Attending to Clients' Psychological Needs During Career Construction Counseling

Abstract

Attending to clients' psychological needs during career counseling merits more attention in career theory and practice. We describe how the elaboration of clients' needs during career construction counseling supports clients' problem formulation. After reviewing the literature on the psychology of needs, we present and illustrate an intervention strategy with a case example. Counseling vignettes from the initial counseling task of problem formulation illustrate how to facilitate clients' narrative symbolization of their emotional experiences and associated needs. We explain how this strategy contributes to deepening clients' understanding of their problems and facilitates both the rewriting of a career narrative and the construction of new career plans. Analysis of the possibilities and limits of this practice merits attention in career counseling process research.

Validity of the career embeddedness scale as predictor of affective commitment

“…Similar to Guan et al's (2021) conceptualisation of P-E fit, career embeddedness alludes to the fulfilment of psychological career identity needs. Proponents of P-E fit theory (see Jiang, 2017;Sampaio, Cardoso, Rossier, & Savickas, 2021;Van Vianen, 2018) positioned psychological needs as a core concept to explain the manner in which individuals engage in self-regulatory career behaviour to successfully adapt to changing work contexts. Career adaptation (and by implication career embeddedness) results from the fulfilment of psychological needs in the work context flowing from a correspondence between personal career identity needs and the work environment conditions (Sampaio et al, 2021).…”

“…Proponents of P-E fit theory (see Jiang, 2017;Sampaio, Cardoso, Rossier, & Savickas, 2021;Van Vianen, 2018) positioned psychological needs as a core concept to explain the manner in which individuals engage in self-regulatory career behaviour to successfully adapt to changing work contexts. Career adaptation (and by implication career embeddedness) results from the fulfilment of psychological needs in the work context flowing from a correspondence between personal career identity needs and the work environment conditions (Sampaio et al, 2021). We argue that individuals' sense of supplementary and complementary P-E fit influences their state of career embeddedness; individuals feel more deeply situated in a specific organisation-based career when their basic psychological career identity needs are fulfilled.…”

“…Psychological needs in the career embeddedness context relate to what individuals feel they lack, which in turn moves them to seek experiences of supplementary fit (career identity congruence) and complementary fit (D-A fit and N-S fit) in environments in which they feel more secure (Guan et al, 2021;Sampaio et al, 2021;Savickas, 2013;Vondracek et al, 2014). Optimal P-E congruence results from a satisfactory match between specific characteristics of the person and the environment (career identity values and D-A fit (the degree to which a person's abilities meet the demands of the environment) and N-S fit (the degree to which an environment meets a person's needs: Darrow & Behrend, 2017;Jiang, 2017;Xu & Tracey, 2014).…”

“…Optimal P-E congruence results from a satisfactory match between specific characteristics of the person and the environment (career identity values and D-A fit (the degree to which a person's abilities meet the demands of the environment) and N-S fit (the degree to which an environment meets a person's needs: Darrow & Behrend, 2017;Jiang, 2017;Xu & Tracey, 2014). (Sampaio et al, 2021). According to Super (1990), life and career satisfaction is dependent on the degree to which individuals find an outlet for their abilities, needs, values, interests and career selfconcepts.…”

Life Design Counseling: Theory, Methodology, Challenges, and Future Trends

“…On the one hand, LDC needs to pay attention to the psychological needs of more diverse cultural background groups, because the counseling needs of different types of clients are unique and different (Sampaio et al, 2021). Scholars have accumulated some group LDC research in the early stage, such as the research on college students (Pordelan et al, 2018), middle and high school students (Nota et al, 2016), Italian entrepreneurs (Di Fabio and Maree, 2012), etc.…”