Chapter 12 Flashcards
At the high school level, career development involves teaching students how to plan and prepare for the workforce.
Many teenagers have no idea what direction they want to head into and need help sorting through their interests and abilities.
This is important because self-information can dictate everything from how students choose their postsecondary education to what jobs they search for while in school.
As such, they need to know how to create résumés, fill out applications, and prepare for interviews.
Counselors must also teach students life management skills and how career choice can affect your ability to support yourself and others.
An additional aspect of career development for counselors can be job placement, more unique to the high school level. Students of all levels are looking for various types of employment.
Some students need help finding part-time positions to help pay for expenses or save for college. Other students need training and basic skills for full-time employment that will begin as soon as they graduate.
High school counselors must be in contact with community resources and businesses to find out what positions are available to students and sometimes to monitor a student’s on-the-job performance.
These contacts may employ students as well as provide opportunities for apprenticeships or internships, job shadowing experiences, and coming into the schools for presentations or recruitment. Career development interventions serve as the bridge between students’ current experiences and future possibilities.
Tips from the field
High school students often feel pressure to be more clear and confident about their futures. Being engaged in career exploration while also being open to future possibilities is a much more realistic and appropriate goal.
As with all developmental transitions, the transition to high school offers opportunities for actively engaging students in career development interventions that can strengthen their academic motivation, bolster their self-esteem, and help them to make connections between their school experiences and their future academic and career opportunities.
from elly’s case
More specifically, as students transition to high school, they focus more directly on the tasks of identifying occupational preferences and clarifying career/lifestyle choices (these tasks build upon all of the American School Counselor Association [ASCA] competencies within the Career Development domain as well as all of the tasks within the National Career Development Guidelines).
from e’s case
According to Super (1957), the tasks of crystallizing, specifying, and implementing tentative career choices occur during early (ages 12 to 15), middle (ages 16 to 18), and late (ages 18 to 24) adolescence.
Ultimately, specifying and implementing become critical goals for high school students.Simply put, implementing involves taking action toward achieving the specified goal.
Rosenbaum and Person recommend that professional school counselors also help others become aware of the following new rules regarding the labor market and college:
All students can attend college, but low-achieving students should be cautioned about the need to take remedial courses once they enter college.
Even if high school students have college plans, they must prepare for work.
College plans require substantial effort and good academic planning in high school.
Many good jobs do not require a college degree.
High school students improve their chances for obtaining good jobs by having better academic achievement, taking vocational courses, getting job-placement assistance from teachers, and developing “soft skills” such as interpersonal competence and good work habits.
These points highlight the importance of developing workforce readiness to cope successfully with the school-to-work transition.
but now employers are more concerned with “finding youth who can read and write, have a good attitude, are motivated, are dependable, follow directions, and can be good team members” (Krumboltz & Worthington, 1999, p. 316)
In this regard, Hansen (1999) argues for expanding school-to-work career development interventions to include student development in addition to the more traditional emphasis on workforce development.
Baker and Gerler (2008) emphasize the importance of school counselors providing “transition enhancement” assistance to secondary school students as they progress toward further education, training, or employment. Because such transitions are a regular part of high school students’ development, Baker recommends that counselors view transitions as a process rather than as events or a sequence of events
Students need emotional support to lessen the anticipatory anxiety they may experience as they consider the transitions they will encounter.
However, it is reasonable to expect this anxiety to be fairly high among adolescents who have lived their lives primarily in the arenas of home and school. Postsecondary work, training, and education present new challenges and experiences. Although some of these challenges may seem somewhat intimidating, counselors can remind students that the competencies they have developed thus far in their lives will also be helpful to them as they negotiate the postsecondary transition experience.
For example, it is essential that students construct and know how to implement a career plan.
School counselors must also address the fact that students differ in their readiness to address career and educational planning tasks.
Thus, career interventions need to be flexible enough to account for these student differences in readiness for career decision making.
Finally, students must develop awareness related to postsecondary options, specifically the pros and cons of each option under consideration (e.g., joining the military, enrolling in community college, attending a four-year university).
Marcia (1966) have also identified important variables for adolescent career development. Specifically, Marcia focuses on two variables—crisis/exploration and commitment—as central to the career development process during adolescence.
Crisis/exploration refers to the process of sorting through identity issues; questioning parentally defined goals, values, and beliefs; and identifying personally appropriate alternatives regarding career options, goals, values, and beliefs.
The degree to which adolescents resolve the tasks associated with crisis/exploration and commitment provides the conceptual structure for Marcia’s taxonomy of adolescent identity (Marcia, 1980). This taxonomy comprises four identity statuses: identity diffused (or identity confused), foreclosed, moratorium, and identity achieved.
The identity-diffused person has yet to experience an identity crisis or exploration and has not made any personal commitment to an occupation, much less to a set of goals, values, and beliefs.
The foreclosed person has yet to experience an identity crisis or exploration but has committed to an occupation and to a set of goals, values, and beliefs (usually due to indoctrination or social pressure by parents and/or significant others). This type of foreclosure is premature because it has occurred without exploring and struggling with the basic existential questions related to identifying one’s values, beliefs, goals, and so on.
The moratorium person is engaged in an active struggle to clarify personally meaningful values, goals, and beliefs. Committing to a particular set of values, goals, and beliefs has been placed “on hold” until the process of identity clarification is more complete.
The identity-achieved person has sorted through the process of identity clarification and resolved these issues in a personally meaningful way. Moreover, as a result of exploring and resolving identity issues, the identity-achieved person commits to an occupation and a personal value system.
Rather than being a singular process of exploring and committing to a set of values, goals, and beliefs, identity formation occurs across several domains, such as occupation, religion, politics, and sexuality.
In addition, the individual’s identity status within each domain is not static but rather an ongoing process involving back-and-forth movement across stages (Muuss, 1998).
Given survey results such as those obtained by Gibbons, Borders, Wiles, Stephan, and Davis (2006) indicating that ninth-graders expressed a desire for additional career information as it relates to developing their career and educational plans, the provision of interventions such as a career fair comprised of nontraditional workers can be an important intervention that offers students accurate information about potential career options.
CAREER INTERVENTIONS FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS:
The high school competencies, however, challenge students to become more focused on making career plans by translating their self- and career information into career goals.
Savickas (1999) proposed career development interventions that foster the sort of self-knowledge, educational and occupational exploration, and career planning described in the high school competencies.
Specifically, these interventions focus on (a) orienting students’ comprehension of careers, (b) developing students’ planning and exploring competencies, (c) coaching students to develop effective career management techniques, and (d) guiding students in behavioral rehearsals to become prepared for coping with job problems.
To orient ninth-grade students to the planning tasks they will encounter as they move through high school, Savickas (1999) recommends:
using a group guidance format to discuss items on career development inventories, such as the Career Maturity Inventory (Crites, 1978) or the Adult Career Concerns Inventory (Super, Thompson, Lindeman, Jordaan, & Myers, 1988).
Using inventory items to orient students to the tasks they need to address to manage their career development effectively helps provide a stimulus for planning and exploring behaviors (Savickas, 1990).
