ROBERT W. LENT1 AND STEVEN D. BROWN2
1University of Maryland, College Park, MD
2Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL
It does not seem to be true that work necessarily needs to be unpleasant. It may always have to be hard, or at least harder than doing nothing at all. But there is ample evidence that work can be enjoyable, and that indeed, it is often the most enjoyable part of life.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience)
Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?
Charlie McCarthy (as voiced by the ventriloquist, Edgar Bergen)
Why do people work? What role does it play in our lives? Why should counselors and psychologists focus on work behavior? What do they have to offer people who are in the process of preparing to enter the world of work, adjusting to the workplace, experiencing problems or challenges in their work lives, or preparing to leave the work role? How does involvement in paid work relate to other life roles, such as family member, caregiver, or volunteer? When might it conflict with, and when might it harmonize with, involvement in other life domains? Is counseling for work issues any different than counseling for personal, social, or other issues?
These are all questions that captivate and challenge those who study the psychology of work behavior or who assist students, workers, and retirees in the process of preparing for, entering, surviving or thriving within, or disengaging from the work world. Not surprisingly, such questions form the foundation for this book, which is aimed at introducing students (and reacquainting professionals) in the helping professions with the literature on career development and counseling. This literature includes foundational and evolving theories of work and career behavior, research on a host of work‐related topics, and efforts to translate theory and research into interventions for promoting optimally satisfying and successful work lives.
This chapter is designed to set the stage for the rest of the book by briefly considering the role of work in people's lives, sketching the conceptual and professional boundaries of career development and counseling, discussing some of the myths and realities that surround the field, and describing its historical context and contemporary challenges. Our primary goal is to convince the reader that work is one of the most important domains of life that counselors and psychologists can study—and that it is also one of the most meaningful targets of intervention in our roles as counselors, therapists, educators, and advocates. Freud was said to have equated mental health with the capacity to love and to work. Although these capacities may not be sufficient by themselves to define mental health, it is clear that work has a central location in many people's lives—one that frequently intersects with other life roles, is an integral part of one's life story, and can have an immense impact on one's overall quality of life.
It seems fitting to begin by pondering the reasons why people work and the various roles that work can play in their lives. At first glance, the question of why people work may hardly seem worth asking. People work because they have to, don't they? They need the money that work provides to put food on the table and a roof over their heads. True, work is certainly a means of survival. But this does not tell the whole story. As the old saying goes, people do not live by bread alone.
In this section, we briefly consider the why of work behavior, or the various sources of work motivation (also see Blustein & Duffy, Chapter 7, this volume).
Work as need fulfillment. One way to view the question of why people work is through the lens of Abraham Maslow's (1943) famous hierarchy, where human needs range from those that focus on basic survival (e.g., the need for food) all the way to self‐actualization (e.g., the need to realize one's inner potential). Maslow's hierarchy is often pictured as a pyramid, with more basic needs (e.g., food, safety, security) at the bottom. In this view, the satisfaction of basic needs provides a foundation for meeting higher‐order social and psychological needs, such as friendship, intimacy, self‐esteem, and personal growth.
One of the problems in applying such a needs hierarchy to work motivation is that it may be used to imply that some reasons to work are somehow nobler or loftier than others or that poor people work only because they have to (i.e., to survive), while those who are wealthier work because they want to (i.e., to satisfy higher‐order needs). To avoid such a bind, one can simply view Maslow's needs as reflecting a range of work motivators, without imposing the added assumptions that they are ordered in importance or merely reflect social class differences. Thus, in addition to meeting basic survival needs, work can provide the context for fulfilling (at least a portion of) one's needs for security (e.g., enhancing the material comfort of one's family), social belonging and intimacy, personal esteem (e.g., providing a sense of personal worth and accomplishment), purpose, and self‐actualization. People may be motivated to work for any combination of these reasons; they are not mutually exclusive or necessarily hierarchical, except to the extent that basic survival is obviously a prerequisite for fulfilling other needs. Swanson and Schneider (Chapter 2, this volume) and Rounds and Leuty (Chapter 16, this volume) provide a more complete consideration of work needs and values, including the roles they play in career choice and work adjustment.
Work as an individual's public identity. Moving beyond Maslow's hierarchy and the issue of need fulfillment per se, work may also serve other personally and culturally important roles in people's lives. For example, tied to the esteem and self‐actualization bases of work is the issue of identity, which can have both public and private significance. Perhaps particularly in individualistic or Western societies, work can be seen as an expression of one's public image. Note how often people in the United States ask each other, “What do you do?” (i.e., what form of work do you do?) when meeting a new acquaintance. One's occupation can be a shorthand way of announcing one's social address (e.g., education, social class, prestige). Fair or not, what one does for a living is often viewed as an essential part of who one is as a person.
Work as personal identity or self‐construction. Work as identity can also be an expression of self‐image, a means through which people “implement a self‐concept,” in the view of Donald Super (see Hartung, Chapter 4, this volume). This may be most obvious in artistic forms of work. For example, we typically think of artists as expressing themselves through their creations or performances. But self‐expression or, more broadly, using work to become the sort of person one imagines—to construct a self—can be a potent source of motivation for many persons and in virtually any form of work. Taking Super's thoughts about work motivation a step further, Edward Bordin, another influential career scholar, emphasized people's capacity to seek work that they find intrinsically interesting or from which they can derive pleasure. To illustrate his point, Bordin (1994, p. 54) asked, “Is a professional athlete working or playing?”
Such views of work motivation are sometimes criticized with the argument that many people are not free to choose work that expresses anything more than the need for a paycheck, or that not everyone is lucky enough to be able to do work that is pleasurable. One may ask whether those who work for a minimum wage, in unskilled jobs, in fast food restaurants, on assembly lines, or in coal mines, have the luxury of “playing” at, or implementing their self‐concepts through, work? There is little question that lack of economic resources can limit one's choice of work or that jobs may differ in their obvious outlets for self‐expression. At the same time, it is not hard to think of less‐affluent persons who find meaning, dignity, and enjoyment in their work. Thus, it seems unfair to equate the prestige or external trappings of a job with its personal significance to the individual without exploring his or her own perspective on their work and what they derive from doing it.
The notions of work as an opportunity to construct and tell one's life story (Savickas, Chapter 6, this volume), or to respond to a “calling” beyond oneself (e.g., a way to help others or to serve a higher power; Dik, Steger, & Autin, Chapter 8, this volume), capture the sense that work can play extremely valuable, self‐defining roles in people's lives, regardless of social class and even when performed under difficult or harsh conditions. It is possible to view someone else's life story as mundane, boring, or marked only by exploitation. However, that same story may be far more intriguing and meaningful to the person who is living it.
Work as normative expectation, group identity, and social contribution. Particularly in collectivist cultures, work may be seen as an expression of group as well as personal identity. For example, choice of work may be made less on a personal basis and more in collaboration with members of one's family, tribe, or community. Consideration may be given to the needs of the collective, to selecting work that serves (and reflects positively on) the group, and that preserves relational harmony. Such functions of work may be seen as extensions of Maslow's (1943) focus on security, social esteem, and actualization needs—but with the focus on benefits for the group rather than for the individual alone.
Of course, prevailing social norms in most societies maintain that one must work if one is able to do so. It is a strong expectation conveyed by social agents in the family, school, and other social institutions. This norm is well‐captured in the early rock n roll hit, Get a Job, in which the singer comically bemoans the social pressure to find work. Indeed, those who fail to find work are often derided with labels such as bum, shirker, lazy, good‐for‐nothing, or couch potato—especially if their failure to find work is attributed to their character or to a lack of effort. And such social derision is often accompanied by internalized anxiety, frustration, and anger. Allan and Kim (Chapter 24, this volume) describe the adverse financial, emotional, and relational consequences experienced by unemployed or underemployed persons.
Work as existential response and aid to mental health. From an existential point of view, work may be seen as a way to structure one's time and to construct personal meaning in an otherwise meaningless universe. Kierkegaard, the famous philosopher, spoke of work as a means by which people find distraction from their self‐consciousness, especially from thoughts of their own mortality. Such a view of work may help explain why some people become so heavily invested in their work, sometimes to the point of work addiction, and why many become depressed when the loss of the work role, either through involuntary layoff or retirement, erodes their sense of life structure or meaning. Several societal problems, like crime, also stem partly from, or can be exacerbated by, lack of access to suitable work. The old adage, “an idle mind is the devil's workshop,” captures the value of work as a way to structure time, maintain mental health, and promote prosocial behavior. The concept of psychological “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) demonstrates how pleasurable it can be to become so absorbed in an activity that one temporarily loses one's sense of self and becomes oblivious to the passage of time.
In sum, people work for a variety of reasons, especially, to earn a living, honor and contribute to their families and communities, achieve self‐growth, pursue their sense of a higher purpose or meaning in life, establish a public identity, advance a personal narrative, and structure their lives. Many of the ideas we have presented on why people work or what they derive from working align with either of two venerable philosophical positions. In the hedonic view, people are motivated to survive and to experience as much personal pleasure (and to avoid as much pain) as possible. This position subsumes Maslow's survival, security, and esteem (and, perhaps, love and belongingness) needs. In the eudaimonic view, people are motivated to “live the good life,” not merely the happy life. Doing good is elevated above feeling good; work confers opportunities to achieve personal growth, purpose, meaning, and social contribution. The eudaimonic position subsumes Maslow's focus on esthetic and cognitive needs (e.g., knowledge, goodness, justice) and self‐actualization (or developing one's inner potential). Again, these sources of motivation may be seen as complementary (rather than as mutually exclusive) contributors to work behavior.
Paid work is but one of life's domains, though it is the focal point of many people's waking lives—if not in terms of psychological investment, then at least in terms of hours spent. Assuming an 8‐hour workday, many full‐time workers spend at least one third of most weekdays at work—as much or more time as they spend sleeping or engaged in just about any other single activity. And this estimate does not include the many additional hours or days that some people put into their work, above and beyond the traditional work week. If work accounts for a third of a typical weekday and sleep accounts for another third, that means all other activities (e.g., leisure, parenting, volunteering) are compressed into the remaining third, or are put off until the weekend—assuming that one is not doing paid work then, too. Many people also think about their work when they are not at work. It is no wonder, then, that work can be seen as having the potential to conflict with or overshadow other life roles, like that of family member. Yet research suggests that work and other life roles also have the potential to enrich one another (see Schultheiss, Chapter 9, this volume).
Super (Hartung, Chapter 4, this volume) was perhaps the first vocational theorist to view career development in the context of other life domains or roles, noting that, in addition to their roles as workers, people can be invested in student, family, romantic, leisure, volunteer, and other life roles. Because work can interface with these other roles, it makes sense to reframe career planning as life–career planning or “life design” (Savickas, Chapter 6, this volume). Such a broadened view suggests that people consider how central or peripheral a role paid work will play in their lives. It also opens the door to extending research and interventions to those who perform non‐paid (e.g., caregiving) work (Schultheiss, Chapter 9) or who wish to enrich their leisure or civic lives. In a literal sense, occupations can be seen as any activities that occupy people's time and energy—or as roles that people occupy—whether or not such activities or roles involve paid compensation.
Super also emphasized the notion of role salience, which implies that work, or any life role, can vary in its centrality or importance for any given individual and at different stages of life. Thus, work is not the most valued role for everyone. This acknowledgment allows for a less work‐centric view of people's lives, freeing career counselors to view their clients as whole people with interests and commitments outside of work, and providing a valuable link to the study of gender in career development (Richardson, 1993). Historically, men have often been socialized to focus primarily on their work trajectories, giving less thought to other life domains, whereas women have been more likely to consider their work lives in the context of other life roles, such as romantic partner or parent. Life–career planning and the allowance for differential role salience simultaneously challenge traditional role expectations for males as the way to define career development for everyone, normalize alternative ways to pursue work, honor the feminist commitment to equality, and offer the possibility of more flexible work choices for all.
To this point, we have mainly focused on the why of work—the reasons why people work—and how work relates to other life domains or roles. In so doing, we have been discussing the general forces that impel, or motivate, people to work. And we have so far sidestepped the crucial what, when, where, and how questions, including the issue of what specific form of work people either choose or feel compelled to do, the how of choice‐making (the process through which work “choices” are made by the individual and/or important others), the when of work decisions (points at which key work choices are made), and the where of work (the impact of the environment on choice and subsequent work outcomes).
Much of this book is devoted to addressing these very questions. The major theories of career development, contained in the first section of the book, grapple with these questions to varying degrees. For example, the theories of person–environment fit (Swanson & Schneider, Chapter 2; Nauta, Chapter 3) tend to emphasize the what and where questions (i.e., the content of people's work and the role of the environment in attracting them to or repelling them from certain forms of work). The developmental theories (see Hartung, Chapter 4) highlight the how and when questions (e.g., the ages or stages at which work‐related decisions are made and the processes by which these decisions are aided or stifled). The chapters in the second section of the book emphasize the roles of person and social factors (e.g., gender, social class) in people's work “choice” and adjustment. The chapters in the third section focus on attributes that career counselors often assess when assisting people to select or adjust to work. And the chapters in the final section involve the how of facilitating career development—that is, problems or challenges that can impede career progress, along with interventions designed to surmount them.
We placed the word “choice” in quotation marks in the previous paragraph to highlight the controversy that sometimes surrounds discussions of personal agency or volition in the career literature. Career development theories have occasionally been criticized for assuming that people are entirely free to choose their own occupational paths and for ignoring conditions that limit people's career options (e.g., Warnath, 1975). A bit of reflection, however, suggests that, even with the benefit of favorable environments, people are rarely free to choose any form of work they wish; conversely, those who are less favored are rarely devoid of any volition, though they may be faced with a narrower range of options. Agency tends to come in bottles that are neither completely full nor empty. We do not believe that modern career theories assume that environments are irrelevant to personal choice; neither do they assume that the Horatio Alger “rags to riches” narrative is the norm (i.e., that personal initiative is all that counts). To the contrary, they generally acknowledge that people's social addresses do matter and that factors, such as financial resources and educational barriers, can aid or thwart people's career ambitions.
Certain cultural and economic contexts allow individuals relatively greater (though not total) freedom to exercise their agency in work selection. Under other conditions, “choice” may be severely limited by financial, educational, or other constraints. In some cultural contexts, work choices may be highly responsive to the wishes of important others (e.g., family members). Environmental factors also come into play when people attempt to implement their choices. As Vroom (1964) observed, “people not only select occupations, they are selected for occupations” (p. 56). Indeed, employers, admissions committees, and others serve as gatekeepers that help to determine initial and continued access to particular work and educational options. Thus, in a theme that runs throughout the study of career development, choice and other work outcomes may be seen as resulting from the interaction or interplay between the person and environment.
We see it is as a sign of progress in the career literature that rhetorical arguments are, increasingly, being preempted by theoretical and empirical efforts to grapple with specific mechanisms through which agency is expressed in career behavior, along with the personal and contextual variables that may strengthen or weaken its effects. In addition, researchers and practitioners, along with theorists, are showing increasing commitment to the need to understand and facilitate the career behavior of a much wider range of client populations, reconnecting with the earliest social justice themes of the career development field, such as how we can be helpful to clients with fewer socioeconomic resources, the unemployed, and other groups who may be challenged to assert agency in their work lives (see, for example, Juntunen, Ali, & Pietrantonio, Chapter 11; Fabian & Morris, Chapter 13; Allan & Kim, Chapter 24).
To this point we have been using the term work as the most inclusive way to refer to the subject matter at the center of this book. Work may also be less laden with excess conceptual and cultural baggage than are other terms used to describe essentially the same area of human functioning. Some writers have, in fact, suggested that the field of vocational psychology be recast as “work psychology” or the “psychology of working” (Blustein, 2006). While we appreciate this argument, we also find the older terms, such as vocational psychology and career counseling, as still serviceable, if occasionally less than ideal. We decided to retain “career development and counseling” in the title of this book to maintain continuity with a large body of literature that has accumulated on the study and promotion of work behavior. It is appropriate at this stage, however, to define our terms more carefully.
Work refers to the domain of life in which people provide services or create goods, typically (though not always) on a paid basis. It can also refer to the specific activities that one performs for pay or on a volunteer basis. In most societies, work is associated with the period of life after formal schooling (although some students engage in work as well as academic roles) and before retirement (which may or may not involve disengagement from paid work). Job is a specific work position held over a defined period of time (e.g., being a quality inspector at one factory for 10 years). Although job and career are sometimes used synonymously in popular discourse, vocational psychologists often use the term career to refer to a sequence, or collection, of jobs one has held over the course of one's work life. In this sense, people may hold different jobs over the course of a single career. However, it is also common to use career to refer to one's involvement in a particular job family (e.g., engineering), which may include multiple jobs (e.g., being an engineer at company A for 10 years and at company B for another 10 years). It is in this context that one can speak of a career change, which is to say a shift from one job family to another (e.g., from engineer to teacher).
Other terms commonly used to refer to work behavior include occupation and vocation. Both of these terms are often used interchangeably with career. For example, many writers speak of occupational choice, vocational choice, or career choice as meaning the same thing. But each of these terms, particularly vocation and career, may also have somewhat unique connotations. Vocation is sometimes viewed as an antiquated term. It originated from the Latin verb, vocare, to call, and historically has been used in some religious circles to refer to a divine “calling” to pursue a religious path. Vocation was later used to refer to secular forms of work as well, and leaders of the vocational guidance movement (e.g., Parsons, 1909) sought to assist people to locate jobs that would best match their personal qualities and be experienced as satisfying. In more recent times, the term vocation has been associated with vocational/technical (as opposed to “academic track”) education and is sometimes used to refer to jobs that do not require higher education. As a result, some clients may be a bit confused about how they can be helped by someone identifying themselves as a vocational counselor or psychologist. Still, vocation has had staying power as a generic term.
Career has a more contemporary feel than vocation and is more commonly used in popular discourse. Potential clients may be more likely to understand why they might see someone called a career counselor as opposed to a vocational counselor, and many professionals in our field prefer to refer to themselves as career counselors or psychologists. However, some writers find the term career as objectionable, arguing that it implies choice and privilege and that not everyone who works has a subjective sense of career. According to this line of reasoning, careers imply higher‐status work. Thus, engineering is a career but housepainter is not because the former requires more education and tends to command greater prestige and more favorable work conditions and pay. Although we are sensitive to concerns about classism, we are not sure that the term career necessarily implies all these things (or that housepainters would agree that they cannot have careers). Moreover, it is hard to dismiss the term without also dismissing the extensive literature with which it is associated. In short, career is a compromise that most professionals in the field have been willing to make in the absence of an alternative term that meets with universal acceptance. Yet it is well for readers to be aware of the controversy that sometimes still surrounds it.
On balance, we view it as a positive development that career theorists and researchers now often use “work” as the more inclusive term in an effort to level the economic playing field and to promote social justice. Somewhat paradoxically, however, it has been difficult to escape entirely an emphasis on more privileged forms of work in the literature. For example, terms such as “decent work” (Blustein & Duffy, Chapter 7) or “meaningful work” (Dik et al., Chapter 8) may be seen as synonymous with middle class or white collar work (e.g., work that is relatively clean, safe, well‐compensated, consistent with personal values, and accompanied by employer‐provided benefits). On the one hand, such concepts encourage career scientists and practitioners to attend to equitable work conditions that may allow people to flourish and not merely survive at work. They also represent a reaction to concerns about the current prevalence of precarious (e.g., unstable, insecure) work. On the other hand, they may underestimate the power of economic forces and the difficulties that many workers face in obtaining better working conditions or of locating jobs they find more self‐expressive or meaningful. Moreover, if what constitutes decent and meaningful work lies at least partly in the eye of the beholder, workers may see the significance and decency of their own work from a somewhat different perspective than that assumed by theorists and researchers peering in from the outside. Such dilemmas reflect the inevitable growing pains of a vital and still evolving field. The ensuing discourse will, we are confident, help the field to further mature, honoring its social justice legacy and broadening the scope of its science and practice.
Career development can be seen as a process that encompasses much of the lifespan—one that begins in childhood (and includes the formal and informal experiences that give rise to talents, interests, values, and knowledge of the world of work); continues into adulthood via the progression of one's career behavior (e.g., entry into and adjustment to work over time); and may culminate with the transition into, and adjustment to, retirement. It is a concept designed to capture the dynamic, changing nature of career or work behavior and is sometimes used as incorporating career choice and at other times as distinct from it. The latter may be seen as the process of selecting and entering a particular career path, whereas career development refers to one's experience before, during, and after career choice.
The period before initial career choice or work entry typically overlaps with one's educational life. Some writers conceive of this period of academic or educational preparation as a part of the larger career development process; others treat it as distinct from, but conceptually related to, career development. Of course, career choice is not necessarily a static decision or one‐time event. Many people revise their career choices over time for various reasons (e.g., to pursue work that better fits their interests and talents, to shift paths after involuntary job loss, or to re‐enter the workforce after raising children or caring for other loved ones). Career choice, in turn, often consists of at least two phases: setting a choice goal and then taking steps to implement this goal, for instance, through additional training or a job search process.
Career development is sometimes used synonymously with career advancement or management. We see these terms as somewhat distinctive, however. Career advancement implies a linear process or one in which the individual progressively improves his or her career standing over time, as in the metaphor of climbing a career ladder. Career management connotes a situation in which the individual is actively engaged in directing the course of his or her own career development; that is, it implies a view of the person as an active agent, anticipating and adjusting to new opportunities and behaving proactively to prevent (or reactively to cope with) negative situations. Career development, by contrast, connotes a continuous stream of career‐relevant events that are not necessarily linear or positive in impact and that may or may not be subject to personal agency (e.g., being born into poverty, losing a job due to the bankruptcy of one's company). Although development ordinarily implies forward movement, it also holds the potential for stasis or regression.
Super, the dean of the developmental career theorists, described a number of life stages through which careers were assumed to evolve (growth, exploration, establishment, maintenance, disengagement; see Hartung, Chapter 4), and other developmental theorists also point to distinct stages or life periods that are crucial to career choice and development (e.g., Gottfredson, 2005). The current book is organized with three larger developmental periods in mind, namely, the periods prior to work entry (e.g., see Rojewski, Chapter 20; Sampson, Osborn, & Bullock‐Yowell, Chapter 21), during work entry (e.g., Brown, Chapter 22), and after work entry (e.g., Lent & Brown, Chapter 23; Allan & Kim, Chapter 24; Hirschi & Pang, Chapter 14), which may well involve a recycling through periods of exploration, preparation, and entry into new career paths.
We use the term career counseling in this book, as will most of the chapter authors, to refer to services offered to resolve or prevent problems with work behavior, regardless of the prestige or level of education associated with a given work option. In this section, we describe the purview of career counseling, other services that may augment or overlap with it, and the relation of career and personal counseling.
Career counseling typically takes place between an individual client and counselor, though many career counselors also employ group counseling or workshops, particularly in educational settings in which a number of clients are dealing with common developmental challenges (e.g., academic or career‐related choices). Career counseling can be directed at a fairly wide range of clients' presenting problems, but these may largely be captured within three larger categories:
Help in making and implementing career‐related decisions. Helping clients to make career choices is probably the most popular image of career counseling. It entails assisting clients to decide between various career paths as well as educational (e.g., academic majors) or training options that may have career relevance. Some clients enter counseling needing assistance to identify viable career options, having few if any firm ideas about which direction they might like to pursue. In some cases, clients have prematurely eliminated options that may, in fact, suit them well. Other clients enter with a dizzying array of options in mind and hope for help in narrowing their list. Yet other clients may have already made at least a preliminary decision about their educational or career direction and would like the counselor's assistance either in confirming the wisdom of this choice or in putting their choice into action, for example, by helping them to locate and obtain employment in their chosen field. Sampson et al. (Chapter 21) and Brown (Chapter 22) focus, respectively, on counseling for making and implementing career choices.
Although career choice counseling is often pursued by students anticipating entry into the work world, it may also be sought by adult workers wishing to change directions (or compelled to do so by circumstance) and by persons planning to re‐enter the paid workforce after a period of primary engagement in other life roles (e.g., parenting). For these reasons, it may overlap with the career transition focus of career counseling, discussed later in this section. In addition, counselors in school settings often focus on orienting children and adolescents to the world of work, with the goals of helping them gain self‐understanding and early awareness of career options, and motivating academic performance. Such activities, which are intended to prepare students ultimately to make and implement satisfying choices (Rojewski, Chapter 20), may be part of the developmental aims of vocational guidance and career education services.
Help in adjusting to work and managing one's career. Another common focus of career counseling involves work adjustment concerns, such as coping with dissatisfaction with one's job or difficulties with work socialization or performance. These problems may be manifest at any point after work entry. Sometimes they occur during the early period of transitioning from school to work as people discover that their new job is not exactly what they expected or that they are having a difficult time meeting the expectations of their employer. At other times, work dissatisfaction or performance issues may occur at later periods, for example, when people gradually come to feel stifled by a lack of variety or advancement opportunities or when a promotion places them in a novel situation where their current skills are challenged by new job requirements. Counseling to promote work satisfaction and performance must contend with the many reasons why an individual may be unhappy at work or, conversely, why a supervisor or coworkers may be unhappy with the individual (see Lent & Brown, Chapter 23).
Career counseling may also entail a variety of additional challenges that may be loosely included within the rubric of work adjustment, such as assisting clients to prepare for and adjust to new work roles and responsibilities; to find ways to sustain their employability amid technological and other disruptive workplace changes; to decide how to manage personal identities (e.g., sexual minority status) at work; and to cope with a variety of harsh work conditions, such as workplace incivility, sexual harassment, or various forms of discrimination (see, for example, Schultheiss, Chapter 9; Fouad & Kantamneni, Chapter 10; Lyons, Prince, & Brenner, Chapter 12; Fabian & Morris, Chapter 13). Such challenges, which often occur during the establishment and maintenance stages of career development (Hartung, Chapter 4), have not traditionally been a major focus of career interventions but typify the expanding, contemporary field of career development.
Help in negotiating career transitions and work/non‐work life roles. Some people seek or are referred for career counseling specifically for help in making the transition from work to school, from one form of work or career path to another, or from work to retirement or other life roles. The issue of career transitions is complex and multifaceted because such transitions may be either voluntary (e.g., based on a desire to do something “more meaningful” or to engage in “career renewal”) or involuntary (e.g., due to job layoff); experienced as developmentally on‐time and expected or as unplanned and premature; and be anticipated with great worry or, in other cases, great excitement. Whereas some clients seek counseling preemptively to improve their work lives before things go wrong or get worse, many are likely to seek counseling with a sense of urgency or crisis after a negative life event has occurred or seems imminent. Career transition issues are addressed in several chapters, for example, Chapter 14 (Hirschi & Pang) and Chapter 24 (Allan & Kim). Conceptually and operationally, counseling for career transition issues may overlap with counseling for making or implementing career–life choices, though it may also involve dealing with the considerable affective, relational, and other challenges that can accompany major life changes.
Some clients also seek assistance in coping with the challenges of managing multiple roles or maintaining work–life balance. Although their reasons for counseling may not be stated exactly in those terms, these concerns may be implicit in such presenting problems as stress at keeping up with work responsibilities while caring for an ailing parent or dissatisfaction with one's relationship partner because he or she is perceived as not doing their fair share at childcare or homemaking responsibilities. Some counselors may view this class of presenting problems as not essentially a part of career counseling, seeing it rather as within the realm of relationship counseling or psychotherapy. We believe it falls within the province of career counseling, particularly if one takes a broadened view of career–life counseling, seeing the work role as intersecting with other life roles (e.g., romantic partner, parent, family member). Lent and Brown (Chapter 23) consider role conflict (e.g., between work and family roles) as one source of work dissatisfaction, and Schultheiss (Chapter 9) explores additional dimensions of the work–home life interface.
Our clustering of career presenting problems into three broad categories is, admittedly, somewhat arbitrary. Some problems do not fit neatly into only one category. For example, as we noted, some clients anticipating a career transition or dissatisfied with their current jobs may need to revisit career choice issues in order to consider whether a career change may better fit their current interests or life circumstances. The bottom line is that career counseling can be viewed as encompassing multiple presenting issues that occur across the life span, from the pre‐entry period of education and work preparation through entry into, adjustment to, and exit from the world of work. To be helpful to clients, counselors must ordinarily arrive at a mutual agreement with them on the goals and tasks of counseling. Equating career counseling only with choice issues does not do justice to the great variety of career–life concerns with which clients present—and the many ways in which career counselors can assist them.
As Savickas (1994) has noted, career counseling is related to a variety of other services intended to promote people's career development, in particular, career guidance, advising, education, placement, coaching, and mentoring. The first three of these are mainly identified with educational settings; the remaining three tend to be associated with work settings, or with the transition from education to work. Guidance refers to the career‐orienting activities typically provided by school counselors and teachers as they help students to become aware of the work world, of the value of planning, and of self‐attributes that may relate to various career options. Career counseling as a formal specialty grew partly out of this guidance function. In recent years, computer‐based career guidance and information systems have been developed to complement the guidance function (see Gore & Leuwerke, Chapter 19). Advising, typically associated with teachers and professors, is usually limited to selection of coursework and fulfillment of academic requirements, but may include advice regarding career options.
Career education usually refers to formal school‐based programs, often at the middle and high school levels, aimed at introducing students to the world of work, assessment of career‐relevant personal attributes, and exploration of career options that may fit one's attributes (e.g., interests, abilities). It may also include a work component (e.g., placement in a relevant part‐time job as a part of a school's career academy). Career education may be seen as an extension of the guidance function in that it is aimed at many of the same career‐orienting and planning objectives, though often in a more structured and lengthier format. It differs from advising in that the focus involves career exploration rather than simply provision of advice or instructions on meeting academic requirements. A typical format for career education involves coursework facilitated by school counselors or teachers. Career courses are often offered at the college level as well to assist with academic and career decision‐making and preparation for work entry.
Placement, as the term implies, is focused on “placing” students or workers in particular jobs. It is concerned with helping people to locate relevant job openings, mount effective job searches, and present themselves effectively to prospective employers (e.g., via resumes, job applications, and interview preparation). (On the work organization side of things, human resources professionals are involved in recruitment, screening, and selection of prospective employees.) Career counselors often provide services that overlap with those of placement personnel because both types of professionals may assist people to implement their career choices. Placement offices on college campuses are sometimes part of a larger career services center which offers assistance with both career choice and implementation. The advantage of such an arrangement is that it provides students with “one stop” career assistance. In other cases, however, placement services may be located in a unit separate from counseling services.
Finally, coaching and mentoring are increasingly popular career services. Coaching has come to take on a number of different meanings in the career world. Often it is focused on assisting workers, particularly managers or executives, to improve their work performance or to further their career progress within a given work organization (e.g., prepare for a new leadership role). It may be practiced by service providers from a variety of professional backgrounds (e.g., counselors, vocational psychologists, organizational psychologists) and overlaps substantially with career counseling. Alternatively, it may be offered by persons with relevant work content experience but no formal counseling or psychological training. Mentoring typically refers to the practice of pairing a newer worker with one or more experienced workers for the purposes of assisting the newcomer to adjust to the work environment, “learn the ropes” of his or her job, receive support and advice when work problems surface, have a model for negotiating work–life balance, and generally facilitate his or her career progress. Mentors and mentees may come together informally or be matched formally by the work organization.
It is apparent that career counseling can overlap with other career services. It is, therefore, important for career counselors to be familiar with these services so that they can facilitate clients' use of them as needed, for example, by making appropriate referrals to an academic advisor, a career class, or a placement office, or by helping clients to identify mentors.
There are differing views about how career counseling relates to personal counseling and psychotherapy. Career counseling is clearly distinctive in some respects. Its most obvious distinction is the focus on one or two life domains—that is, preparation for and functioning in work and school contexts. Thus, it involves specialized training, especially in career counseling and vocational psychology. However, the prevailing view within the counseling professions appears to be that there is often a “false dichotomy” between career and personal counseling (Hackett, 1993). This view is based on the observations that clients often present with multiple concerns (e.g., depression and difficulty in making a career choice); that career issues are often intertwined with other life domains and roles (e.g., the difficulty of a romantic couple in making “dual career” decisions); that career problems can have emotional sides or consequences (e.g., stress, dissatisfaction); and that counseling can frequently move back and forth between career and other (e.g., personal, relational) life concerns.
Given the frequent overlap between career and personal counseling, it may be argued that the ideal scenario is for counselors and psychologists to be prepared, via training and experience, to deal with both career and personal concerns. Training only in personal counseling, for example, can lead counselors and therapists to overlook or downplay the importance of work‐related issues or to feel incompetent at dealing with them. (We are reminded of the old adage, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”) It is, of course, imperative that one should be able to recognize the limits of one's competence and, where those limits have been reached, to make responsible referrals. However, there are also advantages to receiving training of sufficient breadth in counseling and therapy so that one is truly competent to identify and deal with the more common career and personal problems with which clients are likely to present.
It is probably most helpful to view the career versus personal counseling controversy in terms of a continuum, rather than a dichotomy, with more purely career‐type concerns (e.g., career choice) at one end and more purely personal concerns (e.g., depression) at the other. In the middle of this continuum is where the two overlap or are interwoven (e.g., where choice is made more difficult by depression). The career decision‐making literature supports the notion that career issues can be relatively distinct from and, at other times, overlap with personal concerns. Researchers have found, for example, that there are multiple sources of career indecision and that these may best be approached with different counseling strategies (Brown et al., 2012). For instance, some clients enter counseling with relatively focused, developmental problems in making a career decision. They do not generally experience decision‐making problems, but are having trouble with this one area. Not surprisingly, perhaps, such clients often do well in five or fewer counseling sessions aimed at career exploration and decision‐making. Another career client may enter counseling with a characteristic tendency to experience negative affect and to be indecisive in most life areas (Brown & Ryan Krane, 2000). To be maximally helpful, counseling with such clients may well involve more extensive efforts to deal both with their career and personal (e.g., cognitive and emotional) concerns.
We have found that career counseling is viewed in stereotypic fashion by some of our colleagues in the helping professions. Common stereotypes include perceptions that career counseling is relatively simple, easy, formulaic, and brief; that it involves a “test ‘em and tell ‘em” approach in which assessments are mechanically assigned and interpreted and clients are quickly sent on their way; that computer programs can be used to substitute for career counselors; and that the effects of career counseling are not as impressive or meaningful as are those of personal counseling. In this section, we briefly address such perceptions, examining ways in which we believe they can mistake or distort the reality of career counseling.
Is it true that career counseling is simple, easy, formulaic, and brief? The kernel of truth in this stereotype is that some clients do, indeed, profit from relatively brief, structured forms of career counseling. But it depends to a great extent on the nature of clients' goals and presenting problems, on other qualities that they bring to counseling, and on the methods that counselors employ. As we noted earlier, research has found that many clients profit from five or fewer sessions of counseling aimed at career choice (Brown & Ryan Krane, 2000). Such rapid gains are most likely to occur when (a) clients' presenting problems are limited to making a career‐related decision, (b) clients do not exhibit high levels of general indecisiveness or negative affect (i.e., global tendencies to experience feelings like depression and anxiety), and (c) counseling includes at least three of five critical ingredients (see Sampson et al., Chapter 21).
Many clients also profit from receiving more than five sessions of career counseling (Brown & Ryan Krane, 2000). In such cases, it is likely that their presenting issues extend beyond making a career decision (e.g., coping with work dissatisfaction or stress), that they present with other issues that affect their career development (e.g., chronic indecisiveness), or that their career concerns are complexly intertwined with personal (e.g., emotional) or relationship (e.g., work–family conflict) issues. Such situations, which are quite common, stimulate the creativity of career counselors and underscore the need for them to be facile with both career and other forms of counseling. For example, counseling for work dissatisfaction often draws on many of the same strategies as would be employed with clients who seek help because of dissatisfaction in other areas of their lives (Lent, 2004). Career counseling need not be any less artful or spontaneous than other types of counseling—and clients may well present with problems that cannot be neatly categorized as requiring only one form of assistance or as fitting a traditional career counseling tool kit. For example, problems of workplace harassment or discrimination may draw on systemic or advocacy interventions that transcend counseling.
Is it true that career counseling is synonymous with testing? The kernel of truth here is that career counselors often do employ formal assessments, particularly with clients who seek assistance in making a career‐related decision. In fact, many clients have been told by advisors or others to go see a career counselor to “take that test that will tell you what you should do.” Of course, no test can read a client's mind or future, much less make a decision for her or him, and some clients are disappointed when they discover this reality. However, there are a number of assessment devices that can provide very useful information about the client's self‐attributes (e.g., interests, values, abilities) in relation to the educational and career options they are considering—or that can help them to expand or narrow their range of options (see the chapters in the third section of this book). Although not as dramatic, perhaps, as gazing into a crystal ball, it can be very helpful to discover, for example, that one's interests resemble those of people who are satisfied working in health care settings. In fact, individualized assessment is one of the components that accounts for the effectiveness of career choice counseling (Brown & Ryan Krane, 2000). Career counseling for work adjustment and transition issues may also profitably employ formal assessment methods (Hirschi & Pang, Chapter 14; Lent & Brown, Chapter 23).
Despite its documented utility, career counseling need not involve formal psychometric measures exclusively or even at all. Many career counselors use less formal ways of gathering information about clients, often in addition to psychometric measures, to aid the counseling process. For example, depending on the presenting issue, some counselors use card sorting activities, fantasy workday exercises, career genograms, role plays, and a variety of other methods (Pope & Minor, 2000). Such options can stimulate clients' thinking about career issues and make the process of career counseling more interactive, engaging, and creative—anything but the sterile, rigid, “test ‘em and tell ‘em” stereotype.
Is it true that whatever career counselors have to offer could be done more efficiently and just as effectively by a computer program? It is important to acknowledge that most people do not seek the services of a career counselor. Most make choices and solve other career‐related problems on their own or with the support and guidance of parents, teachers, friends, work colleagues, or others. Computerized guidance and information resources, now widely available on the Internet, are undoubtedly useful tools for “do‐it‐yourselfers” with relatively uncomplicated, developmental needs. Such resources can aid people in gathering information about themselves and the world of work, and considering the possible fit between the two (see Gore & Leuwerke, Chapter 19). They are also useful adjuncts to career counseling. Research indicates, however, that computer‐guided intervention alone yields less substantial effects on average than does counselor support (Brown & Ryan Krane, 2000; Whiston, Li, Mitts, & Wright, 2017). In essence, counselors can add value beyond “high‐tech” resources, offering “high‐touch” services enabled by human interaction (e.g., help with goal setting, planning, and support‐building) (Brown et al., 2003).
Finally, how useful is career counseling compared to personal counseling (i.e., where the two forms of intervention are treated as relatively distinct)? Is it true that career counseling is somehow less impactful or meaningful? There are several reasons why it would be a mistake to trivialize the importance of career counseling. First, one's work can have a great impact on the kind of life one leads, both hedonically (e.g., materially) and eudaimonically (e.g., in terms of life meaning and purpose). As we noted earlier, work plays a central role in many people's lives. Its significance often goes well beyond the sheer amount of time and effort they put into their jobs or the size of the paycheck they receive. For many, work (or its absence) can have great psychological significance, with the potential to spill over into the non‐work parts of life. For example, work‐related stresses or conflicts can affect people's sense of well‐being when they are not at work. Likewise, work colleagues become an important source of friendships and social support for many people. Unhappiness at work, unemployment, and underemployment can each diminish life satisfaction and mental health and impact one's non‐work relationships (Allan & Kim, Chapter 24; Lent & Brown, Chapter 23). Thus, it would be difficult to overstate the value of counseling that can either prevent or remediate career‐related problems.
Second, meta‐analyses, which statistically combine the findings of many studies, have found that the effects of career choice counseling actually rival and, in some cases, exceed the effects of personal counseling. For instance, the average person receiving career counseling tends to show as much gain as the average person receiving psychotherapy, especially if career counseling involves at least three of five critical ingredients (Brown & Ryan Krane, 2000). Although career counseling and psychotherapy gains are typically assessed in terms of different outcome criteria (e.g., changes in career decidedness versus depression), career choice clients do show statistically and practically significant benefits from counseling, and these benefits may well promote other aspects of personal well‐being.
Career counselors and vocational psychologists are not alone in their interest in career development issues. There are many facets to work behavior and these are, accordingly, studied by a variety of professions. Thus, it is useful to appreciate the larger lay of the land. Career counselors often have master's degrees in counseling, with a focus on career issues. They may have studied in programs accredited by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs or other groups. Vocational psychologists typically have doctoral degrees in counseling psychology. Their academic programs may have been accredited by the American Psychological Association. Vocational psychology has, historically, been a central part of the larger specialty of counseling psychology. Practicing vocational psychologists often consider themselves as career counselors as well as more general therapists. Some of the key professional journals read by career counselors and vocational psychologists include the Journal of Vocational Behavior, Journal of Counseling Psychology, Career Development Quarterly, Journal of Career Assessment, and Journal of Career Development.
In addition to those trained specifically as career counselors and vocational psychologists, a variety of other master's‐level counselors, especially school counselors, mental health counselors, and college counselors, may provide career counseling or related services. For example, school counselors may lead comprehensive career guidance programs or teach career education classes, in addition to doing individual or group counseling aimed at facilitating educational behavior or career planning. Some social workers also focus on occupational issues, for example, as personnel in employee assistance programs. Historically, the field of social work emphasized vocational services in an effort to combat poverty, particularly in urban settings.
Within the realm of psychology, industrial/organizational (I/O) psychologists also study and, in some cases, intervene with work‐related issues. In some ways, vocational and I/O psychologists are interested in opposite sides of the same coin. They each focus on factors that promote effective work functioning, but vocational psychologists are primarily concerned with person‐focused outcomes (e.g., how to facilitate an individual's decision‐making), whereas I/O psychologists tend to emphasize outcomes of concern to work organizations (e.g., how to promote organizational productivity). Although the two specialties tend to approach work behavior from differing (person vs. organization) perspectives, their interests frequently overlap. For example, both specialties are concerned with issues of work satisfaction, performance, stress, the work–family interface, and workplace equity. I/O psychologists are less likely to do counseling or to receive counselor training but may engage in other interventions, such as organizational development or consulting. Occupational health psychology, a relatively new specialty, is concerned with factors that affect the psychological and physical health of workers (workplace safety, psychological burnout). Various other psychological specialties, such as educational psychology and developmental psychology, also study topics that overlap with vocational psychology.
Finally, several fields outside of psychology and the helping professions also share an interest in work behavior. In particular, occupational sociology (also referred to as industrial sociology or the sociology of work) focuses on work‐related trends, such as technological change and employee–employer relations, that affect workers and families at a large group or societal level. Labor economics focuses on issues affecting employment levels, participation rates, income levels, and economic productivity (e.g., gross domestic product). Like occupational sociologists, labor economists tend to examine work‐related outcomes and processes at a more collective level, rather than at the level of individual workers or work organizations. While these fields emphasize different aspects of work behavior than do counselors and psychologists, they share a concern with shaping public policies that promote the well‐being of workers, though they may define well‐being in social or economic, rather than in psychological, terms.
The field of career development, and the practice of career counseling, has evolved rapidly over the past century. However, an interest in work behavior is hardly new. People no doubt began thinking about their work, what they liked and disliked about it, how to do it better or with greater rewards, how to handle conflicts with others at work, and so forth, well before recorded history. Zytowski (1972) discovered books about occupations dating back to the late 1400s and, of course, philosophers have long been preoccupied with the role and meaning of work in people's lives. Though a full‐scale history of career development and counseling is beyond the scope of this chapter, several writers have traced the evolution of career development as a formal discipline from its early roots in vocational guidance, circa 1850, up to the present day. Some of these histories focus primarily on vocational psychology (Crites, 1969; Savickas & Baker, 2005), and some on career counseling (Savickas & Savickas, 2019), though the two areas are greatly intertwined. Engaging histories have also been written about the pioneers of the vocational guidance movement, which formed the foundation for present‐day career counseling and vocational psychology (Savickas, 2009).
Frank Parsons (1909) is widely acknowledged as one of the field's key early figures. Parsons, a social reformer who was committed to raising the living standards of the urban poor, ran an early vocational service in Boston. He developed a deceptively simple three‐step approach to vocational guidance that has been widely incorporated into subsequent theories of career development and counseling. In essence, he recommended that, in choosing a form of work, people be encouraged to (a) achieve a “clear understanding” of their personal attributes (e.g., interests, abilities), (b) acquire knowledge of the requirements and conditions of different occupations, and then (c) use “true reasoning” to consider how to reconcile these two sources of information. Modern‐day career counselors may identify with a variety of theoretical positions and employ somewhat different terms and methods, but Parsons's simple formula still serves as a fundamental blueprint for the practice of career choice counseling.
Historians of the field also tend to agree that the two world wars of the twentieth century—and the Great Depression between them—were major influences on the field's evolution. In particular, the U.S. military needed assistance assigning its recruits to different jobs in both wars, and the Veterans Administration was concerned with assisting returning veterans to adjust personally, educationally, and vocationally to civilian life after World War II. The Great Depression created an unparalleled challenge to return the underemployed and unemployed to acceptable work. In addition, increasing industrialization and associated changes in the economy (e.g., shifts from agriculture to manufacturing) in many countries during the twentieth century created a need for proven methods of matching people with work options, attending to their productivity, and nurturing their satisfaction and loyalty. These challenges were a huge boon both to the development of psychological instruments that could systematically assess self and occupational attributes and to the creation of guidance and counseling methods. Assessment devices, like the Strong Interest Inventory and the General Aptitude Test Battery, emerged from this early cauldron of activity. So did the development of career counseling methods based on directive and, eventually, person‐centered approaches.
Once veterans returned from the world wars, and the economy recovered from the Great Depression, there was a continuing need for career counseling and placement personnel. Societal and economic changes in the latter half of the twentieth century (e.g., the increasing popularity of higher education, shifts in employment demand from manufacturing to service sectors) formed the historical context for the further evolution of the career development field. In more recent decades, there have been considerable changes in technology (e.g., the introduction of personal computers and the Internet), in the nature of work (e.g., increasing need for “knowledge” workers), in global economic competition, and in the structure of work organizations. (As this book was in its final stages of completion, a global pandemic began wreaking havoc on the global economy, posing yet new challenges to the stability and sufficiency of employment for many people. At this writing, it is too soon to say how long this economic downturn will last or how permanent its effects will be on the landscape of work.)
Observing such changes, a number of writers have concluded that a new era in career development has dawned, one in which the old psychological contract between worker and employer has been cast aside (e.g., Hesketh, 2000). Where many could once expect to work for a single employer for many years and feel confident that their loyalty and productivity would be adequately rewarded, the “new contract” appears to offer far less security and stability. Terms such as “boundaryless careers,” “protean careers,” and “Me Incorporated” abound, particularly in the I/O literature. These terms are based on the assumption that global economic competition, automation, and other forces will continue to encourage many employers to retain smaller permanent workforces and to rely increasingly on temporary, part‐time, contract, or “gig” workers to create a flexible, less costly, just‐in‐time labor pool requiring neither benefits nor long‐term commitments. Such trends may further erode the pool of relatively stable, secure, or “decent” jobs and increase the incidence of precarious work (Blustein & Duffy, Chapter 7; Lent, 2018).
The implication is that workers will need to be increasingly adaptable and resilient in their approach to work. The “Me Incorporated” notion refers to the need to treat oneself essentially as a private vendor who is responsible for finding new work, investing in one's own career development, developing new interests, and updating one's skills to remain employable under uncertain and constantly changing conditions. Some believe that “the new contract” will render obsolete current theories of career development and approaches to career counseling. Although the context of work may be changing, we are convinced that current career theories still have relevance (Lent, 2013). Many people may have less stability in terms of where and when they work, but they still profit from identifying and accessing work options that are compatible with their work personalities (e.g., interests, talents, personal, and cultural values) and in which they can perform successfully. We think this is a point that career futurists sometimes miss. If career is based on the assumption that one will work for a particular employer over one's entire work life, then that restrictive notion of career may be dead (and was never truly viable for many workers). However, if career is defined, consistent with Super, as the sequence or collection of jobs held over one's work life, then the concept of career remains alive, though it does not presuppose the long‐term stability of any particular job.
It is unreasonable to expect that career choice and development theories should predict the exact job that a single individual will enter and stay in for life. It is quite reasonable, however, to expect that theories be able to help people identify and adjust to an array of potentially compatible work options. Beyond these traditional contributions of career theories, we see a need for new theories and preventive‐developmental interventions to help people negotiate a changing economic environment. Although the range of jobs people perform is still generally captured well within existing occupational classification schemes (see Gore & Leuwerke, Chapter 19), how and where many jobs are performed (e.g., using computers, at home) is changing—and so is the need to prepare for periods of work instability and change.
The time‐tested Parsonian formula, though still viable, may need to be supplemented with new methods aimed at assisting students and workers to anticipate and cope with periods of flux and transition (Lent, 2013, 2018). We do not see it as reasonable to expect people to turn into occupational chameleons who can quickly retrain for and shift into any available form of work, as circumstances shift. A basic assumption of person–environment fit theories, like that of Holland (Nauta, Chapter 3), is that people's work personalities (e.g., interests, skill sets) tend toward stability and are not ideally suited to all work environments. Flexibility is a valuable asset in both persons and environments, yet the artistically inclined may not easily transform themselves into engineers (or vice versa) just to find the next job. Still, it may well make sense to approach adaptability and preparedness as qualities that can, to some extent, be learned and nurtured through counseling and other forms of intervention (e.g., career courses, workshops).
We believe this is an exciting time to enter the field of career development. In fact, there have probably been few more momentous times in the field's history. In addition to the external challenges of a changing work world, the field has been evolving in response to new professional opportunities and crosscurrents. For example, career counselors and vocational psychologists are, increasingly, meeting and working together across cultural and national boundaries as the larger profession—like the work domain that serves as their common focus—becomes more and more internationalized (e.g., Athanasou & Perera, 2019). U.S.‐based professional groups, such as the National Career Development Association and the Society for Vocational Psychology, are not alone. Their international counterparts, such as the International Association for Educational and Vocational Guidance and the International Association of Applied Psychology, are prospering as well. The field has been infused with a great deal of vitality and energy as career counselors and vocational psychologists around the world find new ways to study and promote career behavior. Several recent reviews and commentaries offer useful perspectives on the current status of the field, either generally or in particular areas of inquiry, and provide possible glimpses into its future (e.g., Blustein, Ali, & Flores, 2019; Brown & Lent, 2016; Fouad & Kozlowski, 2019).
It is important to emphasize that career development and counseling is both a scholarly and a practice field. That is, it is devoted to understanding work behavior and to applying this understanding to practices that directly enrich people's lives. Although the ideal for many years in psychology has been to develop scientist‐practitioners—that is, persons who are adept in both of these spheres—the reality is that some professionals will be drawn to one of them more than to the other. This, after all, is consistent with assumptions that certain career theories make about people's work personalities. For example, based on Holland's theory (Nauta, Chapter 3), one might expect those with predominant social interests to gravitate toward the counseling role, and those with stronger science interests to favor research and scholarship roles.
The field needs talented people to perform both sets of roles and it needs them to communicate well with one another so that scholarship remains responsive to practice and that practice is based on evolving science as well as art. More and more, the field is also becoming aware of the need to invest a greater portion of its collective energy in advocacy and public policy efforts, including involvement with decision‐makers and leaders who formulate wide‐ranging education and work policies. Such “upstream” advocacy may aid people's career opportunities and well‐being at a systemic level, whether or not they ever seek career services.
As part of its science, practice, and advocacy missions, the career development field is also marked by a commitment to social justice and multiculturalism, to serving the needs of an increasingly diverse society and world. Indeed, as we have suggested earlier, concerns about social justice pervade the history of the career development field. They were prominent in the earliest days of the field, as social reformers sought to improve the lives of recent immigrants and others lacking economic privilege (Parsons, 1909); and they were a primary stimulus for the field's efforts during the middle and latter parts of the twentieth century to better meet the needs of women, persons with disabilities, veterans, work‐bound students, and other traditionally underserved clients from diverse social and economic backgrounds. Social justice remains a hallmark of the field, as evidenced by a continuing sensitivity to the ways in which diversity shapes people's career experiences (e.g., see the chapters in the second section of this book). In short, assisting people to obtain and succeed at work has long been seen as an essential way to improve the human condition and to promote a just society.
We noted a variety of roles that work plays in people's lives, from meeting basic survival needs through addressing meaning‐of‐life questions. We also defined several key terms, such as career and career development; identified the counseling and psychological professionals who are specially trained to provide career counseling and related services; and noted a variety of other professions that share an interest in career development or work behavior. We considered some common myths and stereotypes surrounding career counseling, pointing out ways in which they are often inaccurate or fail to tell the whole story. Finally, we described the field's historical context and some of its contemporary challenges, arguing that a concern with social justice and a respect for human diversity have been key forces directing the field's evolution ever since its inception. We welcome you to the field of career development and counseling, and hope you will find it a great place to develop your own career.