ABSTRACT
Career decisions are among the most complex and significant decisions individuals make during their lifetime. Many people face difficulties in making such decisions, and hence seek help. Indeed, career indecision is regarded as one of the most important constructs in vocational psychology (Kelly and Lee, 2002; Osipow, 1999), and helping individuals overcome indecision and make better career decisions is at the core of career counseling (Gati, 1986, 1996; Gati and Tal, 2008; Phillips and Jome, 2005). This focal goal of career counseling involves two complimentary aspects of career decisions: (a) facilitating the process of making the decision, and (b) maximizing the outcomes of the choice, namely, choosing the career path that fits the individual best. A review of theories and practices of career counseling reveals that while traditional approaches have often focused on the outcomes of career choice, namely, defining what “a good career choice” is, more recent approaches in the field have focused on improving the process of career decision making. Several factors have led to this growing attention to the processes involved in career decision making. One is the information and technology revolutions of the last three decades, which sharply expanded the variety of occupational and educational alternatives to choose from, the abundance of factors and considerations to be taken into account during the decision-making process, uncertainties about the world of work, and the amounts of information available (cf., Gati and Tal, 2008). Another reason for this trend is the important discoveries made in research on decision-making processes in general during the second half of the twentieth century (e.g., Simon, 1955; Tversky and Kahneman, 1974). Because career decisions involve information gathering and processing, career decision making can be regarded as a special case of general decision making (Katz, 1966; Pitz and Harren, 1980); thus, the goal of career counseling is facilitating the client’s decision making and improving its outcomes. The emerging attention to this approach has affected the definition of the goals, the means, the procedures, and the desired outcomes of career counseling.
