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Career Resource Centers

A career resource center (CRC) refers to a physical facility and to the location of materials, resources, and personnel delivering career services to individuals and groups. A CRC is typically located in the career center, counseling center, human resources office, library, or training and development unit of an organization. In contrast, a career center is an administrative unit of an organization—for example, school, business, or agency—that employs staff who deliver a variety of career programs and services. Comprehensive career centers provide career counseling and assessments, experiential career opportunities such as internships and cooperative education, educational and career information, job hunting assistance, and employment information. They may also provide services to employers seeking to fill their hiring needs. Less comprehensive career centers may provide only some of these services. A career center would almost always include a CRC.

When the vocational guidance movement in the United States emerged in the early 1900s, the development of CRCs was one of its most tangible and lasting accomplishments. The roots of the movement sprang from the social reform and humanitarian activities in urban areas in the Midwestern and Eastern United States. CRCs were often located in settlement houses, which provided a variety of social services including vocational guidance to immigrants and others. Career counseling developed in the context of these CRCs. A distinguishing CRC feature was and remains the provision of resources and information about occupations, jobs, training, financial aid, employability, and career planning. This entry briefly reviews some of the characteristics of the first CRCs that have carried forward to the present time and describes the characteristics of modern CRCs.

The Development of Career Resource Centers

Frank Parsons, generally regarded as the father of vocational guidance, at the turn of the last century created one of the first CRCs. His Vocation Bureau was located in the Civic Service House, a Boston settlement house that provided a variety of social and civic services to citizens and Italian immigrants. Parsons created this early CRC with a private grant provided by a wealthy Boston matron, and he formulated a technique for providing career counseling in this context. His book, Choosing a Vocation, was published posthumously in 1909 and included details about the resources, materials, and staffing of the Vocation Bureau.

With the passage of time, CRCs moved from community settings such as settlement houses mostly into colleges, universities, and high schools and less often into business organizations, governmental, and social service agencies. The Vocation Bureau, for example, found a new home at Harvard University. In educational settings, CRCs were typically housed in either a counseling center or a career planning and placement center. More recently, CRCs are most likely to be located in a career center and provide the resources used by staff and clients to solve career problems and make career decisions.

The resources in a CRC can include inventories and tests, card sorts, books, descriptions of occupations or educational and training institutions, CDs and DVDs, pamphlets, clippings, Web pages, instructional modules, multimedia resources, training materials, magazines, take-away materials (free handouts), and procedures for locating information or preparing for a job campaign, for example, resume writing and interviewing. Career counseling is another resource that might be available in a CRC, and professional counselors or paraprofessionals, sometimes called career development facilitators, could provide it. The intended outcome of using career resources, including career counseling, is client or customer learning and a change in career-related behavior.

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