Career Helping: Harnessing perspective and emotion in everyday practice

University

Introduction

My journey in the field of career development started quite by accident. I needed one more elective course to complete my Bachelor of Education degree at the University of Regina, and of the three offered at my preferred time slot, the only one that seemed remotely interesting was a course called Vocational Guidance. The course was a fairly traditional exploration of the models of guidance that were prevalent in the mid-1970s: we learned about the pioneering work of Frank Parsons, who first argued for the thoughtful matching of personal characteristics with the demands of the workplace, the influence of the Minnesota Point of View (the home of standardized interest inventories including the Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory), how John Holland conceived of personality types and corresponding work environment types, and how Donald Super emphasized the developmental nature of one’s career path.

I was enthralled! I had never really encountered anything like this, and it made me think about my own journey, and of how much more helpful these ideas might have been as I was making decisions about my program choices at university. By the end of the course, my professor offered me direct admission to the master’s program in counselling; the normal admission requirement at the time was at least two years of related work experience. I actually thought the work experience requirement made sense, so I got a job as a teacher in rural Saskatchewan. Chance again smiled upon me; in the fall of my first year of teaching, the school district offered free vocational assessment to all students in grade 12 — they all took the Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory (SCII). But, being a small rural school, they did not have any counselling services, and so students were simply handed their SCII printouts and left to make sense of it themselves. Having just completed the vocational guidance course four months earlier, I offered to do group interpretations in class for the grade 12 students, which meant showing them how to read the results and how to make sense of them. This experience, while far from ideal, helped confirm that I wanted to work in the guidance and counselling area. At the same time, I was painfully aware that my head knowledge of the interest assessment was not nearly enough to actually help the students, and I would need much deeper preparation.

After two years of teaching, I returned to the University of Regina to take the Master’s degree in Guidance and Counselling (yes, they were still using the term guidance in those days). I once again focused my work on trying to better understand how to help people make choices that would lead to better futures for themselves. Our coursework took us deeper into the models of career development, and while acknowledging a developmental component to career processes, the helping emphasis was very much rooted in the three-step vocational decision paradigm that had its roots in the original writings of Frank Parsons: know yourself, know the demands of the world of work, and use true reasoning to bridge the two.

There is an inherent sensibility and simplicity to Parsons’ three dictums. In fact, we can trace the history of the North American guidance movement to the pursuit of those three processes. Starting in the 1930s, E. K. Strong at the University of Minnesota developed the first interest inventory, aimed at helping people to better know themselves, and to see how their patterns of interest compared to people in specific occupations. In the next decade, a second layer of information was added: comprehensive labour market information. The United States Government began publication of the Dictionary of Occupational Titles, with the goal of helping people understand the nature and demands of the world of work. By the mid-60s, Canada followed suit with the release of the Canadian Classification and Dictionary of Occupations (or CCDO). Parsons’ third dictum — applying true reasoning to make logical decisions — started receiving significant attention in the 1960s with the release of several models of decision-making. Essentially, making good occupational choices was seen to be a function of having and using information in logical ways.

I was so intrigued by these notions that I decided to prove how well the system worked, particularly with respect to the design and use of instruments to help people with career decision processes. I was particularly interested in how well the popular assessment instruments of the day actually predicted the things they were purporting to measure. And, I was presented with a wonderful opportunity to explore this question: I was given a job as a research assistant in charge of managing the Faculty of Education test library. All incoming students to the faculty were given a battery of tests, and the results of those tests were used to advise the students on the suitability of their choice to be in education. I had all of that data at my fingertips, and so I decided to see how useful those tests actually were for making such decisions. My master’s thesis had the rather dry and pompous title, A Study of the Differential Aptitude Tests and the Nelson-Denny Reading Test as Predictors of Academic Achievement. I amassed a sample of 1100 university students, and the first thing I discovered was that the results from my sample looked a lot different from the published norms. That led me to wonder, how are we supposed to use a comparison-based assessment tool if the comparison groups are all wrong?

In part two of my study, I tracked a subset of 298 students over four years to see how they actually did at university. This led to my second discovery: the best combination of predictors — all of the relevant subtests of the standardized instruments I was using — were pretty much useless in predicting how students would actually fare academically at university. They did not predict achievement, persistence, or speed of progress through their programs. In fact, the combination of subtests from the assessment battery accounted for less than 7% of the variance in any of the measures of achievement I used. That meant that 93% of the variance in achievement — the factors that explain differences in student achievement — was left unexplained. As with most research, the results of my work only left a bigger question: If the assessment instruments could not predict a more ‘straightforward’ outcome like academic achievement, how in the world could they be expected to help in something as complicated as career choice?

The next part of my journey took me to Northern Alberta, where I worked as a counsellor in a small college that catered to the educational needs of adults in the community. I worked primarily with students and prospective students looking to upgrade their education, usually with the goal of gaining admission to post-secondary programs. A significant part of my job was to help adults make and implement decisions that would improve their quality of life; career and educational planning were inextricably linked. And this is where I was confronted with a harsh reality: virtually nothing of what I learned about career decision-making actually worked with the clients I was seeing. Instruments usually failed; my clients were mostly women, under-educated, many with difficult personal histories, and from a variety of cultural and social backgrounds that had no relevant comparison groups in the standardized tests. And, relying on the more information leads to better decisions approach inevitably left people frustrated or worse, disconnected, when they either did not want to put the work into exploring options, or believed that regardless of how good a potential occupational match was, there were simply no opportunities to pursue that choice within their communities.

Thankfully, our field has come a long way since then. We understand the power of personal stories in helping people plan for the future. We are far better attuned to the realities of the complex social and cultural contexts that people live in, and the impact of those contexts on clients’ lives. We are far better equipped to relate personal decisions to broader economic conditions. And, we are far less likely to assume that just because a person wants to pursue a preferred future, they will have equal opportunity to do so; systemic bias, racism, class distinctions and oppression are still with us and still have a significant limiting effect on people’s career journeys. And yet despite this progress, in our day-to-day practice, we often fall back on an old standard of career intervention: emphasizing the rational component of the career helping process.

What became very apparent to me when working with my early clients was that they were rarely stuck because of a lack of decision-making ability. They almost always entered with an uncertainty about the path they should choose, and almost always had personal experiences that shaped their thinking about the possibilities for their futures. Furthermore, the interplay between how they saw themselves and how they felt about themselves and the world around them resulted in complex, personal, and unique sets of challenges that needed to be addressed before they could move forward. It was not that the focus on providing information and then helping clients through an occupational decision-making process were wrong; rather, it was just that other issues often had to be addressed before the cognitive strategies could work. These other issues almost always involved how the clients viewed and felt about their situations.

Who Is This Book For?

This book is primarily intended to support helping professionals in the field of career development. Across Canada, there are thousands of people providing some form of career services. Helpers come from a variety of educational and professional backgrounds, and there is a great variability in the kinds of preparation people in the field have. Throughout this book, I will be using the terms career helper and career development practitioner interchangeably, with the intention of referring to the broad spectrum of career practice.

I will also be using the term intervention in a generic sense to mean anything that a practitioner does to try to foster client change. When used this way, interventions may be as complex as the administration and interpretation of career assessments or the teaching of job search skills, or as simple as asking a good question or paraphrasing a client response. The important piece is that interventions are purposeful: the career practitioners acts with the intention of helping to promote client change.

Across the spectrum of practice, career helpers may fall victim to the assumption that career decisions are essentially a planning process, and largely rely on helping strategies that emphasize broadening information available to clients, reviewing decision factors, and developing access skills such as networking, resume writing, interview skills, and job maintenance skills. I fully agree; these helping strategies are indeed essential and not much will change for clients without them.

However, there is often something that stands in the way of clients benefitting from these helping strategies. There may be a lack of follow-through on skill development or skill usage. There may be a hesitancy to commit to a particular course of action, even when the evidence for that course of action is overwhelming. Following an initial period of enthusiasm for the process, there may be a significant drop in energy or commitment, and the client may start making negative attributions for the whole helping process. I can vividly recall a client who started with great energy, and halfway through our third session together, stood up and said: This is not helping and left the room. For many clients, we need to address underlying issues that prevent them from benefitting from our services. Almost invariably, these underlying issues are related to the client’s patterns of perceptions and to their emotional experiences. If we truly want to help, then we need to deal with both sets of underlying issues.

I have three main goals in writing this book. The first goal is to explore how two sets of client experiences — their perceptions of self and the world around them, and their emotional responses to those perceptions — intertwine to have a significant impact on the career development process. In doing so, I hope to provide career development practitioners with another lens through which to view their practice. The second goal is to provide those in the career helping business with ways to recognize perceptual and emotional barriers that clients face. My third goal is to provide some simple strategies that career development practitioners can use to help clients work through perceptual and emotional barriers, and in doing so to liberate clients to more fully benefit from the help that practitioners are providing to them.

In my journey to date, I have found that those in the career helping business share some common traits. Many, if not most, did not start their occupational planning with the goal of becoming a career development practitioner. I was heading down the path of teaching when I was hijacked by this whole career business. Most, if not all, genuinely care about helping clients to forge better lives for themselves, and derive as much if not more satisfaction from seeing clients succeed as they do in seeing their own successes. Indeed, I have yet to meet the helper who says, I want the clients I work with to be worse off than they were before they saw me. Genuineness, compassion, and persistence in the face of a myriad of obstacles describe the typical career development practitioner. Because of these qualities, when most career development practitioners read this book, they will see how they have naturally or intuitively used some of the principles and strategies that I will be describing. When they do, I hope that they feel validated and encouraged in their own practices. But, I also want to encourage career development practitioners to be more intentional about how they recognize and harness the amazing power of perception and emotion in career practice. Our actions and interventions become far more powerful when they are used intentionally.

Organization of This Book

In Chapter 1, What’s in a Career? The Curious Case of Little Beaver, I set the stage with a narrative about one of the first clients I worked with. He was in an adult upgrading program and was on the brink of being expelled from college. Nothing anyone tried had worked with him and he was referred to me as a last resort to see if some career counselling might help him stay on track with his program. It is ultimately a tale of triumph and tragedy; I use this story to show how the usual planning processes were ineffective because of significant negative emotions that always interfered with his progress, and how we were able to harness positive emotions to help him move towards a preferred future.

In Chapter 2, Career Helping in Complex Times, I explore the challenge of providing career help in complex times, and make a case for client change as the only goal that really matters. I then explore the three domains or foci of client change, and show how often as career helpers we get stuck in the cognitive domain (helping people plan and make decisions) and the behavioural domain (getting them to take actions such as writing better resumes, doing better at interviews, engaging in networking, etc.). However, we often neglect to explicitly and intentionally work with client emotions. By establishing simple but specific practitioner goals for each of the three domains of client change, we provide a more holistic approach to career helping.

In Chapter 3, How We Got Here: A Brief History of Conceptions of Career Practice, I describe three main eras in the history of career thinking, and make the argument that one’s conceptual framework has a significant influence on the career interventions one chooses to use. For example, we can better understand current career practices if we know that for much of the first century of career practice, career helping was largely thought of as a rational process, and client problems were framed as either a lack of information, a lack of decision-making skills, or a lack of concern for planning. This has left a legacy effect, especially in the minds of funders of services, who often provide very narrow interpretations of what career helping is supposed to look like, and often demand a single outcome (usually job placement). The current emphasis on constructivism and systems thinking are more holistic and demand an expanded toolkit from practitioners. To show the impact of these different ways of thinking, I present an actual client case study, and the different effects that interventions from each era had.

Chapter 4, A Matter of Perspective, lays the foundation for the mechanisms by which people come to believe the things they believe and see the world the way they do. There is a very strong connection between the perception of an event and the emotional attachment to the perception. If we understand how clients are looking at their situations, and their emotional attachments to those perceptions, we are in a much better position to help them. I present four common career perception problems, and some strategies that can be used to deal with these problems.

In Chapter 5, Emotional Filters: Harnessing the Power of Emotions, I explore the biggest career perception problem of all: the role that emotions play in selectively filtering information and experiences. I present a powerful heuristic, called the Morale Curve, that describes a typical sequence of emotional responses that people have when presented with a new situation. If career development practitioners can recognize the emotion a client may be experiencing, they can also better understand how those emotions serve to interfere with, or enhance, the clients’ career journeys. In career practice, it seems that we are almost hesitant to work with emotions, especially if those emotions are negative or difficult ones. However, I conclude this chapter by exploring how helpers can harness the power of client emotions and develop a framework that enables helpers to take actions to support positive client change. I also explore how one can engage in emotion-infused work in an ethical and professional manner.

In Chapter 6, Growth-Focused Helping Conversations, I provide a framework for thinking about how to move clients into spirals of positive growth, and then describe a simple but comprehensive tool (which I have called the 5 Ps) for using client conversations to create growth spirals. Each element of the model helps the client to focus on a particular process outcome, and to harness the positive emotions from those outcomes to foster a cycle of continuous client growth. I conclude the chapter with a description of my version of the Pride Story exercise, to give you an example of how we can intentionally harness the power of emotions to foster client change.

In Chapter 7, Moving Forward, my intention is to leave you with a reminder of how complex our world has become, and how difficult it is to be a career client in these times. I also want to emphasize that you can and do make a profound difference in client lives, even if at times you don’t see it, and give you a way to think about your role as an agent of change.

My hope is that you will find some useful ideas within the pages that follow that will encourage and strengthen your practice.

Chapter 1

What’s in a Career?

The Curious Case of Little Beaver

Life is 10% what happens to you and 90%

how you react to it.

Charles R. Swindoll

It was the summer of 1980, and I was about to receive one of my most important lessons in career counselling. I had just completed the coursework for my master’s degree