Career Counseling This Analysis of Term Paper

From the list of personal dimensions of development produced by the Association for Multicultural Counseling and Development (Arredondo et al., 1996), gender is the dimension most neglected or ignored, in spite of the fact that gender intersects with all other dimensions across cultures (see Hansen, Gama, & Harkins, 2002).

Whether internal or external, one major weakness is the need to motivate more counselor educators to value career counseling and to be excited enough to learn contemporary approaches and methods, including qualitative methods of research (Gama, 1992). The approved position paper of the NCDA/ACES Commission on Preparing Counselors for Career Development in the 21st Century offers several recommendations available to counselor educators and practitioners (Hansen & Associates, 2001). The position paper, the joint effort of 12 career counseling leaders and counselor educators, can be found on the NCDA Web site at www.ncda.org.Founded in 1998, the commission is continuing its work, developing and sharing new methods, media, and effective practices. The pace of change with regard to emerging theories and methods has tended to be slow. Such new theories as constructivism and topics such as spirituality and work have also tended to be slow in being implemented. Although many adults, in particular, want more wholeness in their lives, few career counselors are trained in this mode, and the fragmented approaches of the past continue to dominate the field.

One internal weakness is the failure of the profession to give adequate attention to the fact that career counseling arises out of a very strong democratic tradition.As is well-known, Frank Parsons, the father of vocational guidance, was a humanitarian reformer who developed a process to help immigrants find jobs in a new industrial society. In the postmodern world of 2000, career counselors have lost some of that advocacy and activist zeal. If career counselors could help individuals and groups have a greater freedom of choice from a wider range of options that use their many talents, we as a profession could make tremendous progress toward helping to lift people out of poverty and come closer to some of the democratic values on which this society is based (e.g., freedom of choice, social equality, privacy, dignity, and respect for the individual). Freedom of choice is a basic tenet of career counseling and guidance; it derives from U.S. values to help people develop their talents over the life span to bring satisfaction to themselves and benefit to society or community. An assumption is that the ability to make wise choices and decisions will help people develop their potential and live more satisfying lives. With the increase of new immigrants, refugees, and other diverse populations in the United States, the task of serving diverse clients may be even more difficult, especially with populations that may not under stand or be committed to democratic values and whose values may be antithetical to basic values of a democratic society (e.g., groups that practice or tolerate female genital mutilation, wife abuse, sale of girls and women for marriage or prostitution, sexual slavery, denial.....