مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

The principle of public funding for career counseling and employment services in England, especially for young people, has been established through various iterations of legislation over decades (Peck, 2004). As with all publicly funded services, career counseling has become particularly vulnerable to spending cuts in times of labor market volatility, with the most recent period of global economic turbulence and austerity proving to be no exception (Roberts, 2013). Marshalling carefully constructed arguments that demonstrate the efficacy of careers support for clients, based on a sound evidence base of robust research, has become critical for safeguarding services for all clients in need but particularly those who can least afford to pay for access. Alongside the imperative for demonstrating the positive impact of services for clients beyond reasonable doubt, is the vital and urgent need for counseling professionals to stay abreast of the best and most innovative practices. One example relates to the integration of an understanding of context into career counseling.

Despite increased acknowledgement of the importance of the social and economic context to the delivery of effective careers counseling services that are meaningful to clients across their lifespan (Blustein, 1997, 2015; Richardson, 2012; Richardson & Schaeffer, 2013), evidence for the successful integration of theoretically informed frameworks that foreground context are scarce. Where new approaches have been developed (e.g., Savickas et al., 2009), what seems to be lacking are clear, robust, accessible and detailed accounts of how, exactly, these new approaches have been integrated into practice generically, particularly those that demonstrate benefits to clients. Experimenting with new approaches in practice is always challenging. Compared with the need to secure the survival of services, theory, and research underpinning practice is always at risk of being marginalized (Reid & West, 2011).

In the UK, the professionalism of career counseling has come under significant pressure (Hughes, 2013; Mulvey, 2013), with questions about its positive impact raised by politicians and funders of careers support services. The recent failure of practitioners to integrate new approaches into practice has been attributed to the ‘technicizing’ of the career counseling sector, through the introduction of work-based qualifications that have resulted in a reduction in scope for professionalizing practice (Reid & West, 2011, p. 398). This process has exerted particular pressure on career counselors, who now also need to develop and deploy the types of coping strategies required by their clients, including career resilience and career adaptability (Bimrose & Hearne, 2012), to facilitate the construction of different occupational identities. The merit and importance of crafting different identities by clients has been discussed in relation to new approaches for practice (e.g., McMahon & Watson, 2013). This has relevance to all client age groups who are entering or navigating volatile labor markets.