lmhc career counseling
Last week you explored the intersection of personal and career counseling. Keep this in mind as you dive into the career counseling process, starting with the intake interview. After reading the chapter, the Career Counseling Application Assignment 3: Intake Interview Chapter 5 Helper Studio Angela’s Self vs. Family will help you apply the material through open-ended questions AND recording your counseling skills in the form of a response to the client vignette linked to this assignment. In MindTap, you will submit both your written responses to open ended questions and video recorded verbal response to the client. Your video recorded verbal response should be as if you are actually in session with the client; this should NOT be “I would help the client explore….” but rather SHOULD BE “You feel ….. It sounds like……” as if you’re actually responding to the client. If you don’t think your first (or second, etc.) try is satisfactory, you can re-record before you submit the assignment. Further instructions are in the assignment.
When completing this assignment, keep in mind personal issues that affect career, including family influences and values. You job is NOT to problem solve or to direct Angela in any one direction, but rather to meet her where she’s at, listen to her dilemma, and help her explore how her values, career goals, and family might be influencing her career decisions. Good luck and let me know if you have any questions or concerns.
Chapter 5 Introduction
Chapter Highlights
· Rationale for career counseling intake interviews
· Suggested sequence for an interview
· Suggestions for interviewing multicultural groups
· Identifying strengths and assets
· Identifying career development constraints
· Identifying some psychological and personality disorders
· Key standardized assessment instruments
The call for integrating career counseling to include personal concerns clients bring to counseling suggested a more comprehensive and inclusive role for the intake interview. Focusing on both career and personal concerns and their interrelationship is the key factor in current career counseling programs. This is not a new position. As you may recall some of the counseling models discussed in chapter 3 included suggestions for addressing personal concerns that interfere with the career choice process. A client’s dysfunctional thinking, for example, is a most legitimate concern as discussed in the previous chapter. In the whole person approach to career counseling, I emphasized that one is to address both career and personal concerns aggressively and how the interrelationships of concerns can affect the career choice process as well as career development. What was suggested is that counselors are not only to focus on a client’s measures of ability, assets, and interests for instance, but also on symptoms of psychological disorders that could present barriers to making an optimal career choice. The position that behavior is the product of multidimensional influences suggested that not only are abilities, assets, values, and interests involved in the career choice process, but also so are many other important factors including socioeconomic and mental health issues. All information obtained in an intake interview is used with other data to develop the content of interventions that address both personal and career concerns.
5-1 Identifying Strengths and Assets
We begin the interview with an informal evaluation of the client’s strengths and assets. The counselor is to focus on identifying positive traits as well as negative ones. A balanced view of human functioning includes subjectively measured feelings of well-being that could include a discussion of a client’s relationship with others, a sense of meaning and purpose in life, job satisfaction, happiness, contentment, hope, self-determination, and optimism for the future (Compton & Hoffman, 2013). The position of using positive traits in the career choice process can be traced back to Parsons’s (1909) very perceptive conceptual framework for helping a person choose a career. He focused on a client’s resources including aptitude and ability as a first step in the career choice process. The emphasis was on identifying positive individual traits. Currently, the strength-based approach to career counseling supports and underscores the important focus on exploring one’s existing resources. A most important goal in positive psychology is to identify and enhance an individual’s strength and resilience (Seligman, 2011). Wellness concepts are to be recognized and serve as a major role in the career counseling process. What is clearly suggested here is that career counselors are to balance their counseling approach by spending sufficient time focusing on individual positive characteristics (Harrington, 2013). The emphasis on individual strengths does not cancel the need to identify and address client concerns that are problematic. One could emphasize that a stable sense of well-being, however, could serve as a barrier to halt the influence of negative emotions. In essence, the counselor uses the client’s positive assets to counteract feelings of anxiety, worry, and fear (Shmotkin, 2005). The results of numerous research projects suggest that optimal human functioning includes such qualities as happiness, optimism, resilience, hope, courage, ability to cope with stress, self-actualization, and self-determination (Sue et al., 2014). Client and counselor greatly benefit by addressing the interrelationship of positive traits as well as negative concerns in the counseling process.
Later in this chapter I briefly review a well-known standardized personality inventory, the NEO-PI-3 (Costa & McCrae, 1997), also known as the big five-factor model. The results of this personality inventory are straightforward and provide useful information for use in the career counseling process as well as measures of a client’s subjective feeling of well-being. Ten determinants of well-being in the workplace are introduced next.
5-2 Determinants of Well-Being in the Workplace
Ten determinants of well-being in the workplace that have been paraphrased from Warr (1987, 2005) are contained in Box 5.1. Counselors who are aware of work environments that can determine one’s feeling of well-being and fit are in a better position to foster discussions about the give-and-take associated with one’s workplace. It should not be surprising to find that many workers seek security, interpersonal contact, and a valued social position that can be job related. In addition, one usually desires to be challenged with tasks that can be mastered in order to experience competence and the satisfaction of a job well done. Variety of tasks, supportive supervision, and environmental clarity are other examples of important subjects one can discuss and clarify in the counseling process. I continue with a discussion of the intake interview.
Box 5.1
Well-Being in the Work Environment
1. Opportunity for control. Work environments that promote opportunities for workers to control some work tasks enhance mental health and feelings of well-being. This logical conclusion suggests that when individuals are able to make decisions concerning their work procedures, they are in a better position to predict the consequences of their actions.
2. Opportunity for skill use. The ability to make use of one’s skills promotes and provides opportunities for growth and self-satisfaction. Successful use of skills enhances one’s feeling of competence.
3. Externally generated goals. Organizational goals should be clearly stated with obtainable objectives that are reasonable. Sufficient resources are to be available for meeting the requirements of job demands. Individual workers should be able to experience the satisfaction of a job well done.
4. Environmental variety. The challenge of learning new skills creates an interesting environmental variety of tasks and reduces boredom. The opportunity to successfully learn different and effective work procedures promotes personal growth.
5. Environmental clarity. Clarifying role assignments for each worker should also include opportunities for feedback of job performance. The worker’s feelings of well-being are greatly enhanced by the certainty of the future for a job well done.
6. Availability of money. Job satisfaction is to some extent measured by one’s level of pay. Workers who can provide sufficient funds for the welfare of their families are likely to experience satisfaction and self-esteem. In addition, satisfaction with one’s income is often related to a comparison of what others make who do the same job.
7. Physical security. Pleasant and safe working conditions enhance feelings of well-being. Workers who experience healthy work environments and safety on the job can experience positive reinforcement in the workplace.
8. Supportive supervision. Workers especially respond positively to effective leadership, support, and encouragement. Managers who provide support and offer constructive advice create work environments that offer workers the opportunity to fulfill work goals and experience the feeling of well-being.
9. Opportunity for interpersonal contact. An important aspect of job satisfaction is the opportunity of interpersonal contact with fellow workers. Workers usually respond positively to the opportunity for social support in the workplace. The opportunity to socialize with others reduces feelings of loneliness. Mutual goals that are shared with others provide the potential for forming relationships.
10. Valued social position. Work has a long history of being valued in our society. When a worker feels that his job is appreciated by others, there is indeed a sense of life purpose, a belief that his or her job makes a difference, and a feeling of accomplishment (Compton & Hoffman, 2013; Harrington, 2013; Warr, 1987, 2005; Zunker, 2008).
5-3 An Intake Interview…
