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International Approaches

The term career counseling can be used in a narrow sense, addressing only a one-on-one or group verbal process and designed to assist counselees to explore, clarify, and understand their personal characteristics, their career concerns, and the behavioral options available. Career counseling can also be used in a wider sense, as a term that summarizes the processes and techniques that may be implemented as part of the career counseling process (e.g., assessment, information about job options, computer-assisted career guidance programs, self-directed exercises, Internet Web sites) to assist counselees to acquire knowledge, attitudes, and skills and to take actions relevant to their career concerns. Often in an international context, the term used as the equivalent of career counseling is career guidance or a term used in a native language that embraces elements of career counseling.

Career Counseling: A Worldwide Process

Although career counseling and related interventions have become virtually worldwide in their availability for certain consumers and for selected purposes, there is not one model of career counseling extant across the world. There are many variations in approaches to the processes described as career counseling. Indeed, an increasing number of nations are developing their own indigenous models of career counseling rather than importing a model from another nation.

The nature of career counseling in specific nations is often a function of such factors as whether practitioners of career counseling are trained in a formal, academic setting or in a series of brief workshops; whether career counseling is primarily a function of government policy and legislation and a centralized provision of government or decentralized to many private entrepreneurs who deliver such services; whether there are differentiated career counseling services available to different groups of counselees or whether career counseling is available to any person who wishes such assistance; whether the provision of career counseling is augmented by the availability of online, Internet, computer-mediated career guidance systems or not; and whether the outcomes associated with career counseling are implemented in relation to particular theoretical models, cultural perspectives, or less systematic origins. Some brief examples will illustrate the range of emphases in career counseling among nations.

International Approaches: Examples

Australia—a large nation with scattered populations across great geographic distances and with relatively few career counselors outside of urban areas to meet the demand for career counseling on a face-to-face basis—has provided many self-help resources, using audio, video, and computer technologies; the provision of employment information by telephone help lines and a nationwide telephone information service for career decision making that includes 3- to 5-minute spots on career planning, information, and adjustment; and a national job network of more than 300 private, community, and government organizations with which the Australian government contracts to provide flexible and tailored assistance to job seekers from job matching to intensive assistance. Increasingly, career development in Australia is linked to lifelong learning and projects the practitioner of the future as a career development facilitator who assists individuals to plan and develop their career. Currently, there are initiatives that focus on the formulation of national quality standards for career practitioners, policy statements that affirm career education in school curriculum, and the development of resources about career activities for parents, school principals, and career advisors.

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