User:TheDJP Contributor/Career counseling

=== Benefits ===
Empirical research attests the effectiveness of career counseling. Professional career counselors can support people with career-related challenges. Through their expertise in career development and labor markets, they can put a person's qualifications, experience, strengths and weakness in a broad perspective while also considering their desired salary, personal hobbies and interests, location, job market and educational possibilities. Through their counseling and teaching abilities, career counselors can additionally support people in gaining a better understanding of what really matters for them personally, how they can plan their careers autonomously, or help them in making tough decisions and getting through times of crisis. Finally, career counselors are often capable of supporting their clients in finding suitable placements/ jobs, in working out conflicts with their employers, or finding the support of other helpful services. It is due to these various benefits of career counseling that policy makers in many countries publicly fund guidance services. For example, the European Union understands career guidance and counseling as an instrument to effectively combat [[social exclusion]] and increase citizens' employability.

== History and new approaches ==
Career counseling has a history going back at least as far as the late nineteenth century. An important defining work for the field was [[Frank Parsons (social reformer)|Frank Parsons]]' ''Choosing a Vocation'' which was published in 1909. Parsons was strongly rooted in the American [[Progressive Era|progressive social reform movement]], but as the field developed it moved away from this origin and became increasingly understood as a branch of counseling psychology.

While until the 1970s a strongly normative approach was characteristic for theories (e.g. of Donald E. Super's ''life-span approach'') and for the practice of career counseling (e.g. concept of ''matching''), new models have their starting point in the individual needs and transferable skills of the clients while managing biographical breaks and discontinuities. Career development is no longer viewed^{[''[[Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Words to watch#Unsupported attributions|by whom?]]'']} as a linear process which reflects a predictable world of work. More consideration is now placed on nonlinear, chance and unplanned influences.

This change of perspective is evident in the constructivist and social constructionist paradigms for career counseling. The constructivist/social constructionist paradigms are applied as [[narrative career counseling]] that emphasizes personal stories and the meaning individuals generate in relation to their education and work.

Postmodern career counseling is a reflective process of assisting clients in creating self through writing and revising biographical [[Narrative|narratives]] taking place in a context of multiple choice from a diversity of options and constraints. The shift moves from emphasizing career-choice to empowering [[self-affirmation]] and improving [[decision-making]]. They have "shifted from a sole focus on the individual, to an explicit recognition of contextual factors, to a perspective that might be best described as a 'person-in-complex-social-and-economic-systems' focus." Postmodern career counseling theories include Mark Savickas's Career Construction Theory and Life Designing Paradigm as well as David Blustein's Psychology of Working Theory, which was developed to "address the roles that economic constraints and being marginalized could play in an individual’s choices, or lack of choices, about work, his or her ability to adapt to work, and ultimately in him or her finding decent work".

Recently this approach is widely applied in [[Australia]] such as in Athlete Career and Education (ACE) program by the [[Australian Sports Commission]] and Scope for artists by [[Ausdance]].