Due to ongoing changes in the labor market, groups that assist people in developing or changing career directions are particularly important. This digest outlines some features of employment group counseling. Research has shown that the unemployed face numerous factors, such as job rejections and financial pressures, that can hinder the job…

The technological advances that have occurred in recent decades have resulted in substantial changes in the nature and structure of occupations and industries. Career development is now being recognized as a lifelong process. Individualized career plans (ICPs) or personal plans of action are becoming important instruments for counselors and others…

Although counselors have implicitly understood and used a number of its tenets, an action-theoretical approach is a relatively recent development in career counseling. This digest analyzes the tenets of this approach. An action approach to career counseling sees clients as agents who steer and direct their activities. It represents an integration…

A comprehensive delivery system offers several advantages in career counseling programs serving adult clients. Systematic delivery is advantageous because of its developmental emphasis, effective use of resources, amenability to change, provisions for built-in ongoing evaluation, and focus on process and product. A comprehensive adult career…

The need for lifelong career development in Canada is becoming increasingly evident as more people switch jobs. To meet this need, it has been suggested that counseling services for adults should be organized in a three-tiered structure. Such a structure would ensure that individuals have access to a counselor in accordance with their level of…

Since culture provides a direction for discovering a sense of coherence between stability and change, therapeutic change can be established when clients become aware of their cultural rules. This digest examines techniques developed for ethnographic research that can be applied directly to the career counseling interview. Ethnography assumes that…

Terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, DC, and the continued threats of terrorism have the potential to engender negative psychological effects upon school age children and their families. School counselors and mental health professionals working with children need to be knowledgeable regarding interventions which allow students to…

The centric model of career counseling was developed for use in employment counseling and takes into account psychological, social, and economic factors. Four developmental phases are used to describe movement within the centric model. The initial phase, readiness, establishes the working alliance between the counselor and the client. Clients must…

Creating Self-Portraits is an individual and/or group career development tool designed to assess without testing. Researchers have found that testing can be counter-productive; once clients were labelled, they frequently stopped self-examination. A tool was needed that would help people understand themselves in a way that would encourage further…

A constructivist framework can often appear vague and abstract to the novice counselor. The abstract and nebulous realm of meaning-making, which is central to constructivist approaches, can be frustrating for a linear, task-oriented counselor. This digest explains the approaches used in constructivist counseling. The need to use constructivist…

The context in which career decisions are made is dynamic--occupations are changing rapidly and society is becoming increasingly complex. This digest describes a model that uses five processes which are critical to effective career planning: initiation, exploration, decision making, preparation, and implementation. The first process, initiation,…

Employment counseling is a set of interventions designed to help clients identify and resolve issues in employment-related decisions. This digest examines Canada's measurement model which was designed to enhance understanding of counseling's function. The model uses four employability dimensions: (1) career/occupation decision making; (2) skills…

Career exploration typically involves the investigation of personal factors: interests, aptitudes, values, and personal style. This digest outlines one counseling method, pattern identification exercise (PIE). PIE starts with past experiences and identifies personal patterns which are relevant to career decisions. A premise of PIE is that…

While there is general consensus on the importance of good academic advising to student success and support for the American College Testing Program's developmental concept of advising, there is less agreement on the most effective model for delivery. Research suggests that both faculty-oriented advising and professional counselor-oriented systems…

Canadian counselors working with young offenders confront at least two problems that interfere with effective intervention: a trend toward increased incarceration, and public confusion and mistrust over approaches to reducing crime. Research during the past decade is beginning to show clearly that programs for young offenders and other at-risk…