Career CounselingNarrative Approach

Career Skills TrainingYeung Ka Ching

Tradition vocational guidance Emphasizes objectivity in helping individuals select

and succeed in occupations. As an applied science, guidance uses rational decision making to logically match individuals to fitting occupations.

Guidance personnel make the march by comparing an objective picture of the individual’s talents, interests, and goals to the ability and personality requirements of jobs.

What has all too often been absent in guidance interventions is counseling that focuses on a client’s private sense.

Career Decision The basic subject of career counseling is a person’s

future - the most fundamental outcome is a person’s design for his or her future, career, a projection of a course of life in working to produce ends.

The function of an orientation is to orient the future. A future representation is self-invested rather than

self-divested. That is, personal orientation would be dominant, whereas objective information would be secondary and supportive. What a person wants forms the basis for a representation, whereas the objective information concerns viability

Agent or victim Some representation endure, but others arise and

fade quickly. A representation is like the gist of a whole future.

The most basic division of future representations is that some involve an agent, and others involve a patient or victim of circumstance.

An agent is one who makes things happen; a patient is one to whom things happen. An individual has a repertoire of future

representations that range from being an agent of one’s future to being a victim of a future.

Narrative and Meaning We seem to have no other way of describing

lived time time in the form of narrative (Bruner (1987, p.12)

Composing a narrative is our primary way of making meaning (Howard, 1989, Russell, 1991)

The major ways of creating meaning: purpose, rich implications, sensible point.

A narrative provides a temporal organization, integrating beginning, middle, and end into a whole.

The plot of a narrative carries a point.

Decisions as narrative constructions The basic function of a representation of the

future is to create a meaningful narrative of the future that a person can live out. A decision situation is one in which the future is in doubt.

On the basis of memories and current experiences, a person implicitly or explicitly composes an ideal narrative of the way his or her life should be. This is a task that might be done well or poorly. A person might not have unified division, settled upon a coherent narrative, or developed a very rich vision of a more ideal life.

Dialectic process One matches narratives of options to the ideal

narrative in order to identify the option that best encompasses one’s idealized view of the future.

The process is more of a dialectic than a series of stages. Dialectic involves a mutual fitting of ideal to actual and actual to ideal.

The idea of matching one static list of features with another static list is misleading. More accurately, there is a dynamic adjustment of constructions.

Adopting a Career Narrative Career decision is a movement from being a

spectator on one’s life to entering within a drama that is life-defining in whole or in part (Cochran, 1992, p.29)

Traditionally, matching has been conceived in a static way. In a dialectic between the ideal and the possible, matching is ongoing. It is because:

Both an ideal narrative and optional narratives changes over time. They are not fully formed, but forming as one goes along.

The ideal and the possible are interdependent. One must adjust the ideal to what is possible and the possible to what is ideally desirable.

Adopting a Career Narrative Although matching is clearly necessary, it is too

limited a term for the activity. In a dialectic, a person is actively constructing meaning.

Meanings are expanded, refined, tested, and revised. Tiedeman and O’Hara (1963) appropriately described

deciding as an activity of differentiation and integration.

A decider makes distinctions, yielding an increasingly differentiated map of self-in-situation. Increasing differentiation requires proper integration for closure, and the parts are properly integrated in a narrative.

Optimal Standards for Adoption A decision is optimal to the extent that the adopted

course of action promises to acutalize ideals for a career better than the other options do.

First order evaluation is concerned with what will most satisfy a desire. Priority instead of efficacy. Will a person’s desire for power be most satisfied by political office or corporate management?

Second order evaluation is concerned with the qualitative worth of the desires one has and, to some extent, the desires one lacks. Is it better to have a higher salary or to have more autonomy?

Wholeness, harmony, agency and fruitfulness.

Practical Wisdom Career counseling have both an immediate aim and

a developmental aim. Immediately, the aim is to enable a person to resolve a difficulty such as making a decision. Developmentally, the aim is to empower the person to resolve future difficulties.

With a clear understanding of oneself, a person can assess prospects for success and satisfaction.

Practical wisdom is concern with searching for a specification of ideals in concrete circumstances, answering the question of what one should do.

Practical Wisdom In career counseling, the immediate aim is to use

practical wisdom to specify a future course of life in work. The developmental aim is to enhance practical wisdom, making the person more capable of wise choices in living out a course of action.

Understand self or understanding the way the world works? (personal or situational)

Enhancing practical wisdom involves an increasing capacity to articulate ideals of one’s mostly implicit vision of a good life, to assess relevant and salient features of situations, and to specify courses of action that most agree with one’s ideals regarding a situation in light of practical limitations.