A rich past and a future vision.

The National Career Development Association celebrated its 90th birthday at its recent summer conference. During that span of time, there has been significant development of theory, tools, and interventions as well as standards for the preparation of the members of the career development profession. The author reviews those accomplishments and suggests some needed directions for the immediate future.

For this special issue, authors have been asked to review the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities in the career counseling profession and, based on these, to make suggestions and predictions for the next decade. I approach this task by examining the profession in four areas: its theoretical base, its tools, its methods of intervention, and the preparation of its members. In each section, I summarize my view of that category as well as offer suggestions for the next decade. Although I am aware that public policy and legislation are also critical factors, I leave this domain to other authors who have greater expertise in that area.

Theoretical Base

The career counseling field has a rich theoretical base. Parsons (1909) laid a foundation for career counseling work by stressing the critical relationship between the characteristics of individuals and occupational choices. His pioneering work led to the trait-and-factor approach that, although not a sufficient intervention in and of itself, is one helpful approach to identifying alternatives.

Anne Roe (1956) made a beginning contribution to the development of an organizational system for occupations that is simple enough to use with students and clients as a basis for their occupational exploration. Although her theory that early childhood experience was a determinant of vocational choice was not supported by research, her eight-category classification of occupations and her advocacy for a Things versus People dimension in the work tasks of occupations served as a foundation for the later work of Holland (1959) and Prediger (1981).

Super appeared as a giant in the field with his 1957 book The Psychology of Careers. With that book he began to move the field to a much broader perspective--from choosing an occupation to crafting a career, from single decisions at transitional points to lifelong development. He contributed many of the concepts most precious to the career counseling profession--the centrality of self-concept; the definition of career as a combination of interacting life roles; the delineation of factors and tasks that constitute career maturity; the importance of values and their attainment in various life roles; and finally, the recognition in his Arch of Determinants model (Brown & Brooks, 1990) that personal career is supported by two pillars of equal importance: internal variables such as interests, talents, and personality traits and external variables such as the labor market, the economy, and hiring practices.

Tiedeman (Tiedeman & O'Hara, 1963) made an immense contribution to the understanding of the process that underlies the many decisions made in a Super life stage or life role. His model provided a structure that could be internalized into one's own decision making or used as a basis for helping students and clients become aware of and inform their own processes.

Holland (1997), in his highly focused stream of research and development, has made his contribution through tools that counselors can use to assist individuals to make satisfying choices or transitions related to work, educational programs of study, and leisure activities. His theory defines personality types and the environment in which persons of those types may thrive or be dissatisfied. His classification system for occupations, often with non-Holland titles, has become the nationally accepted classification system and the basis for ACT's World-of-Work Map (Prediger, 1981).

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, a host of theorists have added to the understanding of the phenomenon of career choice and development. Schlossberg (1989) has focused on transitions--the factors that constitute them and a cognitive method of managing their impact. Peterson, Sampson, and Reardon (1991) have focused on the bases and dynamics of how individuals process information and on their readiness to do so. Krumboltz (1996) underscored the importance of the learning process, both instrumental and associative, in career choice and development. Brown (1995) has detailed the impact of values on career choice and development. Lent, Brown, and Hackett (1996) have focused on the power of self-efficacy and cognitive factors such as outcome expectations and goals as precipitators of career choices and behaviors. Hansen (1997) has stressed the need for individuals to focus less on self-actualization and more on inclusion of family and global needs--in other words, making career choices in a more holistic way.

These theorists, whose work is too briefly reviewed here, inspect the context and phenomenon of career choice and development from a different perspective. It is as if each one turns the kaleidoscope of career choice and sees a different and unique arrangement of its pieces. Yet all these theorists have identified relevant pieces of the puzzle.

This review of theories leads me to a summary of weaknesses in the profession's theoretical base as I see them. These, in turn, can become goals for the next decade.

1. Although theorists may not have identified all of the internal and external variables and dynamics that have an impact on career choice and development, they have surely identified most of them. At this point in the profession's history, career counselors need disciplined, thoughtful work in integration of these theories into a more meaningful whole as well as clear statements of the theories' implications for working with students and clients.

2. In theory development to date, there has been disproportionate attention to the career development of White, middle-class, young men. Given the societal changes and diversity of the twenty-first century, it is essential that more attention be given to the career development of women; members of racial/ethnic minorities; persons with disabilities; and gay men, lesbians, and bisexual men and women.

3. The profession's research base is spotty and fragmented. Although some theories, such as Holland's, have been subjected to long-term study across many cultures, others have been subjected to little or no study. Many studies that are related to the investigation of theories or to the evaluation of interventions have been done with small, non-representative samples.

Tools

Theories spawn applications, and applications require tools. Tools include formal and informal assessments, curricula, and technologies. They are items that counselors can use to aid, in substantial ways, their delivery of services to students and clients.

The latest edition of A Counselor's Guide to Career Assessment (Kapes & Whitfield, 2001) bears testimony to the fact that the profession has a myriad of well-researched instruments designed to measure career beliefs, career thoughts, career maturity, interests, skills, aptitudes, abilities, personality traits, values, and other internal variables. Many of these instruments are available in print and in computer-based and Internet-delivered forms. Many have had a long history of research that has documented acceptable reliability and validity, and many are based on the theoretical work reviewed in the first section of this article.

The development of additional instruments seems unnecessary. Rather, the needs appear to be the following two points:

1. Counselors need more funding to acquire these instruments and time to administer them to students and clients--especially at the secondary school level.

2. Counselors need more training in the effective use of these instruments--especially in knowing how to use the instruments' results to assist clients/students in career decision making.

In schools, career development curriculum is a second and very important tool for delivering career guidance services. The development of the National Career Development Guidelines, funded by the National Occupational Information Coordinating Committee (NOICC; 1992), and the American School Counselor Association's National Standards for Career Counseling Programs (Dahir, Sheldon, & Valiga, 1998) provided a corn textual skeleton upon which career guidance curriculum could be built at the local level as well as developed by publishers. Furthermore, well honed models of implementation, such as that described by Henderson and Gysbers (1998), offer practical tools and training for implementation of guidelines. Thus, there is no scarcity of guidelines and models. Rather, the needs exist in the following areas:

1. School administrators and counselors in schools and colleges need to recognize and implement the high priority that systematic programs of career guidance should have.

2. With this recognition, time needs to be created in the school day of middle and high schools to make career-planning curriculum available.

3. School counselors need more training in the area of career development in order to teach or manage such curriculum effectively.