“Follow your heart but take your brain with you.”
Who Will Benefit From Career Counseling?
Career Counseling is helpful to anyone feeling disconnected about college and career goals or options. This might be a student that feels overwhelmed about the prospect of leaving high school and having to choose a college major or career path. Or it could be a young adult that finds that college was not a good fit and is not only worried about future goals, but may also be experiencing shame or guilt associated with leaving school. It could be someone recently dejobbed through downsizing or outsourcing that is feeling suddenly lost or it might be a stay at home parent that feels disconnected from the paid workforce and is hoping to re-enter but uncertain of how that could look given their experience and skills.
Certain situations shed light on our need for career exploration. By embracing these situations and taking action, we can begin to tell our own story and feel confident in our path forward. Career Counseling can offer more than a vocational goal - it can offer a sense of self that goes beyond a job and helps clients feel more connected to their world in and out of the workforce.
The Career Construction Method of Career Counseling
Career construction views work as a vehicle to make life more meaningful. It rests on the premise that individuals construct themselves through story. In telling their life stories, people shape identities in the form of self-defining autobiographical narratives. These narratives hold them during and carry them through times of uncertainty and instability, especially characteristic of life in the digital and global age. Career construction emphasizes narratability to tell one’s story coherently, adaptability to cope with changes in self and situation, and intentionality to design a meaningful life.
Career construction counseling entails an interpersonal process of helping people author career stories that connect their self-concepts to work roles, fit work into life, and make meaning through work. Using the narrative paradigm, career construction counseling begins with a Career Construction Interview. Each question prompts individuals to tell small stories about themselves that convey who they are and who they wish to become. Counselor and client collaboratively shape the themes culled from these micro-stories into a macro-narrative about the person’s central preoccupation, motives, goals, adaptive strategies, and self-view. This co-construction process empowers individuals to author life-career stories that enhance their experiences of work as personally meaningful and socially useful. They may then use work to actively master what they passively suffer.
Paul J. Hartung Northeast Ohio Medical University