Effects of Orientations to Happiness on Vocational Identity Achievement

There is an increased interest in vocational psychology and career counseling regarding the link between career development and well‐being, yet, little is known about how different ways to achieve well‐being or happiness relate to career development. This study explored the relationship between 3 orientations to happiness (meaning, pleasure, and engagement) and vocational identity achievement among 2 groups of Swiss adolescents (n = 268, 8th grade; n = 208, 11th grade). The results indicated that more orientation to meaning and engagement but not to pleasure positively related to vocational identity achievement.     

Work‐to‐School Transitions in the Age of the Displaced Worker: A Psychology of Working Perspective

Frank Parsons (1909) founded the vocational guidance movement more than 100 years ago within the context of a shift from an agricultural to an industrial workplace. Today, globalization, workforce diversity, and the financial instability related to the Great Recession present numerous challenges to workers across the economic spectrum. In addition to highlighting Parsons's continued influence on career counseling practice, the authors draw on David Blustein's (2006) psychology of working to enhance the understanding of the needs of dislocated workers. Using case examples, the authors demonstrate how to incorporate insights from the psychology of working to address social justice, financial, relational, and self‐determination concerns among this vulnerable population. Counseling strategies for clients in transition, especially those considering educational options, are provided.     

The impact of infertility on men's work and finances: Findings from a qualitative questionnaire study

The impact of infertility on the emotional, social and relational aspects of men's lives is now more widely understood. Yet the impact of infertility on men's working lives and financial status remains largely overlooked. Drawing on a qualitative questionnaire study into men's experiences of infertility (n = 41), this article examines how work and finances are managed and negotiated during infertility, including treatment cycles. Three key themes were identified from our thematic analysis: managing infertility in the workplace; compromised job performance, (in)security and progression; the financial burden of infertility, suggesting that infertility can have significant implications for men's working lives, including their identities as productive workers. The impact had a gendered dimension, with threats to masculine‐relevant breadwinner roles and career ambitions. Awareness and management of infertility as a chronic health condition could be a useful way for employers to support disclosure of infertility and to allow men to navigate infertility and their working lives and identities in less stress‐inducing ways. This article contributes to our growing understanding of the stigma men experience in relation to infertility and how such stigma may intersect with masculinity in general and breadwinning in particular.     

Negative Career Outlook and the Working Alliance in Career Counseling

The authors investigated 3 dimensions of the working alliance—goal, task, and bond—and the reduction of negative career‐related thoughts. A pretest–posttest design revealed a significant reduction in negative career thoughts after an initial career counseling interview was provided to college students (N = 87). Regression analyses revealed that task predicted negative career thoughts. The findings offer evidence of the effectiveness of career counseling and of the contribution of working alliance to counseling as a process and outcome variable.     

The Career Decision‐Making Difficulties Questionnaire: A Case for Item‐Level Interpretation

The Career Decision‐Making Difficulties Questionnaire (CDDQ; Gati, Krausz, & Osipow, 1996) has long been demonstrated as a useful instrument for career counseling practice. Several case studies have demonstrated how and why using the CDDQ facilitates the career counseling process (e.g., Amir, Gati, & Kleiman, 2008; Gati & Levin, 2014; Levin & Gati, 2014). This study explores how an in‐depth analysis of a case study conducted at the item level can provide career counselors with a richer understanding of their clients’ needs. The case study also emphasizes how administering and providing feedback on the CDDQ in career counseling sessions is likely to foster working alliances. The study concludes by presenting an intervention map based on the CDDQ taxonomy.     

Career Pathways into Retirement in the UK: Linking Older Women's Pasts to the Present

Understanding of how women's experiences in retirement are shaped by their pre‐retirement lives is limited. In this paper we utilize an innovative mix of measures to examine the link between career histories and expectations and experiences of retirement. Analysis of timeline data capturing the long working lives of a sample of older women identifies five different pathways into retirement. We explore these trajectories in detail to determine how they are shaped and their links to different outcomes in later life. The analysis shows how different career histories unfold and how they shape expectations and experiences of retirement. Long, professional career pathways leave women feeling enabled in retirement, women following more fragmented pathways are more constrained, and some trajectories, including pathways involving transitions into professional careers in later life, can leave older women financially and emotionally vulnerable in older age.     

Integrating Relational Perspectives in Career Counseling Practice

Sweeping changes in the world of work are transforming the very fabric of career counseling practice as clients cope increasingly with work uncertainty, including unemployment, underemployment, and precarious work. The authors describe how relational perspectives (Blustein, 2011 ; Flum 2015 ; Richardson, 2012 ; Schultheiss, 2003 ) can be infused in career counseling, with a focus on the concerns of an increasingly stressed and anxious client population. To provide a framework for the application of relational perspectives, the authors integrate and present existing relational theories and frameworks in 4 tenets that have particular relevance for career counseling practice. An in‐depth case analysis is provided to illustrate how relational perspectives can be integrated in working with clients experiencing uncertain work and associated relational challenges.     

A Study of Clinical Change in Individual Career Counseling

This study examined the clinical significance of career counseling effects. Participants were 111 university students (83% women) who participated in individual career counseling sessions at their university. All participants completed the French version of the Outcome Questionnaire–30.2 (OQ‐30.2; Lambert, Finch, Okiishi, & Burlingame, 2005) immediately before the 1st session (pretest) and at the beginning of the last session (posttest). The OQ‐30.2 assesses 3 client life domains: subjective discomfort, problems in interpersonal relationships, and problems in social role satisfaction. Using Jacobson and Truax’s (1991) statistical approach to assessing clinical change, the authors compared clients’ pretest OQ‐30.2 scores with their posttest scores. Among clients with a “dysfunctional” score (n = 59) at the study’s inception, 34% recovered and 14% improved, whereas 41% of clients with functional scores (n = 52) at the study’s inception improved. The results suggest that individual career counseling can make a difference in the lives of many clients; they also highlight the importance of further outcome research that accounts for possible variability in clients’ responses to career counseling.     

Integrating Existentialism and Super's Life‐Span,Life‐Space Approach

As workers face a changing and ever‐complex employment landscape, traditional career theories and approaches may not be sufficient in meeting career challenges. Calls for integrated career theories have emerged as more people seek meaning and purpose in their lives and careers. This article proposes a career counseling option that integrates existentialism and Super's (1990) life‐span, life‐space approach to establish a foundation for a broader approach to career development that views clients holistically by exploring life and career meaning and purpose from a developmental perspective. A case example and interventions are provided to demonstrate practical application and a contextual framework, along with implications for counselors.     

Constructivist Counseling for Career Indecision

Twentieth-century vocational guidance has been an objective enterprise in which counselors have studied and treated career indecision by abstracting and objectifying it. This article describes how the logical positivist perspective on indecision as an objective phenomenon has evolved over the course of this century. Then, the article explains how constructivist counselors view indecision as clients' subjective attempts to give meaning to crisis points in their lives. This view permits a conceptualization of career counseling as a process of articulating a client's life theme. The article concludes with a case study that illustrates a life-theme approach to counseling for career indecision.     

The Last Stitch in the Quilt

The patterns of our working lives are fluid and often unpredictable. They are linked to the process of identity forming that we understand as a recognizable, but continuously changing pattern of actions and developments within our lifespan, which includes our career choices. This interpretation allows us to identify the multiple temporal trajectories within a working life and to see how an analysis of temporalities can help us to understand the gendered nature of our careers. By using a number of retrospective narratives of older women about their working lives, we ascertain how an externally imposed and chronologically organized linear (life‐) career story breaks down into a number of a‐chronological trajectories, each of which is personally marked by the identity of the narrator. The theme of self‐care emerges and turns into a binding notion for working women from different generations.     

Applying the Happenstance Learning Theory to Involuntary Career Transitions

The happenstance learning theory (HLT) proposes a model of career counseling that helps clients to build more satisfying personal and work lives. Although reflective listening remains an essential part of the process, HLT is an action‐oriented approach to helping clients to both create and benefit from unplanned events. Success is measured not by what happens during the counseling interview but by what the client experiences in the real world during and after counseling. A case study illustrates how HLT might be applied with a client who has been laid off after 20 years on the job.     

The Role of Thinking Styles in Career Development Among Chinese College Students

Thinking styles define individuals' marked preferences in how they learn about or process information. This study considered the function of collecting and processing information in career exploration and decision making, and examined thinking styles as a predictor of career decision‐making difficulties (CDMD) and career exploration as a mediator of this relationship. Chinese college students (N = 463) responded to measures of thinking styles, career exploration, and CDMD. Results partially supported the contribution of thinking styles to career exploration and CDMD. Type I styles, characterized as more creativity‐generating, positively predicted career exploration and negatively predicted CDMD. Type II styles, characterized as more norm‐favoring, positively predicted CDMD. Partial mediation was supported in the link between Type I styles and lack of information through career environment exploration. The benefits of type styles should be highlighted for career guidance and counseling among Chinese college students and should be validated in different cultural contexts.     

The Inseparability of “Career” and “Personal” Counseling

In this article it is argued that “career” and “personal” counseling should not be viewed as different types of counseling because: (a) the holistic philosophy of counseling emphasizes helping “whole” persons whose lives contain many important and meaningful roles; (b) recent research on the implications of gender and race for career development further demonstrates the inseparability of our career and “personal” lives; and (c) there are numerous commonalities in the “career” and “personal” counseling process.     

Early 20th-Century Career Counseling for Women: Contemporary Practice and Research Implications

The authors critically examine the development of career counseling for women during the early 20th century. The development of career counseling for women lagged behind career counseling for men. Challenges, such as feminization of occupations, restricted occupational opportunities, and societal norms, stunted the development of career counseling for women. Furthermore, career counseling for women varied based on racial groups. Early writings discussed opportunities specifically geared toward White, college-educated, nonimmigrant women. Although these beginning opportunities provided formal guidance to White women, many other women were excluded from formal career counseling and are not represented in these writings. Implications include training practitioners to recognize their own biases when working with women, how gender bias influences career counseling inventories and career theories, and how counselors can challenge these biases and stereotypes to provide the full range of career opportunities to women. Future research should address the impact of career counseling on women of color.     

The Psychology of Working in Practice: A Theory of Change for a New Era

This article advances the psychology of working theory by developing a parallel change‐based paradigm to guide interventions at the level of individuals (i.e., the psychology of working counseling) and systems (i.e., the psychology of working systemic intervention). The change paradigm presented in this article includes (a) a needs assessment encompassing survival, social connection/contribution, and self‐determination and (b) input on the mobilization of agentic action that includes critical reflection and action, proactive engagement, social support, and community engagement. The needs assessment and agentic action aspects of this approach can be used to foster change in individual counseling, advocacy, and systemic intervention. Case examples reflecting a systemic intervention and an individual counseling vignette are presented along with implications for research, such as explorations of the impact of these change models on client outcomes and systemic change efforts.     

The Self‐Directed Search as a Stand‐Alone Intervention With College Students

The Self‐Directed Search (SDS; Holland, 1994 ) is sometimes administered to large student groups outside of counseling to address common career development needs. This study evaluated the effectiveness of the SDS as a stand‐alone intervention by comparing a general sample of college students who completed the SDS (n = 39) with a no‐treatment control group (n = 41) on several outcomes. Completion of the SDS related to an increase in the number of career alternatives being considered 4 weeks later but did not relate to career exploration, career decision‐making self‐efficacy, career indecision, and seeking of career counseling services. If the SDS is used outside of counseling with broad student samples, the authors suggest providing additional intervention to ensure that it promotes exploration of any additional careers being considered.     

Influence of Temporal Distance on the Perceived Importance of Career‐Related Self‐Efficacy and Outcome Expectations

Because all career choices are about future actions, time is an important contextual variable in social cognitive career choice ( Hesketh, 2000 ). However, there is a dearth of research examining the effect of time. The authors examined how temporal distance to career entry influences the perceived importance of self‐efficacy and outcome expectations concerning a career pursuit. They also examined the moderating effects of perceived support and barriers, as well as country. The participants were college students in the United States (n= 180) and in South Korea (n= 215). The results of hierarchical regression analyses did not show main effects of time, but a 3‐way interaction indicated the complex interplay of time and other contextual variables. Implications for career counseling and future research are discussed.     

Work of Full‐Time Mothers: Putting Voice to the Relational Theory of Working

The purpose of this qualitative research was to explore the work experience of middle‐class, Korean full‐time mothers in their 50s. Interviews, observations, and photographs were collected from 11 Korean full‐time mothers to understand their work and career experiences. The data were analyzed by a case study qualitative method of inquiry. The themes that emerged from the data were paths to becoming full‐time mothers, multiple working roles from relationships, dialectical characteristics of work, meaning of full‐time mothering, and regrets and internalized biases for full‐time motherhood. The findings illustrate how full‐time mothers experience a sense of meaning and mattering from their work; how relationships and work are intertwined in their lives; and how gender, social class, and culture influence the work and relationships of full‐time mothers. Implications for counselors and researchers are discussed.     

Shame and the Psychosocial Costs of Contemporary Work: Implications for Career Intervention

This article explores the concept of shame and integrates it into career development and career counseling. The article begins with an overview of shame from a diverse conceptual framework, describing shame as a self-conscious emotion that occurs in response to interactions or events that evoke embarrassment, humiliation, self-doubt, and psychological distress. We discuss the prevalence of shame in work-based interactions and contexts, which is referred to as work shame. Building on this integrative review of shame within the working context, we describe the counseling implications and provide a case study to illustrate the ways in which shame emerges in clients' lives and potential strategies to resist and transcend shame.