The future of career counseling as an instrument of public policy.

Since the early 20th century, career counseling has been tire object of public policy and legislation. As such, the important contributions of career counseling to labor market processes have reinforced the role of career counseling and related career interventions as sociopolitical instruments vital to the facilitation of national goals. The author discusses the interactions of career counseling and public policy; the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats related to such interactions; and selected strategic issues facing professional career counselors in the 21st century.

Unlike many of the other articles in this special issue that deal directly with the processes and techniques of career counseling, this article examines the public policy context that supports and, often, shapes the substance and the implementation of career counseling. Public policy and its corollary, legislation pertinent to career counseling, have frequently defined who does career counseling in particular settings and with what types of interventions, the nature of the training these career practitioners should have, who receives career counseling, and the purpose of these interventions. Frequently, policy makers who are responsible for specific legislation provide a list of terms to represent the content or the prescribed goals of career counseling in a particular piece of legislation and the concepts that determine the institutional or population boundaries in which career counseling is expected to function.

Indeed, it can be argued that career counseling, in its many manifestations, is largely a creature of public policy. Almost from its birth in the late nineteenth century, the iterations of career counseling (e.g., vocational guidance, vocational counseling) through the twentieth century have been the subject of public policy and frequently of legislation that have mandated inclusion of career counseling as one of several interventions intended to address particular national economic, political, and workforce issues. As such, career counseling and its antecedents have become an integral part of national labor market policies in such areas as the following: (a) the prevention or the reduction of long-term unemployment, the development of an effective workforce, and the matching of workers and employers; (b) the adjustment by employed workers to rapidly changing labor market conditions, including the pervasive use of advanced technology in the workplace or the transfer of jobs within the United States or from the United States to other nations, requiring workers in the affected industries to mi grate to where the jobs are or to be retrained for other opportunities; and (c) the provision of assistance to persons considered marginally employable because of poor skills, functional disabilities, social problems, or work requirements with which they cannot cope without significant help.

Each of the purposes specified is reflected in legislation that has been adopted by the U.S. Congress during the twentieth century. Legislation, the manifestation of public policy, expresses an array of national goals for economic and workforce development: the reduction of problems workers experience that inhibit their productivity and increase their costs to government as reflected in welfare and other social benefits; the democratization of opportunities for education or work without regard to race, ethnicity, or gender; and the need for efficiency in distributing workers among the jobs, occupations, and career pathways available that require specific worker skills. These national goals of facilitating equality of access to work and training opportunities, creating human capital, rehabilitating persons on the margins of society or economic productivity, and helping persons find purpose in and adjustment to work have taken on different configurations and different urgency depending on the metaphors and the events characterizing the larger society at particular historical periods (Herr, 1991). These historical emphases have included social reform in the late 1800s and early 1900s; the growing awareness of individual differences and the concern for people with disabilities and mental illness in the 1920s; the poverty, economic exigencies, and need to match the unemployed with available opportunities during the Great Depression of the 1930s; national defense in the 1940s; the creation of a peacetime economy and new economic opportunities in the 1950s; the democratization of and access to education and occupational opportunities and the development of the nation's scientific capacity to fight the cold war in the 1960s; concerns for equity, special needs populations, and educational reform in the 1970s; the transformation from an industrial to an information-based economy pervaded by the application of advanced technology in the workplace in the 1980s and 1990s; and the rise of the global economy, international terrorism, and the worldwide economic downturn in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Each of these historical periods has provided an economic, social, and political climate that spawned public debate; position papers; policy; and legislation identifying vulnerable populations, shifting requirements for the preparation of youth and adults to participate effectively in the education or training needed in the workforce, and identifying targets for the deployment of resources, including provisions for career counseling. As such public policy and legislation have evolved, their content and expectations have varied between the idealistic, the pragmatic, and the politically partisan. On balance, policy makers and legislators have advocated for the recognition of the increasing need for comprehensive career counseling at major life-transition points (e.g., school to work, midcareer change, unemployment or underemployment), as well as for such national commitments as integration and mobility of members of racially and ethnically diverse groups and of women in the occupational structure, incorporation of persons with disabilities into the mainstream of occupational opportunity, and collaboration between educational and employment settings in the development of human capital. The latter reflects a growing international consensus that in a global economy, a nation's major asset is a workforce that is literate; functional in mathematics, communications, and computer skills; teachable; flexible; and with general employability skills that allow its members or workers to prepare for, choose, and adjust to work and to apply the technical skills they possess productively and purposefully and in effective interaction with other workers.

In policy and legislation, directly and indirectly, career counseling has been assigned major responsibilities to carry out national purposes with different populations and in manifold settings. However, it needs to be noted that relatively little legislation during the past 100 years has identified career counseling as a stand-alone process or as the sole focus of legislation (Herr, 1996). Rather, career counseling has typically been seen as an important process that works in conjunction with some multidimensional program of interventions (e.g., financial aid, apprenticeship, job training, academic programs, physical rehabilitation) to address some larger set of issues reflected in specific legislation, such as those inherent in titles like The School-toWork Opportunities Act, the Workforce Investment Act, the Carl D. Perkins Vocational Education and Applied Technology Act, the Social Security Act, the North American Free Trade Act/Trade Act Assistance.

It is because they have been an object of public policy and legislation that career counseling and other career interventions can be perceived as vital sociopolitical instruments in the facilitation of national goals. The specific national goals, set forth in policy and legislation, to which career counseling is seen as contributing vary across historical periods. The provision of career counseling in the United States is primarily a function of public policy and legislation that is directed to the career concerns found in settings and populations for which career counseling is assessed to be an important response: students in schools and institutions of higher education, persons needing help to break the cycle of welfare, those seeking employment, those unemployed, those leaving military service, those in transition from incarceration to civil society, those dislocated by the adaptation of advanced technology in the workplace, those affected by the transfer of jobs to other nations as a function of the implementation of economic alliances with other countries, and those experiencing chronic or acute physical and mental conditions that have made their access to work problematic.

Inherent in such initiatives are the perceptions of policy makers that the career needs of different populations in multiple settings reflect social costs (e.g., lost wages, lost taxes, societal disruption) that need to be reduced or alleviated. Identifying and providing remedial assistance to individuals whose behavior or lack of skills are troublesome to them or to the larger society; providing a safety net of support and encouragement for those who cannot effectively care for themselves; stimulating workforce preparation, development, and training that increase the quality of persons entering the labor market; and associated needs are seen as appropriate areas of government intervention, as manifested in funding for career counseling and related interventions. How policy makers come to particular conclusions about social issues and needed legislation is a complex process that has imbued the evolution of career counseling with strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Internal Strengths of Career Counseling

Career counseling has evolved during the twentieth century and has developed several internal strengths. One of these strengths has been articulated in the prefatory remarks in this article: The reality that career counseling, in its many manifestations, is largely a creature of public policy. Such policies have focused funding and the building of capacity on career counseling as a significant and continuing item on the national policy agenda through much of the twentieth century, and this process can be expected to continue in the twenty-first century. Legislative initiatives have essentially institutionalized the provision of career counseling in schools and, less directly, in universities; in the U.S. Employment and Training Administration; in labor market policy; in the rehabilitation community; in the military; and in other settings. As such, the importance of career counseling in the nation has not been in doubt, even though there has sometimes been a discrepancy between the legislative vision and definition of career counseling or the comprehensiveness of who should be served by career counseling and the visions embraced by theorists and researchers.

A second internal strength of career counseling is its research base. Career counseling and related career interventions have been the focus of a growing scientific knowledge base that provides evidence that a wide range of career interventions (e.g., individual and group career counseling, career guidance, career education, computer-assisted career guidance programs, self-directed assessments) have a positive effect on many categories of career issues: career awareness and exploration, career planning skills, client information deficits, improved school involvement and performance, personal and interpersonal work skills, help with identifying and selecting options available to individuals, reducing unemployment and problems of work adjustments, and mastering career transitions. This base of research findings that are now available to practitioners, researchers, and theorists provides factual data for use in interactions with policy makers and in the shaping of their perspectives on specific legislative provisions.

A third strength is the comprehensiveness of the application of career counseling and the demand for such services. The application of career counseling includes a variety of forms of interaction with clients (e.g., individual, group, classroom, computer systems, and the Internet) that can address a broad range of clients' career concerns at different ages and with different levels of intensity. It can be argued that career counseling can be seen as a continuum of interventions rather than a singular process. At one end are the traditional approaches of career counseling to choice, situational indecision, clarifying immediate and long-term career goals, and administering and interpreting tests and inventories to assess abilities and interests to clarify career options. At the other end of the career counseling continuum--and the perspective on career counseling that will grow in the twenty-first century--is the application of career counseling to stress reduction; anger management; integrating and resolving conflict between career and other life roles; helping persons reconstruct and reframe past experiences; learning ways to reduce their indecisiveness; assisting in modifying irrational career beliefs; addressing underlying issues that lead to work dysfunctions, including unresolved issues in the family drama being played out in the workplace; providing opportunities for displaced persons to vent their anger and their feelings about personal concerns; job loss; and the loss or diffusion of personal identity. Such emphases are not typically what is reflected in public policy or legislation about career counseling, but these are certainly the types of concerns being addressed by persons practicing career counseling in independent practice, in employee assistance programs, and in public sector agencies focused on the unemployed and underemployed.

Although there may not be a direct link between the increasing comprehensiveness of career counseling and the demand for career counseling, the demand for career counseling services is evident. At one level, the public policies and legislation discussed previously create an enduring demand for career counseling. In addition to this reality, there are other indicators of growing demand for career services, particularly among adults. For example, recent Gallup polls (Herr, 2000) have indicated that some 17% of Americans in the labor force change jobs every year and that at least 10% of the workforce need career planning help each year. That amounts to some 13 to 14 million persons each year who want or could profit from help in career planning or in selecting, changing, or obtaining a job. Important research questions still to be answered are, How many of these persons are actually being served, by whom, when, and how well?

Internal Weaknesses of Career Counseling

In some senses, the internal strengths of career counseling are also reflected in its internal weaknesses. For example, public policy and legislation, while consistently supportive of career counseling, have sometimes served to limit the models of career counseling supported. From this view, career counseling, as provided and supported in some federal legislation, reflects a restricted view of how career counseling should be provided and the goals it should serve. Because different departments of the federal government have unique as well as overlapping constituencies, it has been true in some instances that legislation has identified processes and perspectives that are more conservative in expectations and bureaucratic in provisions than the processes and perspectives that are favored by professional organizations or theorists in career counseling. The internal weakness reflected is the breakdown in advocacy by career counseling specialists to expand policy makers' visions of career counseling's potential to serve comprehensive client bases more effectively and to use models of career counseling that realistically portray the objective and the subjective components of the career problems to be solved.

In addition to better and more comprehensive advocacy of emerging models of career counseling to policy makers and legislators, career counseling professionals need to organize their rather large quantity of evidence about the utility and outcomes of career counseling more effectively. One possible structure to identify and connect career counseling's potential contributions to public policy is the creation of matrices or taxonomies that depict the large range of career concerns expressed by persons of different ages, at different transition stages, and in different conditions of employment, unemployment and underemployment; the differential treatments that research has shown to be effective in alleviating such career concerns under particular conditions; and the cost-benefit ratios associated with specific career problems and the treatment of them. In essence, if an internal weakness is a lack of advocacy of new and broader interpretations of the utility and application of career counseling, those serving as advocates on behalf of career counseling to policy makers and legislators must have the tools of advocacy--facts, trends, results, costs--not opinions.

External Opportunities for Career Counseling

The opportunities for the continuing expansion of career counseling as an instrument to achieve sociopolitical goals and to facilitate positive career development in the American population seem to be assured. Following are some of the opportunities that this expansion affords. Public policy and legislation that support the inclusion of career counseling in intervention programs designed to address both continuing (e.g., unemployment) and emerging (e.g., dislocation due to the dynamics of the global economy) career needs continue to be proposed. As an example related to the economic decline at the end of 2002, the unemployment rate in the United States has risen rapidly to 6%, from a low of less than 4% some 2 years ago. As the overall unemployment rate rises, more persons are engaged in part-time work, often holding more than one part-time job in order to keep their families economically viable. The current rise in the number of persons experiencing unemployment, part-time employment, and underemployment increases the demand for career counseling, even though the availability of and access to such services are unlikely to meet the demand.

In addition, as changes in the organization and content of work, the pervasive adoption of advanced technology, and the interactions of employers and employees occur, expectations rise for workers to assume responsibility for their personal career management, including the continuous learning of skills that are required to keep them employable. Embedded in such shifting of responsibility for career management from the employer to the employee are new needs for career counseling, information, and skill development. Furthermore, the context in which these changing career needs unfold will be characterized by uncertainty, anxiety, and resistance to change for some workers; by challenges to be more flexible and teachable for other workers; and by the need for still other workers to acquire anger management, stress management, career exploration and job seeking, and cross-cultural and transnational mobility skills. The comprehensiveness of these career needs challenges the boundaries of career counseling and frequently causes it to overlap with personal counseling.

The turbulence in the occupational structure and in the labor market that now accompanies the growth of the global economy suggests new markets or new constituencies for career counseling. The future likelihood is that new markets will unfold for career counseling via the Internet and other advanced technology. Although one can argue that such a circumstance is now a reality, the fact is that the current approaches to providing career counseling on the Internet are still prototypical and relatively limited. As more and more persons engage in education and career exploration online, their need for career counseling will rapidly follow and will lead to the development of new models of synchronous and asynchronous career counseling.

In addition to the new constituencies for career counseling that will emerge in new markets online, there will be other new constituencies for career counseling. As a function of the global economy, the flow of immigrants and "world workers" (i.e., persons who will work transnationally) will increase. Many of these persons will experience assimilation stress, cultural shock, and confusion about work norms and behavioral expectations that will ultimately be reflected in the need for career counseling.

External Threats to Career Counseling

A potential external threat is the reality that career counseling in the United States is provided by many persons in many settings. School counselors, community college and university career counselors and academic advisers, employment counselors, counselors in employee assistance programs, rehabilitation counselors, counseling and clinical psychologists, and other helping professionals all provide career counseling in organizations and private practice, although with different purposes and intensity. These persons differ in training and knowledge about career counseling and in the approaches to career counseling that they use. It is difficult to know which of these categories of counselors do career counseling better than the others, because there are essentially no empirical studies that compare the quality of career counseling or the outcomes achieved by different categories of persons who provide career counseling services. At the least, one can assume that the clients seeking career counseling are distributed across these categories of counselors, but what clients obtain may be uneven because of differences in legislative authority and the degree to which the provision of career counseling is central in the roles of some counselors and not in others, as well as the differences in training for career counseling that exist among these practitioners. With some exceptions, most of these groups of counselors function independently of career counselors in other settings. The likelihood is that this diffusion of career counseling--and the likely unevenness in approach--often tends to emphasize and incorporate older models of career counseling, thus diluting the effects of new models of career counseling. The result may be that the public image of career counseling is therefore either quite varied or frozen in images of simple models.

One of the indirect external threats is the need for coordination of career counseling policy and legislation at the national and state levels. Career counselors should take the lead in advocating for career counseling issues to policy makers at all levels. Currently, there is no office in the U.S. Congress or in the federal government with responsibility for monitoring legislative initiatives that deal with career counseling. Without such knowledge, it is difficult to coordinate and make coherent legislation or to examine the interaction of proposed new legislation with legislation that is already in place. The lack of coherence and integration of the policies and legislation that provide for career counseling at governmental levels reflects what has been called an uncoordinated mosaic of efforts (Herr, 1991) rather than an integrated agenda of legislative initiatives directed to addressing career needs of populations across settings and across the life span. Without such coordination, there is potential unevenness from state to state and constituency to constituency in the career services that are available. As suggested previously, speaking only to the federal level at the moment, there are many separate federal departments (e.g., Defense, Education, Health and Human Services, Labor). Each of these departments tends to have its own constituencies and the ability, acting independently, to recommend policies and levels of funding to the Congress for conversion into legislation. Virtually all federal departments have some entitlement to support career counseling for specific subsets of the population: children, youths, adults, older individuals, the economically disadvantaged, the unemployed, military veterans, migrant workers, exoffenders, persons with disabilities. Because separate policies originate in different governmental agencies, they sometimes divide rather than make coherent the provision of career counseling services. As a result, several policies or pieces of legislation may be directed to the same population for different purposes, provided by different practitioners, in different settings, and using different terms for or models of the meaning of career counseling. Although multiple practitioners may be providing career counseling services that are supported by federal legislation, these practitioners--the school counselor, the employment counselor, the rehabilitation counselor, the counselor in the Veterans Administration, and so on--working in different settings may be practicing in isolation, unaware of other practitioners in their community who are receiving support for the provision of career counseling for similar purposes for populations that they all serve. To the degree that such situations exist, they tend to limit the effective deployment of persons providing career counseling and to limit the acknowledgment and use of the professional support and referral of specialists in career counseling who are employed in other settings. Embedded in such conditions is the possibility that as legislation supporting career counseling originates in separate federal or state agencies, it is quite likely that new programs or services are authorized and implemented without attention to the availability of the services that are already in place or to the different standards for the professional preparation and continuing education of those providing the services.

To the degree that career counseling practitioners, or their administrators, are not fully informed about the full repertoire of public policies and legislation supporting career counseling and the language, purposes, and interventions provided, it is possible that counselors in different settings will implement career counseling quite differently and stereotype its processes and content (e.g., "three sessions and a cloud of dust," "test 'em and tell 'em") and in this sense freeze in time conceptions of career counseling that do not acknowledge that models of career counseling are dynamic and growing in their ability to be tailored to clients' career needs.

Analysis of Strategic Issues Facing Career Counseling

This brief chronicle of the internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as the external opportunities and threats, embedded in public policy and legislation in career counseling suggests several possible strategic issues facing career counseling.

Strengths that should be built on as strategic issues for career counseling are the large, and growing, demand for career counseling across the life span by persons in educational institutions, workplaces, and community settings who have a need for career exploration and planning at points of decision and transition, who have concerns about induction and adjustment to the workplace, and who need assistance in considering exit from the workplace. Where public policy and legislation support the provision of career counseling to persons in these demand categories, resources should be used to build tailored, effective, and evidence-based responses to the career needs that are represented. When there are voids in legislative provisions that affect particular subpopulations, career counseling professionals should advocate for amended policies and legislation.

If public policy and legislation are to be fully effective in supporting career counseling with continuity and comprehensiveness, expectations about performance indicators and evaluation procedures must be clarified. It is currently difficult to assess the impact of government policy initiatives or the configuration of career counseling interventions they promote, in part because much of the research associated with public policy and legislation has been descriptive--often case studies of programs that are evaluated by panels of government-sponsored experts as to the programs' efficacy, rather than being assessed by experimental, replicable research designs. In a sense, the research spawned by public policy and legislative initiatives and the research conducted in the field of career counseling by theorists and researchers tend to be on parallel, rather than intersecting, pathways. Professionals in career counseling who advocate for public policy and legislation must infuse such deliberations with available summaries of evidence-based research that can more fully inform the objectives and expectations of public policy and legislation. In this sense, policy makers and professional specialists in career counseling need to be seen more clearly as collaborators who are cooperatively seeking the most credible outcomes of career counseling.

Current public policy often assumes that expected outcomes are achieved, without testing this assumption. An excellent illustration of this point is the importance of cost-benefit information as an emerging strategic issue. Over the past decade or so, all helping professions have been under increased scrutiny about their costs and their benefits. Policy makers; legislators; and administrators in schools, universities, corporations, communities, and state and federal government have increasingly raised questions about what they are receiving when they support career counseling through public policy and legislation. Such questions include the benefits of career counseling--to whom, in short- and long-range results, as related to the costs of such positions. During the same time period, the career counseling profession has become increasingly accomplished in generating and presenting research evidence that career counseling is effective for many populations and purposes and is seen as useful by consumers. However, from an accountability standpoint, in spite of an enlarging and important research base, researchers and theorists in career counseling typically have not taken the next step of translating the available research findings into cost-benefit analyses. Even though one could make the oversimplified observation that every positive or negative correlation between a particular career intervention and a desired outcome carries with it economic costs and economic benefits, professionals in career counseling have not systematically focused on these issues. In essence, they have not examined the ratio of costs of providing career counseling to various populations for specific purposes compared with the economic and the social benefits derived from such services. Nor have analyses accrued that report the benefits of career counseling to individuals, the direct consumers of such services, as well as to the secondary beneficiaries of such services (e.g., educational institutions, employers, governments, or society at large). Given limited national resources, an economic downturn, and rising demands for such resources, a strategic issue for the future will likely involve the development of matrices that depict the effectiveness of different treatments of different career problems experienced by individuals in different subgroups and what the costs of such interventions are. Such comparative approaches to the benefits and costs of career counseling will likely need to be cast against immediate, medium-, and long-term outcomes as ways to deploy practitioners and models of career counseling and other interventions in the most cost-effective ways.

Concentrating on the development of cost-benefit analyses can be considered a strategic opportunity in an era of growing expectations for public accountability. To do so, however, will at a minimum require clarity about the level and kind of evidence that policy makers and administrators want about the benefits of career counseling and related interventions and how they view their return on investment for supporting such processes; will require coordinated efforts across populations and settings where career counseling has been implemented to design studies that focus on the relative effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, and cost-benefit of different models of career counseling (Bysshe, Hughes, & Bowes, 2002); and will require the development of a national research database that synthesizes research findings about the effectiveness of different models of career counseling and related career interventions and about the costs and benefits of such interventions and of a clearinghouse that disseminates these findings (Kileen, White, & Watts, 1992; Swisher, 2001).

A Vision for Career Counseling in the Next Decade

The strategic issues facing career counseling suggest that the next decade will further extend the continuum of emphases and specific interventions that will be subsumed under the term career counseling. The demand for career counseling will expand as unemployment rates rise, as more workers are part-time, and as the traditional conception of careers is modified, placing more responsibility on individuals to be their own career managers. Public policy and legislation will continue to be vital sources of support and reality checks on the views of career counseling held by policy makers. Information about voids in legislation and about the understanding of career counseling by policy makers will serve as the bases for advocacy on the focus and coverage of public policy and legislation in career counseling by theorists and researchers. Furthermore, the next decade will increasingly pose new ethical and substantive challenges to career counseling to address new constituents who prefer to engage in career development activities online, using computer systems and the Internet. Finally, research models addressed to career counseling will need to incorporate cost-benefit analyses as extensions of empirical studies of the outcomes of career counseling.

References

Bysshe, S., Hughes, D., & Bowes, L. (2002). The economic benefits of career guidance. A review of current evidence [Occasional paper]. Derby, England: The University of Derby, The Centre for Guidance Studies.

Herr, E. L. (1991). Multiple agendas in a changing society: Policy challenges confronting career guidance in the U.S.A. British Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 19, 267-282.

Herr, E. L. (1996). Perspectives on ecological context, social policy, and career guidance. The Career Development Quarterly, 45, 5-19.

Herr, E. L. (2000, June). Working in America: The implications for theory and practice of the Fourth Gallup/NCDA Poll. Paper presented at the ninth National Career Development Conference, Pittsburgh, PA.

Kileen, J., White, M., & Watts, A. G. (1992). The economic value of career guidance. London: Policy Studies Institute, Department of Education and Employment.

Swisher, J. D. (2001). The costs, cost-effectiveness, and cost-benefit of school and community counseling services. In D. C. Locke, J. Myers, & E. L. Herr (Eds.), The handbook of counseling (pp. 669-680). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Edwin L. Herr, Department of Counselor Education, Counseling Psychology, and Rehabilitation Services, College of Education, The Pennsylvania State University.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Edwin L. Herr, The Pennsylvania State University, 304 CEDAR Building, University Park, PA 16802 (e-mail: [e-mail]).