10/01/2023

Mapping Career Interventions with Client Needs

By Shékina Rochat

The art of career counseling consists of selecting, tailoring, and delivering relevant career interventions to meet clients’ specific needs. This personalization process is essential to the effectiveness of career counseling because it allows the practitioner to foster two components of an effective working alliance, namely: (1) agreement on the goals of the counseling process, and (2) agreement on the ways to reach those goals (Bordin, 1979).

Ideally, such pairing should be anchored in the empirical research on career counseling efficacy (e.g., Whiston, 2021). However, practitioners may find it difficult to do so, as the current body of literature focuses on general outcomes of counseling procedures, instead of delving into the impact of  personalized interventions on a given client’s needs. Accordingly, career practitioners may feel left on their own to master (and to teach) the art of personalized career interventions.

Creating Your Own Map of Career Interventions

To fill this gap, career practitioners may benefit from taking the time to map their counseling interventions to their clients’ most pressing difficulties (Rochat, 2022). Concretely, this mapping process requires answering these two questions as precisely as possible:

• What are the most frequent difficulties my clients encounter?
• Which tools, strategies, or methods can I use to address each of these specific needs?

Linking relevant interventions to the list of client needs then serves as a blueprint for guiding the career counseling process. Accordingly, when a client (explicitly or implicitly) expresses a specific difficulty (verbally or through a questionnaire), the practitioner will know ahead of time if this is a need they can address and which tools, strategies or methods would be the most relevant ways to do so.

For many practitioners, drawing their interventions map tends to demonstrate that different types of interventions can address the same need. For example, Savickas and Hartung’s (2012) career construction exercise that asks about an individual’s favorite magazines or television shows can be just as useful as a standardized interest assessment to help clients who are struggling to identify suitable work settings. Moreover, a single intervention could meet several difficulties. For example, a job interview role play is likely to meet both a clients’ need for information about the hiring process and their job search self-efficacy.

Mapping interventions with specific difficulties can therefore promote the adoption of a coherent integrative approach of not only the various tools and methods developed in the field of career counseling, but also within the broader discipline of psychology. For example, the fear of making a wrong decision can be proficiently addressed with Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) strategies for anxiety management, such as the technique of unfolding worst-case scenario to help the client develop a more adequate perception of their choices’ consequences (Miller & Rollnick, 2012).

Useful Tips for Your Map

To facilitate the identification of clients’ needs, career practitioners can use various taxonomies of career difficulties. For example, the Career Difficulties Inventory, which draws on theoretical models and empirical findings to list 63 common career difficulties, is available for free in the form of an inventory (CDI), a card sort (CDI-C), and an illustrated card sord (CDI-Ci).

Preferably, when drawing their map, practitioners will pay attention to identify as many career interventions as possible for each of the enumerated difficulties. This allows them to adjust flexibly to clients’ counseling preferences (for example, regarding qualitative or quantitative approaches) with a collaborative attitude.

When completing this mapping exercise, career practitioners may notice that they lack some of the interventions, strategies, or skills to most effectively meet some of their clients’ needs. In this instance, the map can serve as a helpful tool to identify promising training opportunities, or as a reminder of when to refer clients to skilled third parties.

In the context of a career services team or group practice, it may be useful to conduct this mapping exercise as a group. This will allow for the identification of a wide range of client difficulties and can foster numerous intervention ideas from the team. In doing so, this process could contribute to harmonizing the practices within the organization while honoring the uniqueness and diversity of both clients and practitioners.

Career interventions mapping can also be useful when designing a course or a training curriculum in career counseling. In this case, the relevant questions to ask are:

• What kinds of difficulties should the future career practitioners be able to solve at the end of their training?
• What tools, strategies, or methods should we teach them, so they learn to do so?

This process can lead to designing curriculum closer to the realities of career practice. However, as clients’ career needs are always evolving, practical and training maps are never final, and should be regularly updated.

References

Bordin, E. S. (1979). The generalizability of the psychoanalytic concept of the working alliance. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, 16(3), 252–260. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0085885

Miller, W. R., & Rollnick, S. (2012). Motivational interviewing: Helping people change. Guilford Press.

Rochat, S. (2022). Mapping career counseling interventions: A guide for career practitioners. Routledge.

Savickas, M. L., & Hartung, P. J. (2012). My career story: An autobiographical workbook for life-career success. Vocopher.

Whiston, S. C. (2021). Career counselling effectiveness and contributing factors. In P. J. Robertson, T. Hooley, & P. McCash (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of career development (pp. 336–352). Oxford University Press.

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Shékina Rochat, PhD, is a substitute senior lecturer in career counseling psychology at the University of Lausanne, Switzerlan. Her research interests include the integration of motivational interviewing and positive psychology intervention in career counseling. She can be reached at: shekina.rochat@unil.ch, www.shekinarochat.com