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Experienced happiness and reported life contentment represent cardinal elements of subjective well-being (SWB). Achieving happiness and contentment with work and other domains, such as love, play, and community, constitute fundamental life goals. Career construction offers a developmental theory of vocational behavior and a career assessment and counseling model counselors can use to promote client SWB. As an intervention model, career construction assists individuals with using work to foster self-completion and derive meaning, satisfaction, and happiness as they design their lives. Career construction counseling promotes SWB because its aims are consistent with increasing both immediate life satisfaction and overall life contentment. The present analysis describes the basic principles and practice of career construction and explains the career style interview as an assessment and counseling method useful for assisting individuals to identify and pursue self-selected goals and projects, endeavors that contribute to SWB.

The primary purpose of this study was to obtain estimates of internal consistency reliability, as well as to examine evidence of the construct and criterion validity of the Career Maturity Inventory-Revised (CMI-R) in a sample of male and female high school students. Results found modest reliability for the CMI-R. Participants scoring higher in CMI-R attitudes appear ready to make wise and congruent occupational choices. Sex and grade differences showed that females tended to manifest more career mature responses than did males across grade levels. Additional research on item functioning and on the factor structure underlying the inventory is suggested.

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Decision making is not only contingent upon what takes place in the present but also on how one feels about the past and one’s hopes for the future. However, when it comes to time perspective and career decision making, vocational psychology has focused exclusively on future time perspective. The present study examines the relations among past, present, and future time perspectives and career decision-making difficulties in a sample of 195 adults seeking career counseling services. Participants completed the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI) and the Career Decision-Making Difficulties Questionnaire (CDDQ). Results from canonical correlation analysis produced three significant canonical variates. The results indicate that different patterns in time perspective are associated with different types of career decision-making difficulties. Areas for future research regarding time perspective and career decision making are discussed.

Despite the importance of the working alliance in therapeutic outcome, little is known about the factors associated with its formation. We advance that personality similarity between client and therapist is one such factor pertinent to the working alliance. In this study, personality similarity in 32 client-therapist dyads was examined for its relations to the bond, task, and goal elements of the working alliance (Bordin, 1979, Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, and Practice, 16, 252-260) and therapeutic outcome. Personality similarity was conceptualized using Holland's (1997, Making vocational choices [3rd ed.]) congruence construct. Therapists completed the Self-Directed Search pretreatment and clients completed the Working Alliance Inventory-Short Revised and Self-Directed Search after the third session. Results indicated that (a) client-therapist personality congruence was associated with the bond, (b) bond was associated with task and goal, and (c) task and goal were associated with therapeutic outcome. Congruence was not associated with task, goal, or therapeutic outcome. Holland's theory provides a framework for adapting to clients of varying personality types. By understanding how client-therapist personalities relate to each other in therapy, client-therapist bonds may be more efficiently realized.

Clarification of a client's self‐concept and its implementation in the world of work remains an overarching goal of career counseling. To date, counselors have largely used objective measures of interests, values, needs, and abilities in their efforts to accomplish this goal. Objective assessments alone offer decontextualized views of the self, often disregarding nuances in individual differences. To address this problem, counselors can use the Career Style Interview (CSI), which forms the assessment as a method for attaining a more comprehensive and personally meaningful representation of the self. A description of the CSI and a case study are presented to promote counselor understanding of this method.