Career Counseling in Schools

Defining Characteristics

Career counseling in schools needs to be differentiated from the broader category of school-based career interventions due to its more personalized nature characterized by career-focused face-to-face interaction and focused on occupational selection and decision making in relation to the individual's view of self in relation to life and future work roles. In contrast to other forms of counseling, the use of some form of assessment may contribute to the discussion and planning process. While career education promotes career development through its focus on knowledge and skills, career counseling enables the individual to refine the process through consultation and discussion. In the literature, there has been an extensive debate about interaction between personal counseling and career counseling with many authors acknowledging not only their complementarity, but also the distinctive sets of specialized skills needed by counselors in both aspects of the work.

Impact of Developmental Stages

Career education begins (whether explicitly a part of the curriculum or not) in elementary school, but career counseling is more likely at particular phases of secondary school. Career choices are among the most important decisions any young person has to make. Young people today have greater awareness of the world of work as they experience the impact of parents' [Page 1464]occupations, with more mothers working, and may see friends and older siblings struggling to find employment or experiencing work as stressful. They also develop ideas about the working world through television viewing. In adolescence, the learner is developing a sense of personal identity and refining ideas about the self.

Career counselors are likely to see youth at various stages of the career development process with varying levels of readiness for planning and decision making being evident through the course of adolescence, and differences across a cohort will be evident at key decision points. Some studies have shown that as young people approach school-leaving, it may be the parents rather than the individual who show more concern or express anxieties about the future.

In adolescence, individuals are located within the exploration stage (as first identified by Donald Super), and young people will have developed different levels of competencies in the different tasks required to progress in this stage (self- and occupational awareness, crystallization, and specification). James Marcia expanded on Erik Erikson's work related to adolescent identity development and identified four identity statuses: foreclosure (where the young person tends to conform to expectations), diffusion (where the young person has not yet committed to a direction), moratorium (where active exploration of alternatives is occurring), and achievement (good progress has been made toward a sense of identity). It is very important for career counselors to be sensitive to these variables because they have a substantial impact on the young person's readiness for engagement in the process and because different individuals will have different needs at any point. Some measures of career maturity or readiness for career decision making have been developed; for example, the Career Decision Scale (developed by Super and his colleagues) and the Career Maturity Inventory (see Crites, John O.).

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