Orienting Educators to Contemporary Ideas for Career Counseling: An Illustrative Example

Abstract

The context in which career decision-making is being conducted is radically different from what it was in 1911 when Frank Parsons began his work with youth in the United States. The current context of evolving and escalating social and economic change in many countries of the world presents a challenge to educators regarding how best to prepare young people to move forward with their lives in a positive way. Studies involving young people in developing and developed countries have identified their needs pertaining to career guidance and counseling, along with the types of assistance that they would find helpful. The challenge across all countries is that as educators we are often in the situation of preparing young people with current educational programs for jobs that have not yet been created using technologies that have yet to be developed.

In this chapter, we provide a summary of the needs identified by young people from several countries, and describe the context that they must work within when trying to navigate their career paths. This is followed by an outline of the types of services that they might find useful in learning how to self-manage their career paths over time. In describing the services we focus on key concepts like career–life planning, and lifelong and life-wide guidance and counseling. We then describe an approach for preparing professionals to provide the types of services that will help young people become more adept and more planful in managing their careers. In considering the preparation of professionals, we begin with a discussion of core terms that appear to lack a commonly accepted definition and are often used interchangeably. The terms occupation, vocation, and career are defined and illustrated, as are the fundamental professional processes of advising, guidance, and counseling. We also provide an example of an initial step in professional development for those offering career development services in a comprehensive, institution-wide setting and describe a process for demonstrating the impact of the training on the participants involved. The program that is described is a five-day orientation to guidance and counseling program developed at the request of UNESCO for college and government professionals to assist in the implementation of a program in technical and vocational education. To date it has been implemented in Nigeria, Bahrain, and Bhutan. In addition to describing the program, we outline the approach used to evaluate the program’s effectiveness, including an innovative “post–pre” method of obtaining participants’ thoughts on different parts of the program. The results of the evaluation process are also described. The chapter is concluded with some thoughts and suggestions regarding future directions for professional development that will help service providers offer relevant comprehensive services to clients, based on our experience of implementing the orientation program in Nigeria and Bahrain, our other international program development and implementation experiences, and the current literature.