a scientific procedure to justify this first stage, it is unlikely that career counseling would have been so popularly accepted. Francis Galton, Wilhelm Wundt, James McKean Cattell, and Alfred Binet made important contributions to the newly emerging field of psychological testing and through extension to career counseling.

Another important factor in the establishment of career counseling was the early support for vocational guidance that came from the Progressive social reform movement. Child labor laws were the reason for this collaboration as this crusade to prohibit the exploitation of children grew. Although some states beginning with Pennsylvania had established minimum age laws in the latter half of the 19th century, the first decade of the 20th century continued to see over half of a million children from 10 to 13 years of age employed. Effective federal legislation did not come about until the passage of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. Parsons was a prominent leader in the struggle to eliminate child labor.

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