Career advice

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Career advice includes the analysis of all competencies for the independent design of the professional résumé. Reasons for career counseling are professional transitions of all kinds. They can be initiated yourself or have been caused by external influences. Examples of career guidance-relevant transitions are reorientation at one's own request in order to improve the degree of self-realization ; threatened unemployment ; Return to work after parental leave ; Return to work after illness such as B. Burnout Syndrome ; reorientation supported by the employer in the event of unemployment ( outplacement ); Business start-ups and the transition from the job to the post-job phase.

Definition of terms

In the past, the term career counseling was closely related to predefined careers - for example in public administration, in sport or in school service. The terms study counseling and career counseling also imply an understanding of counseling that is geared towards a very specific decision: What profession should the client strive for? Which course should he choose? Behind this was the idea of ​​a profession that will be practiced largely unchanged for a lifetime. Today the framework conditions for employment and professional careers have changed significantly. The change in the world of work has created new professions that can no longer be summarized in traditional job profiles. In today's knowledge-based society , the half-life of acquired knowledge continues to decline, and the spread of the Internet has largely removed spatial and temporal barriers. The earlier continuous normal employment biography is increasingly being replaced by discontinuous and multi-track career paths.

Therefore, in more recent publications, the term career counseling has been given a broader definition and is now used as a generic term for professional counseling to help shape a successful career path.

In contrast to career counseling, career counseling mainly starts with counseling for adults, but adolescents and young adults can also be supported with career counseling-oriented concepts.

Career research as the basis of career advice

Career research is currently in transition. The traditional theories are still effective in practice, the practical implications of the more recent theories have not yet been adequately worked out, the theory formation itself is still struggling with the changed and differentiating requirements. Practice is changing at a pace at which theorizing fails. In recent years the gap between career theories and counseling practice, which has been visible for a long time in career research, has increased.

The complexity is also increased by the fact that not only practitioners and theorists have an impact on this process, but also economic and social developments and political frameworks.

While the main counseling goal in traditional career development approaches was to find the right, suitable (life) occupation, this goal has in most cases become obsolete under the conditions of today's professional activity. The French career researcher Guichard sums up the central question of modern career advice:

"How can individuals be supported in directing their own lives within their social context?"

- Jean Guichard

The new theoretical and practical career development approaches must - as suggested by Super in his life-span / life-space model in 1990 - adopt a holistic perspective. The procedure in career counseling is not determined by the conditions on the labor market, but rather it is primarily geared towards the needs of the clients. This development marks the actual expansion of career guidance to career guidance. Career development is now perceived in the context of overall personality development. Now it's about "fitting work into individuals' lives", no longer about "fitting individuals into jobs".

Consequently, the focus of professional advice on integration into the labor market is no longer necessary: ​​“The advice measures should therefore no longer necessarily be geared towards taking up or returning to work. Various measures can be taken that encompass the whole person and that strengthen and promote self-determined life planning and personal responsibility as a citizen. All transitional phases of life can be the subject of counseling ”.

To implement this claim, the perspective of constructivism is repeatedly used in theory and practice , which is intended to replace the positivist approach of traditional career development approaches. In the constructivist understanding, career and career are subjective experiences. The individual creates meaning and ultimately personal meaning through career decisions and subsequent actions.

The order of the new career counseling

New career counseling approaches have to meet additional requirements in response to the dynamism of society:

• "[...] the support of the adjustment services that are necessary as a result (and in anticipation) of greater uncertainty and possible unemployment,
• the development of the components of personal adaptability (including optimism , openness, expectation of self-efficacy, internal control , proactivity ), which is necessary due to an increasingly self-designed career ,
• the orientation of the counseling on the establishment, maintenance and stability of the client's identity "

Bußhoff sees the overriding goal of career counseling early on in enabling clients to counsel themselves in future counseling situations with the help of the process knowledge they have learned, and names the skills, attitudes and experiences they have acquired as reorientation competencies. He describes it as “learning self-directed and responsible career behavior”.

If the core concerns are formulated from the perspective of the affected individuals, then the focus should not be on adaptability, but rather on the ability to shape the skills development processes. This results in the following requirements for career counseling:

• Developing skills to cope with transitions,
• Encouragement to work on a coherent identity for the phase and context of life,
• Building up skills for reorientation and maintaining or expanding employability and possibly skills that enable independence.

Principles of modern career guidance approaches

Advice at eye level

Amundson outlines major changes in counseling practice. Maintaining an active bond with clients enables holistic advice through the fluid change between career-oriented and personal issues. In the past, career guidance solutions were generated through observation and naming. Appropriate job profiles were assigned. Now a reversal of these relationships takes place, the advisor serves the client by supporting him to become aware of his identity in order to move towards professional activities that are suitable for him.

Resource orientation and potential development

Another important implication from holistic advice is resource-oriented work. Holistic career advisors develop potential, even if the client's weaknesses are in the foreground in a crisis or transition situation. This means the inclusion of the environment, the client's social network, in order to identify and activate resources that can permanently support the client in his process.

Encouragement and solution orientation

Clients often have insufficient coping strategies and patterns of action to cope with the current situation. Amundson speaks of a "crisis of imagination". It becomes a task of the counselors to stimulate the client's ability to solve problems creatively through the appropriate selection of methods. This is where the solution-oriented counseling in the tradition of De Shazer comes in, in which the goal or the solution is prioritized, whereby the client's scope of possibilities is to be expanded. Behind this is the basic attitude of the consultant that clients bring the knowledge and resources with them to solve their problems or challenges themselves. The job of career counselors is then increasingly maimic.

Biography orientation

By including the biography and the environment of the clients, there is the possibility of recognizing or working out patterns and structures, which in turn can point the way for future orientations, as they make up an essential aspect of the client's personal profile. Instead of a positivistic dissection and analysis of the individual factors such as interests, skills, values, etc., it often makes more sense to follow the narrative story of the client, in which various personality dimensions, life issues or the general willingness of clients to adapt is usually clearly evident. In this way, the client's professional self-concept can be approximated, development topics can be identified and future development opportunities can be anticipated to a certain extent.

Method plurality

The role of the counselor changes in the same way as the role of the client. As part of the demand for holistic, lifetime and life span advice, the counselors should have a large repertoire of holistic methods. The trick is to select the appropriate method for the issue, the personality of the client and his or her status in the process. The range of tools for more recent career counseling approaches (see below) includes professional and personality diagnostics, methods from solution-oriented short-term coaching according to Steve de Shazer , systemic coaching methods to support resource development and strengthen change skills, intuitive and narrative procedures such as imaginary journeys, constellation work and methods from individual psychological and gestalt psychology work . Depending on the career and educational background of the respective career advisor, this results in an individual composition.

Reduction of complexity and proactive examination of one's own employability

Even if today's economic and social reality calls for proactive, self-responsible people, this is far from being generated automatically. A paradigm shift that has to take place in the minds of those involved requires time and space for reflection. Career advice can be such a space. During this transition period, the primary task of the career counselor is to accompany and support clients in developing their individual life plans in the area of ​​tension between adaptation and design and to strengthen their decision-making skills so that they can position themselves in this space of opportunity. New careers, which only rarely follow traditional career patterns, are characterized by openness, which is associated with opportunities and risks in equal measure: Opportunities arise through new permeability in educational programs and a departure from the principle of professionalism, risks arise from the lack of opportunities for long-term planning and the steadily increasing number of career transitions that are required externally or desired by those affected. There is a growing uncertainty about planning for the future at all. This openness must also be made manageable for individuals in the sense of reducing complexity in the new career counseling approaches and weakened by trusting their own skills.

Practice of career counseling

Target groups

• All adults in professional transition processes, e.g. B. Return to work after parental leave, change of job, promotion to a management career, specialist career, return to work after unemployment, return to work after illness and burnout syndrome , desire for more fulfillment and self-fulfillment at work, start-up
• Transition from the job to the post-job phase
• Advice on patchwork careers, development of individual work and life models
• Schoolchildren who are looking for alternative and more comprehensive forms of counseling
• Students, students changing their studies and dropouts

Possible counseling content in career counseling

• Comprehensive clarification of concerns, possibly diagnostic analysis of the professional transition situation with the help of process and competence models
• Positioning with analysis of the current job, satisfaction and dissatisfaction factors
• Biography work, understanding of work in the family of origin
• Working with imprints and character strengths
• Balancing, summarizing and focusing of career modules such as strengths, interests, values, visions of the future, career ideas, understanding of roles in the job
• Identity and vision work
• Developing several professional opportunities, possibly as a patchwork design or as a combination of employment and self-employment
• Support in researching, comparing and weighing up alternatives
• Education and training advice
• Support in decision-making processes
• Goal setting, development of posture and action goals
• Developing ideas for trial work in new areas of work or developing first professional prototypes that can be used as a reference when looking for a job
• Training of self-management and implementation skills
• Application advice, preparation of job interviews, support with alternative application strategies, preparation for assessment centers for students
• Support in the first time in the new field of activity
• For schoolchildren, preparatory measures for professional requirements such as selection interviews, study aptitude tests (application training, test training, trial studies).

Methods

• Psychological aptitude analysis, potential analysis
• Competence assessments
• Career profiling, in which the individual career modules are compared with external professional opportunities
• Collection and focus of values
• Working with analog media, metaphors and visualizations to integrate intuitive aspects
• Interventions from individual psychology , e.g. B. Cycle of Encouragement, Strength Stories
• Methods from Gestalt psychology , e.g. B. Contact cycle, work with the empty chair
• Systemic coaching methods, e.g. B. systemic questions, constellation work , timeline, tetralemma
• Methods from the Zurich resource model for decision making and goal setting

Current career counseling approaches in Germany

While the professionalization of career counseling has already taken place in Switzerland and Austria, it is still in its infancy in Germany. Swiss career advice is characterized by its own training and further education to become a qualified career advisor and a nationwide network of professional, systematically trained public and private career advisors. The development of German career counseling was hampered by the employment office's monopoly on career counseling until the fall of the vocational counseling monopoly in 1998.

There are now a number of coaching and consulting services for adults in the form of new placement, career planning, career and career path planning, job coaching offers, etc. As an example of the new career counseling approaches presented above, two counseling concepts are presented that are now based on can look back on fifteen to twenty years of consulting experience. The selection is made on the basis of the criteria derived from the requirements for up-to-date career advice (see above):

• The target group of the offer is so comprehensive that a wide variety of professional transitions can be mapped, the offer can be used preventively as well as in acute transition situations.
• The career counseling process is based on biography and value, as well as resource and thus competence-oriented and solution-oriented.
• The European guidelines of the council for lifelong counseling are fully taken into account.
• Many years of experience from countries in which a career advisory market has already developed flow into the concepts.
• The conception of man in the career counseling approach is based on the principles of humanistic psychology and applied career psychology.
• A well-founded, certified training with practical and theoretical integration can be guaranteed.

Using these two approaches, the basics of modern career counseling in its function as transition counseling can be demonstrated. Both approaches have the potential, in an adapted form, to be a model in education and vocational training or in personnel development for the development of future-oriented advisory services. In the sense of a pioneering function, you can advance the demand to enable sensible access to counseling-supported orientation processes for a broad target group of people looking for advice.

German-language scientific literature

• Hohner, H.-U. (2006). Career advice: Paths to a successful career and lifestyle. Bern: Huber.
• Lang-von Wins, T .; Triebel, C. (2011): Career Advice. Coaching methods for competence-oriented career advice. Heidelberg.
• Möhrt, M. & Söller, I. (2005). Handbook for career guidance. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht.
• Nohl, M. (2009). Development of transition skills in career counseling. Berlin: Köster.
• Nohl. M (2015). Biography-oriented career advice. In: Pahl, JP (2015): Lexikon der Berufsbildung. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann.
• Gasteiger, RM (2014). Career development and advice. Göttingen et al .: Hogrefe.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Tractenberg, L .; Streumer, J .; van Zolingen, S. (2002): Career counseling in the emerging post-industrial society. In: International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance 2, pp. 85–99, p. 92
2. ^ Guichard, J. (2005): Life-Long Self-Construction. In: International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance 5, pp. 111–124, p. 111.
3. ↑ Super, DE (1994): The lifetime, habitat approach of career development. In: Brown, D .; Brooks, L. (Ed.): Stuttgart
4. ↑ Savickas, ML (2001): A Developmental Perspective on Vocational Behavior: Career Patterns, Salience, and Themes. In: International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance 1, pp. 49–57
5. ↑ Cedefop (ed.) (2005): Improving policies and systems of lifelong educational and career guidance. P. 74
6. ↑ Amundson, N. (2005): The potential impact of global changes in work for career theory and practice. In: International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance 5, pp. 91–99, p. 92
7. ↑ Lee, FK; Johnston, JA (2001): Innovations in career counseling. In: Journal of Career Development pp. 177–186, translation: Lang-von Wins & Triebel 2011, p. 42
8. ↑ Bußhoff, L. (1989): Career choice: Theories and their meaning for the practice of career counseling. Cologne
9. ↑ ^{a b} cf. Amundson, N. (2006): Challenges for career interventions in changing contexts. In: International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance 6, pp. 3-14
10. ↑ Cedefop (ed.) (2004): Quality development in vocational counseling and training: international Conference 2003. Final report: 3.-6. 9. 2003, Bern. Thessaloniki