Multicultural Career Counseling Checklist

As societies, especially in the United States, have become more diverse, counselors are expected to be [Page 1579]able to deliver competent services to a wide variety of clients. Such competency concerns call for measures that facilitate professionals collecting and managing the data needed for meaningful and successful interventions in cross-cultural career counseling. The Multicultural Career Counseling Checklist (MCCC) is a 48-item precounseling instrument designed for counselors to use as they prepare to see a client who is seeking career counseling and is especially valuable if the client is of a different race or ethnicity from the counselor. The MCCC was designed by Connie Ward and Rosie Phillips Bingham to assist counselors during initial interventions with ethnic and racial minority clients. The instrument is arranged in three sections: Counselor Preparation, Exploration and Assessment, and Negotiations and Working Consensus.

First, the counselor completes the sections under the heading of Counselor Preparation. The questions are designed to help the counselor focus on issues of the counselor's worldview, racial identity development, socioeconomic status, and political views. The section also asks counselors to review their general knowledge of and stereotypes about the client's ethnic or racial group.

Under Exploration and Assessment the counselor is challenged to conceptualize the client's presenting career questions. This section prods the counselor to sort through the cultural and familial issues that might be interacting with basic career concerns. The counselor must further explore the extent to which the client has already been exposed to career exploration material and role models. These aforementioned steps enable the counselor to determine the appropriate intervention and whether or not the intervention should focus on traditional career intervention methods, familial concerns, self-efficacy questions, or issues of societal structural barriers such as sexism and racism.

The third section on Negotiations and Working Consensus enables the counselor to reflect on the extent to which the client has been involved in framing the presenting career issue. One statement directly addresses whether or not the client and counselor have agreed on that career question. Furthermore, the counselor is challenged to make sure that he or she understands the client's career aspirations, expectations, and level of confidence. The section ends with statements regarding the type of career assessment instrument the counselor will use while working with the client.

The MCCC is a simple and straightforward self-analysis instrument that requires no specialized training beyond that acquired in most appropriate graduate programs. Practitioners, educators, and students can use this instrument to assess their deficits or questions around multicultural career counseling as well as provide a map to better understanding career issues for diverse clientele.