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Homeschooling Resources: Educational Issues

Career Counseling: Five Processes of Career Planning
By Mimi Rothschild

The context in which career decisions are commonly made is dynamic: occupations are changing rapidly, society is becoming increasingly complex and multicultural, and individuals need to plan for diverging rather than converging career paths. Furthermore, in times of social change and economic uncertainty, clients often feel discouraged, despondent, and hopeless about their futures. The increasing complexity of client needs and career counseling interventions have rendered inadequate, and simplistic approaches to resolving career issues. Although traditional approaches still may play a role in career planning, additional emphasis must be placed on other issues: how self-concept is implemented (Super, 1990), personal adaptability (Super, 1985), and personal meaning-making (Miller-Tiedeman & Tiedeman, 1990). Career counseling should also help clients achieve independence rather than dependence. Such factors necessitate a different vision of the counseling process.

The Five Processes

The model in this paper describes five processes critical to effective career planning: initiation, exploration, decision-making, preparation, and implementation (Magnusson, 1991, 1992). The processes are cyclical, although a few clients may begin at initiation and proceed sequentially through to implementation.

Initiation

Initiation means to set in motion. Clients become discouraged or lose hope and strategies to secure meaningful engagement are necessary. The initiation process addresses three core issues:

1. Establishing an effective counseling relationship. Traditional approaches to career counseling often overlook the importance of the therapeutic relationship. However, the establishment of a strong therapeutic alliance can be invaluable in motivating clients to take action.
2. Determining current motivation for career planning. This involves a detailed examination of presenting issues, with a particular emphasis on identifying client motivation for change and the context in which that change must occur. With this information, counselors can determine if clients are ready for specific career planning activities or if other interventions are needed.
3. Building relevance for career planning. Many clients who enter career counseling are discouraged and see themselves with limited opportunities. Counselors must encourage these clients and foster hope. Typically this is done by identifying issues of meaning for the client and by promoting a sense of the future.

To illustrate, clients may be asked to complete a "significant experiences" exercise, in which they write a 2-3 page narrative describing some accomplishment or experience of which they are proud. Client and counselor work together to identify the skills and characteristics that were demonstrated and then clients are asked to select the 5-10 most meaningful of these. Posing a simple question such as "How would you like to experience that level of pride again?" invariably increases client motivation for career planning. Attending to the core initiation issues increases client awareness of the career planning process, builds trust in the counselor, and renews hope by helping clients build a vision of the future.

Exploration

Exploration helps clients discover ways to implement aspects of their vision while concomitantly attending to issues of meaning and personal context. This is most effectively done by capitalizing on the renewed sense of energy and hope that arises during initiation. While formal assessment and occupational information sources may be useful, informal strategies tend to produce more meaningful, more accurate, and more enduring results. These include information interviewing, relational networking, job shadowing, and work experience.

For example, clients who have completed the significant experiences exercise described above will have a ranked list of skills and characteristics that were associated with a meaningful experience. Clients can be taught basic networking techniques to identify other people who share a similar passion. An interesting outcome of informal networking is that the occupational titles of the contacts are often surprising to clients--they never associated the occupation or setting with their own attributes. In this way, new vistas may be opened to clients as intriguing options spawn further exploration. Opportunities to experience the passion, through job shadowing or work experience, serve to validate initial impressions. Thus, initiation determines what is meaningful to clients, while exploration determines how that meaning may be expressed.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mimi Rothschild is a homeschooling parent, author, children's rights advocate, and Founder and C.E.O. of Learning by Grace, Inc. She and her husband of almost 3 decades reside with their 8 children in suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Rothschild co-founded Learning By Grace, Inc. because "our current system of education has broken its promise..." Learning By Grace, Inc. delivers Internet-based multimedia education to PreK-12 children in the United States and throughout the world.

Rothschild has authored a number of books about education published by McGraw Hill and others. Her Daily Education News Blog contains feature stories on alternatives in education.

Five Processes of Career Planning: Part II