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Weekly UpdatesThe Role of Scientific Models in the Construction of Career Counseling Questions
Although career counseling questions fundamentally relate to society, they take on a specific form depending on the scientific models on which they are based. From the outset, psychology has played a major role in the construction of career counseling questions. Concepts such as those of aptitudes, values, and interests constituted (and still constitute) baseline categories in vocational psychology. Such analyses denote a relatively essentialist concept of the human individual, this individual being characterized by a certain number of stable dimensions, which explains why it may be incorporated, with varying degrees of satisfaction, into one or another vocational or training context. For individuals, finding their future career path implies determining the vocational context, with fundamental dimensions that correspond to essential traits that typify a person's own individuality.
Recently, social sciences have emphasized a notably different viewpoint of human development in which behavior and attitudes are linked to the contexts in which people live, the positions they occupy, and the interactions in which they engage. Such a concept is clearly not radically new. Its origins can be found, in particular, in The Principles of Psychology by James (1890). What seems to be new, however, is the current predominance of this concept. This is seen in authors as different as Bakhtin (1981), Becker (1973), Foucault (1986, 1988), Gergen (1991), Giddens (1991), Hayrynen (1995), Holstein and Gubrium (1999), Ricoeur(1992), and others. Ideas such as narrative identities or narrative self now seem fundamental. Strangely, most of the tools (e.g., vocational typologies, most career guidance software) used in career interventions seem to refer to an essentialist concept of the individual (e.g., Holland's theory, 1966, 1992). This indicates a gap between current issues in social sciences and certain caree r interventions. Might it be that current scientific models of the human individual could lead to questioning these career development practices?
Three Prototype Forms of Career Development Practices
Three types of career development practices seem to be prototypes of today's career interventions: (a) counseling interactions, (b) validation of experiential learning, and (c) career education programs. A fourth type-- collective development activities--can be added; although atypical, these activities seem to be related to career development programs.
Counseling Interactions
According to Lhotellier (2001), counseling interactions can be defined generically as "counseling acts" based on the "creation of a dialogic community in which prevail together the thoughts of the other person, the methodical and plural search for the meaning of a problem situation, and the construction of an active and creative approach" (p. 14). Egan (1998) contended that counseling acts also aimed to help clients "manage their problems in living more effectively and develop unused or underused opportunities more fully" (p. 7). As stressed by Egan, counseling interactions are also intended to teach clients how to resolve their everyday problems themselves.
Counseling interactions are fundamentally psychological. They owe their expansion to the considerations of Rogers and, in particular, the publication of Client-Centered Therapy in 1951. The basic idea is that a nonleading interview, undertaken by a counselor adopting an attitude of open understanding (empathy), provides in itself an opportunity for clients to discover by themselves certain aspects of their "self" and to restructure their personality through this very discovery. However, "Rogerian" neophenomenology is not the only theoretical reference for this practice.
For example, some counselors use concepts stemming from psychoanalysis or from sociology when looking at the "life stories or career genograms" of their client (de Gaulejac, 1987). Counseling interactions take on somewhat different forms, according to whether the client is an adolescent or an adult.
Competencies Assessment and Development
The core issue of career counseling for adults is to help them cope during an occupational or professional transition and, in some cases, to help them develop their career. For this purpose, counselors help clients to identify their potential by analyzing their experiences related to work, training, and their social life. This involves enabling clients to identify their assets, to recognize their skills (competencies), and to define their priorities in terms of training or occupation, and it also entails encouraging them to commit themselves to the realization of the projects thus defined.
The situation of adolescents differs notably from that of adults. During adolescence, the future seems--theoretically at least--to be more open. Most psychologists (e.g., Erikson, 1959, 1968) consider adolescence to be a determinant period in self-construction. It is at this time that adolescents develop many possible "selves" and are particularly sensitive to ideas concerning not only the future of society but also what they dream of becoming. To paraphrase Ginzberg, Ginsburg, Axelrad, and Herma (1951), adolescence is the time of tentative choices. But at the same time, this period is one of seeking personal consistency based on certain values or personal projects. Hence, at this time, family, social, and academic pressures explicitly or implicitly influence adolescents to identify certain goals rather than others. For example, Gottfredson (1981) has stressed that parents generally expect their children to aspire to a social position of a level at least equivalent to their own.
Adolescence is also a time of life during which individuals are reminded, sometimes brutally, of social and community standards as well as of the standards of peer groups to which they belong. They are called on to determine how they will relate to these standards. Need it be mentioned here that suicide is the second cause of death among 15- to 24-year-olds in France (and is the first cause of death in Canada; Dorais, 2001)? This is typically a male issue, given that it concerns boys 3.5 times more often than girls, and it is attributed in most instances to coming to terms with their identity. Dorais has pointed out that, according to North American studies, suicide attempts are between 6 and 16 times greater for young men who are gay or bisexual than for heterosexuals.
In all training systems, important career choices must generally be made during adolescence. The complexity of personal and career issues at this age is not always perceived by adolescents; many good students adopt a "logic of excellence" (Dumora, 1990), which satisfies family expectations and meets academic institution criteria. In this logic of excellence, the question "what will I become" is dealt with only in the superficial form of the readymade answer "I want to do well in school, and we'll see after that." The situation of weaker students is more delicate. For them, career choices sometimes involve bereavement behavior regarding "possible" or "ideal" selves (Dumora, 1990). The less adequate academic capabilities of these students limit their future options.
Counselors who become involved in counseling interactions with adolescents regarding their future may encounter complex and painful questions. At the same time, these counselors may be confronted with contradictory expectations held by adolescents or young adults, their family, and the school institution. Therefore, the major question that arises is the independence of practitioners regarding these various "social actors" and processes.
Despite these fundamental differences between career counseling for adolescents and that offered to adults, many of the psychological processes involved in counseling dialogue seem similar. This is why career counseling for adolescents can be considered a "technology of the self" (Foucault, 1988) that prepares them to relate to themselves--as future adults--in the form, for example, of the validation of experiential learning.
Experiential Learning
The validation of experiential learning is an actively developing career counseling practice. It involves adults who seek recognition and legitimization of the skills that they have acquired through their life experience. Validation of these acquired competencies consists of(a) individuals' recognition, or identification, of everything they have learned by experience and (b) legitimization of these skills by the granting of a diploma either by the state or by official certification bodies.
The fundamental difficulty in the validation of such developed skills arises from the difference in nature of practical know-how and knowledge acquired by training. As Clot (1999) has written, the former is imbued with the implication of work experience. The latter is more formal, structured in such a way that it can bc easily evaluated. Candidates for validation of acquired competencies, hence, must restructure the representation of their activity. This is by no means an easy process. Individuals can recognize their activity only by presenting it to others. This verbalization of experience changes its nature. It involves a dialogue. Thus, the validation of experiential learning can be seen as an activity that will produce relatively abstract and noncontextual skills and knowledge that are based on know-how, prowess, attitudes, modes of interactions, and so on and that are implemented in particular situations. This production is the fruit of a "dialogic interlocution."
This issue of validation of experiential learning will probably have notable consequences in the wider field of career guidance. This approach stresses that counseling interactions go beyond mere self-discovery. In this respect, career counseling activity appears to be, per se, a process of self-construction. The issue of validation of experiential learning leads to a future vision of career counseling practices that are aimed at adolescents or young adults, involving dialogic cogeneration of knowledge and competencies based on their know-how that has been gained through hands-on experience.
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