Relation of type and amount of training to career counseling self-efficacy in Italy.

This study examined the relation of self-efficacy to length and type of training in a sample of Italian career counselors. Findings indicated that amount of career counseling training was positively related to counselors' self-efficacy regarding their abilities to conceptualize vocational problems, deal with career indecision concerns, and provide educational counseling. In addition, counselors who had participated in an in-service training course that focused on social cognitive/learning theories reported stronger self-efficacy regarding their skills at vocational problem conceptualization and at educational counseling than did those who received more eclectic training.

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Career counseling is becoming an increasingly popular profession around the world; similarly, the research literature on career counseling has become more international in its scope in recent years (e.g., see Lent, 2001; Watts, 1996). Italy is one country in which interest has increased regarding the provision and study of career services (e.g., see Nota & Soresi, 2000). However, career counseling is currently largely unregulated in Italy; there are no credentialing or licensing laws that govern its practice, and no commonly required training curricula or widely accepted competencies are expected of those who perform career services. Vocational guidance and career interventions in Italy are also offered by an extremely diverse group of professionals, including those trained as teachers, psychologists, sociologists, and economists. These diverse service providers tend to receive training experiences that vary greatly in content and duration.

Specific training and continuing education in career counseling are typically provided by Italian universities through relatively brief in-service courses rather than through formal degree-granting programs. Training tends to emphasize a person-environment matching model of career counseling. Most vocational counseling services are provided either in high school settings or in state-sponsored vocational guidance or job centers. As in the United States, the focus of the career services that are offered varies widely, ranging from the provision of career information, to the provision of guidance with academic course selection and job finding, to addressing individuals' concerns with the psychological processes involved in vocational choice and adjustment.

While efforts are underway to standardize the preparation of career counselors in Italy, it would be valuable to study the implications of type and amount of training for career counselors' functioning. Such data could provide an empirical basis for selecting appropriate training models. In the present study, we examined the relationship of certain training parameters to one important aspect of career counselors' functioning, namely, their self-efficacy regarding their ability to perform various career counseling activities.

Self-efficacy refers to personal beliefs regarding one's ability to perform particular activities and courses of action. These beliefs are hypothesized to help determine a host of important outcomes, such as people's choice of activities and behavioral settings, emotional reactions, and persistence when confronted by obstacles. Self-efficacy is a key construct in Bandura's (1986) general social cognitive theory and in the adaptation of this theory to career behavior (Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994). Research in the context of counselor training has shown that counselors' self-efficacy beliefs regarding their general counseling skills are related to their performance, anxiety, and satisfaction with counseling (for a review, see Larson & Daniels, 1998). Beginning practicum experiences, such as role plays, modeling, and positive feedback, appear to promote self-efficacy perceptions, at least at earlier stages of training; less study has been devoted to training elements that promote self-efficacy in more advanced counselors (Larson & Daniels, 1998).

Researchers have also examined counselors' self-efficacy beliefs specifically in relation to career counseling skills. O'Brien, Heppner, Flores, and Bikos (1997) found that graduate students in counseling showed increases in their career counseling self-efficacy beliefs after they had completed a course in career counseling. It is interesting that although the students reported lower career counseling self-efficacy than did a sample of practitioners, the practitioners' self-efficacy beliefs did not correlate with their years of career counseling experience. Heppner, Multon, Gysbers, Ellis, and Zook (1998) also found an increase in students' career counseling self-efficacy over the course of a career counseling practicum. Heppner, O'Brien, Hinkelman, and Flores (1996) reported that trainees' career counseling self-efficacy beliefs were strongly related to positive training and practice-based experiences with career counseling.

Until now, research on counselors' general and career counseling self-efficacy has focused on graduate students and practicing counselors in the United States, although a number of studies in the broader career literature have shown that the self-efficacy construct has cross-cultural relevance (Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 2002). On the basis of previous literature on general and career counseling self-efficacy, we hypothesized that, in our sample of Italian career counseling service providers, career counseling self-efficacy would vary with amount of training. Specifically, we predicted that regardless of years of counseling experience, greater amounts of training in career counseling would be associated with higher career counseling self-efficacy.

We also expected that, compared with relatively eclectic training, theory-intensive training (i.e., training that is based on a particular theoretical orientation) would be associated with higher counselor self-efficacy beliefs. This hypothesis was developed on the assumption that it may be easier for trainees to assimilate and apply the counseling procedures associated with a coherent theoretical orientation rather than a collection of somewhat disparate approaches. We used social cognitive and social learning theories (e.g., Lent et al., 1994) as the basis for developing a theory-intensive training model. These theories were selected largely because of their focus on client empowerment and self-regulation--that is, a view of clients as active shapers of their own career development in a dynamic context--rather than only emphasizing person-environment fit decision making at a single point in time.

Method

Participants

Participants were 218 Italian career service providers (132 women, 86 men) who had applied to attend an in-service training course on vocational counseling offered at the University of Padova in Italy. The participants had received prior education at a variety of universities in northern and central Italy; 98 had earned a degree in psychology, 42 had a degree in education, 34 in the humanities, 30 in economics, and 14 had earned a degree in political science. Their mean age was 39.28 years (SD = 9.58, age range = 24-62). They reported a range of 1 to 20 years of experience in providing career services (M = 6.79, SD = 4.32 years) and a range of 8 to 200 hours of previous formal training in vocational counseling (M = 64.82, SD = 46.86 hours). Forty percent of the participants provided career services through vocational guidance centers, 35% provided these services in school settings, and 25% provided their services in private practice. The participants spent an average of 13.19 hours per week (SD = 7.41, range = 5-36 hours) engaged in providing a variety of career services.

Procedure and Instruments

All participants completed a battery of measures, in Italian, within small group testing sessions before they began the in-service course. The measures assessed career counseling self-efficacy and elicited demographic information (age, sex), total years of career counseling experience, and amount of prior career counseling training. In order to measure hours of prior career counseling training, participants were asked to indicate all of their prior training experiences. Attendance certificates were checked to verify total hours of prior training.

The career counseling self-efficacy questionnaire, developed by Nota and Soresi (2000), consists of 27 items, each of which presents a specific career counseling task. Participants respond by indicating their ability to perform each task on a scale of 1 (not at all sure) to 7 (very sure). A series of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses provided support for a four-factor structure, accounting for 53% of the total variance (Nota & Soresi, 2000). The factors were perceived ability to (a) understand clients' career problems (14 items; e.g., "I believe I can understand even a difficult vocational guidance situation"), (b) promote academic success through educational counseling (4 items; e.g., "I think I can effectively teach study skill methods"), (c) deal with problems of indecision and choice (5 items; e.g., "I don't believe I can help very undecided and insecure individuals to make choices"), and (d) provide career information (4 items; e.g., "I believe I can effectively inform individuals about labor market trends").

Scale scores were obtained by summing item responses corresponding to each of the four factors, after reversing the scores of negatively worded items. Possible score ranges for each scale were as follows: Problem Understanding, 14-98; Educational Counseling, 4-28; Career Indecision/Choice, 5-35; Career Information, 4-28. For each scale, higher scores indicated stronger self-efficacy beliefs. The scales have yielded adequate internal consistency reliability estimates in previous research. Nota and Soresi (2000) reported coefficient alpha values of .94, .81, .81, and .80 for the Problem Understanding, Educational Counseling, Career Indecision/Choice, and Career Information scales, respectively; corresponding reliability estimates in the present study were .91, .80, .80, and .79, respectively.

To assess test-retest reliability, 50 randomly selected participants in the present study completed the measure a second time, 1 month after the first administration but before beginning the in-service training course. Test-retest correlations were as follows: Problem Understanding (r = .89), Educational Counseling (r = .79), Career Indecision/Choice (r = .79), and Career Information (r = .78). Nota and Soresi's (2000) findings also provided preliminary support for the validity of the career counseling self-efficacy measure. In particular, they found that the measure discriminated among career service providers who take a problem-solving, theory-based approach to their work versus those who do not anchor their counseling activities within a particular theoretical orientation.

Participants in the intervention phase of this study were a subset of career counseling service providers who had applied for the in-service training and were randomly assigned to one of the two training conditions (n = 30 per condition), matched by type of degree, age, gender, and hours of previous vocational training. They completed pre- and posttraining ratings of their career counseling self-efficacy. Training in each condition consisted of 40 weekly 3-hour sessions, which were offered over an academic year.

The trainers were teachers and researchers from universities in Padova, Milano, Bologna, and Cagliari, Italy. Each trainer followed a standard instructional outline. The following theories were presented in the eclectic course condition: Super's life-span, life-space approach (Super, Savickas, & Super, 1996); the theory of work adjustment (Dawis, 1996); Holland's (1997) theory of vocational personalities and environments; the cognitive information processing approach (Peterson, Sampson, Reardon, & Lenz, 1996); and social learning (Mitchell & Krumboltz, 1996) and social cognitive approaches (Lent et al., 1994). The theory-specific course condition focused on social learning and social cognitive approaches. Approximately 60% of the instructional time in each condition was devoted to theory review, primarily through lectures, and approximately 40% of the time was spent in experiential activities, including simulated career counseling interviews, administering and interpreting career instruments, and preparing written reports. Efforts were made to balance the two conditions in terms of teaching methods and structuring of experiential activities such that instructional differences would be limited to the content of the career theories and the practical methods derived from them.

Results

According to Hypothesis 1, greater amounts of training would be associated with stronger career counseling self-efficacy beliefs, regardless of years of counseling experience. Findings indicated that amount of previous career counseling training correlated significantly (p < .01) and moderately with the Problem Understanding (r = .41), Educational Counseling (r = .46), and Career Indecision/Choice (r = .25) scales. The correlation of amount of training to the Career Information scale was, however, small and nonsignificant (r = .11). Years of counseling experience produced small, nonsignificant correlations with the self-efficacy scales (rs ranged from .02 to -.16), and correlations of self-efficacy to amount of training did not change after the effect of years of counseling experience was partialed out. Thus, regardless of amount of prior field-based experience, counselors who had relatively higher amounts of career counseling training reported higher levels of career counseling self-efficacy than did counselors who had less training experience on three of the four self-efficacy dimensions, thereby providing partial support for Hypothesis 1.

Hypothesis 2 stated that career counselors who received theory-intensive, social cognitive/learning training would experience higher career counseling self-efficacy beliefs than would counselors who participated in a course that offered a broad survey of different career theories and associated techniques, without emphasizing any particular orientation. Table 1 presents the pretest and posttest means and standard deviations for the eclectic and social cognitive training groups across the four dimensions of career counseling self-efficacy. Analyses of covariance were performed to compare the groups' posttest means with pretest scores used as covariates. Findings indicated that the social cognitive group reported significantly higher posttest self-efficacy on the Problem Understanding, F(1, 57) = 16.41, p < .001, and Educational Counseling, F(1, 57) = 43.75, p < .001, dimensions; the two groups did not differ significantly on the Career Indecision/Choice or Career Information dimensions.

Discussion

The present study extended research on counselor self-efficacy to career counselors in Italy. Our findings indicated that participants' career counseling self-efficacy ratings varied according to the type and amount of training they had received. First, regardless of years of counseling experience, larger amounts of prior training were moderately associated with higher ratings on three of four dimensions of career counseling self-efficacy. In particular, participants who had more training experience reported higher self-efficacy than did those who had less training in terms of perceived ability to understand vocational problems, to provide counseling aimed at educational success, and to deal with problems of career indecision and choice. However, amount of training did not correlate significantly with self-efficacy regarding the provision of career information.

Second, our findings suggested that theory-intensive training in social cognitive and social learning approaches to career development, as compared with a broad survey of several different career theories, may enhance self-efficacy regarding understanding vocational problems and providing educational counseling services. This effect may reflect the fact that career theories are relatively complex and that exposure to multiple theories in rapid succession may challenge trainees' ability to use them as the basis for conceptualizing clients' problems and performing interventions that are aimed at educational problems. Focusing on a particular orientation or on a set of conceptually related theories, such as social cognitive and learning theories, may facilitate the translation of theory into practice by concentrating learning around relatively fewer theoretical and counseling elements.

The present findings are consistent with earlier research on U.S. trainees, which has shown that career counselor self-efficacy tends to rise with increasing amounts of career counseling instruction and practicum (Heppner et al., 1998; O'Brien et al., 1997). Similar to O'Brien et al.'s findings, we also found that career counseling self-efficacy was linked to career-specific training rather than to total years of counseling experience. However, the differential utility of social learning/cognitive training procedures in promoting certain facets of career counseling self-efficacy in practicing counselors represents a novel set of findings.

Collectively, our findings suggested that social cognitive theory may offer a useful, cross-cultural framework for conceptualizing career counselor development. These findings may also inform the design of career counseling training curricula in Italy by suggesting that length of training and type (or intensity) of theoretical exposure can affect career counselors' self-efficacy beliefs. Although these findings are promising, their interpretation and generalization must, however, be tempered by several limitations. First, the correlational design that we used in testing the first hypothesis can support the conclusion that amount of prior training is related to counselor self-efficacy, but it cannot establish causal linkages between training amount and self-efficacy. Second, because duration and type of training were operationalized in relatively global terms, our findings do not reveal the specific training elements that may be associated with, or responsible for, changes in trainee self-efficacy.

Third, it should be noted that not all dimensions of career counseling self-efficacy differed according to training length or type. Self-efficacy regarding the provision of career information, for instance, did not differ significantly as a function of training length or type. It may be that each of the training conditions offered sufficient and roughly comparable training in career information, that the availability of computerized career information generally bolstered trainee efficacy at this skill domain, or that trainees tended to view this aspect of career counseling as somewhat less challenging and more straightforward when compared with other counseling tasks. Fourth, the self-efficacy measure used to index outcome in the intervention phase of this study was associated conceptually with a central theoretical construct in the social cognitive/learning condition. This conceptual linkage could have produced differential demand characteristics across conditions. It would be useful, therefore, to include a broader array of outcome measures in future research that compares social cognitive/learning with other approaches to career counselor training.

It may be valuable for future research to devote more study to the effect of particular training ingredients and microstrategies on trainee self-efficacy. Social cognitive theory highlights four primary types of experience that can have an impact on self-efficacy beliefs: personal performance accomplishments (e.g., successful counseling experiences), vicarious learning (e.g., exposure to appropriate models), social persuasion (e.g., supportive supervisors and peers), and physiological and affective states (e.g., trainee anxiety level during counseling sessions). Research that translates these efficacy-related elements into specific training modules or supervisory strategies and that examines their effects on trainee and client outcomes could have practical value for the optimal design of career counselor training programs.

Second, there is a need for more research on how career counseling self-efficacy affects trainees' in-session behavior with clients and supervisors. Does counselor self-efficacy, for instance, enable calmer and more fluid counseling behavior or greater openness to supervisory feedback? Third, it would be useful to explore the effects of different versions of theory-intensive training. Such research can address the question of whether training in a particular theoretical orientation (e.g., social cognitive/learning approaches), or theory-intensive training as a general strategy, is responsible for promoting trainees' self-efficacy. Finally, the current findings suggested the value of more cross-cultural research and cross-national collaborations in the career literature. Further research is needed, for example, to assess the degree to which particular career development (and counselor development) theories are culture bound or broadly applicable across diverse cultural contexts (Lent & Worthington, 2000).

TABLE 1 Type of Training and Pretest and Posttest Changes in Career
Counseling Self-Efficacy


                          Eclectic Training
Dimension of              Pretest       Posttest
Self-Efficacy             M      SD     M      SD

Problem Understanding     60.50  10.79  63.27  10.78
Educational Counseling    16.47   4.34  17.13   4.32
Career Indecision/Choice  23.47   4.93  23.33   4.83
Career Information        15.37   5.02  17.46   3.73

                          Social Cognitive/Learning
                              Theories Training
Dimension of                Pretest      Posttest
Self-Efficacy               M      SD    M      SD    [[eta].sup.2]

Problem Understanding       61.57  8.37  72.40  9.77  .22
Educational Counseling      15.60  6.19  22.60  2.58  .43
Career Indecision/Choice    23.77  4.17  23.93  2.81  .01
Career Information          13.53  3.46  16.06  4.45  .01

Note. n = 30 in each condition.

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Salvatore Soresi and Laura Nota, Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialization, University of Padova; Robert W. Lent, Department of Counseling and Personnel Services, University of Maryland-College Park. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Salvatore Soresi, Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialization, University of Padova, Via Belzoni 80, 35121 Padova, Italy (e-mail: [e-mail]).