ABSTRACT
A client walks into a career counselor’s office. If the client is a parent, the issue might be concerns about a child’s burgeoning interests and aspirations. If the client is in high school, the concern might be academic difficulties or apprehension about college entrance requirements. If the client is in college, the challenge might be choosing a major, finding an internship, or resolving academic struggles. If the client is entering the workforce, he or she might be concerned about finding a job that is rewarding. If the client is in the workforce, the issue might be job dissatisfaction, work-life imbalance, harassment, discrimination, job transfer, retirement, or the birth of a child. In short, counselors need a framework for placing vocational assessment within the context of clients’ individual life experiences. We have built this chapter around the vocational outcomes and processes as they become salient across the life span. These include secondary and post-secondary student achievement, educational choices concerning level of academic degree attainment, choices concerning educational major and occupation, seeking and finding employment, changing jobs, job satisfaction, and work-life-family balance. Besides a framework structured around vocational outcomes and processes, counselor interventions also need to be grounded in research. That is, counselors need to know the variables that have been shown to predict these key outcomes. Table 9.1 was built from the vocational literature review conducted by Larson (2012). It has been organized by vocational outcomes and processes (e.g., career decision making). For the outcomes section, empirically-supported predictors of those outcomes are listed. The predictors were generated and described by Larson (2012) based on 47 quantitative meta-analytic reviews covering the years 1991 through 2008. The list of predictors is not meant to be exhaustive. However, the list does provide a reasonable overview of key predictors that researchers and practitioners alike may want to consider. The focus of this chapter is on the career counseling client rather than on the employer. This means that some outcomes reviewed by Larson (2012) are not being discussed (e.g., job
performance) because they center on the employer. For more information related to these outcomes, readers should review Larson and one chapter in this handbook (Arnold and Cohen, 2013). Many of the constructs listed in Table 9.1 will be familiar to the reader, and most are operationalized by well-established measures. The best example is the construct of vocational interest operationalized by the venerable Strong Interest Inventory (SII; Harmon, Hansen, Borgen, and Hammer, 1994; Donnay, Morris, Schaubhut, and Thompson, 2005). However, other constructs and their accompanying operational definitions may be less familiar. For example, career aspirations are not usually included when discussing vocational assessment. One purpose of this chapter, however, is to have the reader consider familiar and unfamiliar measures, as both have been identified as predictors of important vocational outcomes. In addition to a framework built on vocational outcomes that identifies empirically grounded predictors, counselors need practical assistance with career assessment. They need to know the operational definitions of the constructs in order to translate this knowledge to their work with clients. Therefore, we have organized Table 9.2 to parallel the structure of Table 9.1, listing measures under their respective vocational outcomes and processes. A key person predictor section was also added to assist both researchers and counselors in operationalizing constructs that have been established as salient predictors of one or more vocational outcomes. One example from counseling psychology and industrial/ organizational psychology is the role of personality traits, which have been shown to predict vocational choice, job search behaviors and outcomes, job satisfaction, and life satisfaction.
