Career Counseling and Career Courses: Process, Impact, and Outcomes

Abstract

The current study seeks to build on to the existing literature on career interventions by empirically examining possible outcomes of two of the most widely utilized career interventions, career counseling and career courses. This investigation used Critical Ingredients (Brown & Ryan Krane, 2000;Brown, et al., 2003;Ryan, 1999) to assess the components of career counseling and career courses and the relationship between number of critical ingredients and student outcomes. Critical Ingredients were also used in a separate pilot study where career counselors and students were asked to report the number of critical ingredients present in a career counseling session. Student course participants (N = 139) and counseling participants (N = 130), enrolled at a large Midwestern university were assessed at three timepoints during the iii Acknowledgments

Trajectories of Change in Career Decision Difficulties During a Manualized Individual Career Counseling Intervention: The Influence of Counselor Adherence, Working Alliance and Client Personality Traits

“…Finally, another potential limitation is that adherence to the intervention manual was self-reported by counselors at the end of each session (as it was the case in previous studies in individual career counseling; McClair, 2010; Milot-Lapointe et al, 2018, 2020a). An alternative to counselor self-report would have been direct observations of sessions, which would not have been without disadvantages (cost, time, confidentiality, implementation in natural settings, and sample size).…”

“…The SRCCCCL is a counselor self-reported measure of adherence to the intervention manual described above. This pragmatic approach measure of adherence has been successfully used in previous career counseling studies (e.g., McClair, 2010; Milot-Lapointe et al, 2018, 2020a) and has several advantages as it enables more data to be collected at a lower cost without be concerned about confidentiality (e.g., compared to direct observation) (Serfaty et al, 2020).…”

“…Assessing counselor adherence to an intervention manual is important as it enables to determine whether levels of adherence relate to counseling outcomes. Since the publication of Ryan Krane's (1999) and Brown and Ryan Krane's (2000) findings, some studies (McClair, 2010;Milot-Lapointe et al, 2018;Whiston et al, 2017) have demonstrated that career counseling effects are higher when critical intervention components are included into them, especially written exercises, individualized feedbacks and occupational information which have been successfully replicated in each of these studies. Consequently, including these components in an intervention manual appears important to optimise career counseling effectiveness.…”