Essay Example on Career Counseling: A Comprehensive & Inclusive Approach

Introduction

The career experiences of individuals usually happen in a general and broad life context, and this sense, career is considered to be life, and life is a career. The reality needs a comprehensive and inclusive approach to the process of career counseling, especially lifestyle and career development (Bimrose & Hearne, 2012). Career counseling aims at assisting clients or employees with various issues that are associated with personal vocational aspects of life. The best way to tackle topics resolving careers is through the use of expert career counselors or organizational, professional career counselors. They will provide a client or employee with an appropriate diagnosis or prognosis.

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Individual lifestyle and career development are a lifelong process, and it started especially during birth. However, several factors influence personal career development; the elements are values, interests, personality, abilities, circumstances, and background. Generally, career counseling is a process that assists people in understanding themselves and the work to help them to make life, career, and educational decisions. Career development is more than deciding on a job to do after graduation or a major to pursue; it is a process that happens throughout a lifetime as individuals' changes and situations also change and throughout once life and career decisions have to be made. The paper discusses the lifestyle and career development in full detail and discusses the ways that it assists individuals with professional employment and personal counseling.

Overview of Lifestyle and Career Development

In general, lifestyle and career development take place over the lifetime of an individual and on the assumption that cultural, psychological, biological, and sociological factor influences individual career changes, career choice, and career withdrawal across the development stages and they are based on the theories of lifestyle and career development. In the lives of individuals, there are three stages of developmental career choices. The process is essential for the implementation of career plans. In organizations, it consists of various activities that are undertaken by the organization and individual employees to meet both job requirements and career aspirations (Bimrose & Hearne, 2012). The most important element of lifestyle and career development in an organization is that all employees must accept their responsibilities for their career development because all developments being done on their careers are self-development. The process depicts that both individual career planning and organizational career planning have to be integrated to formulate the appropriate strategies for development and design career paths that are mutually acceptable. From the perspective of a person, lifestyle and career development involves the planning of personal career and implementing personal career plans through training, work experiences, education, and job search and acquisition (Coetzee & Schreuder, 2014). On the other hand, from the perspective of an organization, it is the process in which employees are developed through movement, planned job assignments, placement, planned training activities, and growing the employees via assessment.

Components of Lifestyle and Career Development

Lifestyle and career development have been classified under two components, such as lifestyle and career planning and management.

Lifestyle and Career Planning

The component of lifestyle and career planning is the personal plan of an individual work-life. It comprises of evaluation of own interests and abilities, planning of the suitable developmental activities, setting of personal career goals, and examining the available career opportunities.

Lifestyle and career planning are mostly classified as a personal process. Still, organizations can help their employees by using supervisors and individual staff to offer career counseling services through activities like workshops. Organizations can provide such services to their employees to help them decide on developmental programs and evaluate themselves (Coetzee & Schreuder, 2014). Organizations can practice lifestyle ad career development also through making available a workbook for career planning to be utilized by interested employees; also, the planning can be done through giving out information concerning jobs that exist within and outside an organization.

Lifestyle and Career Management

The component is the subset of lifestyle and career development, and it mainly focuses on open activities and plans that are done by individuals and organizations. In this component, individuals career counselor or organizations matches the career plans of clients or employees with the personal or organizational needs, then implement appropriate programs to enable the accomplishment of the joint objectives between the personal or organizational needs and individual career plans.

In an organizational setting, the personnel department orchestrates the whole process, where the inventory and needs forecasts of an organizational human resource are related to the individual career plans. The career plans are designed by the management, where information concerning the openings of jobs is provided and making available career counseling to employees. In the process of creating career counseling for employees, the management assesses the potential and performance of employees through the support of both education and training programs on the job.

Stages of Lifestyle and Career Development

Exploration

The exploration is the first stage, and it represents the period of transition where a graduate comes from college to work. It happens immediately before the employment of the graduate. Exploration is the early period where the graduate is in his or her 20s, and it ends in the mid-20s, and it is a stage where personal preliminary choices are made. At this stage, individuals develop different expectations concerning the future of their careers, and the expectations made are mostly unrealistic. To realize a successful exploration, an individual who has just graduated has to try several potential fields as an effort is put on the formation of the patterns of dominant social relationships and attitudes toward work.

Establishment

It is the career development stage where an individual starts to seek a job, and it covers the first job assigned to an individual above the mid-20s. During this stage, an individual mostly commits mistakes, and there is an excellent opportunity for learning from various mistakes to assist in assuming higher responsibilities in the workplace. Individuals accept the challenges experienced at the job at this stage, and competency is developed in a speculating area. Creativity is formed at this stage, and an individual rotates into a new place for about three to five years. More so, at this stage, an individual is accepted by work colleagues, and the first failure or success is experienced in the real world. The stage is characterized by anxieties and uncertainties as individuals are trying hard to find the right job, which mostly takes time to recover.

Mid-Career Stage

The mid-career is the third stage of career development where performance might decrease, remain constant, or increase. Some employees at this stage maintain their performance, while others reach their goals as they achieve greater heights. Those whose performance remains constant are competent but not ambitious in their job. Employees at this stage try their best to update themselves technically, and they also develop skills to assist in coaching others. Most of them rotate or move to new jobs that need new skills. The stage is marked with the loss of productivity and interest at work as the job begins to deteriorate as the jobs given to employees are less conspicuous where others are discharged or demoted.

Late Career

The late-career stage is considered to be the most pleasant stage as employees during this stage do not try to improve performance or learn new skills. Instead, they depend or take advantage of their reputation, and they play the role of senior workers. Mostly, individuals who have reached this stage leave playing the power role and move to a consultation role.

Decline Stage

This is the final stage of an individual's career, and it ends at the period of retirement. It ends when an employee has provided service to an organization for decades, and throughout the career, there were success stories and continuous achievement.

The Theories of Lifestyle and Career Development

The theories of career development that are used in career counseling explains the ways of enhancing personal growth, overall job satisfaction, and improvement if career trajectory. The notable theories are the trait and factor theory by Frank Parson, the theory of vocational types by Holland, the social cognitive theory by Bandura, and the developmental self-concept theory by Super.Traits and Factor Theory

The theory entails actions such as assessing the personality traits of an individual seeking career counseling, evaluate the character traits required in the job, and measurement of the personality traits against the job traits.

Theory of Vocational Types

The theory examines the personality types, and it considers it as the central element in the development and choice of a career. Holland developed the theory on the basis that personality is the backbone of career choice with believing that the personal work satisfaction of an individual is linked to the similarities that exist between their job environment and personality (Patton & McMahon, 2014). The personality types presented by the theory are realistic personality, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, and conventional personality, all of them being used by a career counselor to decide on the best career choices to their clients.

Social Cognitive Theory

The theory holds that the behaviors and motives of individuals are based on their experience, which can be braked into categories. The experiences are the influence of self-efficacy or achievement beliefs on individuals, the influence of others' achievement and their actions on individuals, and the influence of the surrounding and uncontrolled factors on individuals (Patton & McMahon, 2014). In career development, the theory assists in explaining the way people set their pan for success in career development. People will have a good chance of attaining their career goals when they view their abilities positively and when they surround themselves with various career counselors who are positive.

Developmental Self-Concept Theory

The theory was developed based on the understanding that the personal view of individual changes. How individuals value the goals they set, and their career is shaped by both experience and time, resulting in changes. The theory considers the career to be a lifetime of an individual (Sharf, 2016). The theory identified five stages involved in career development; they are growth, exploration, establishment, maintenance, and decline. According to the theory, career satisfaction is found by people based on the way they view themselves at such stages of career development.

Importance of Lifestyle and Career Development

Lifestyle and career development are essential to professional employment and individuals with personal counseling. In general, lifestyle and career development impact both the social and economic well-being of individuals as is shapes them together with their families and communities. Career development drives life, education, and work (Van Tuijl et al., 2016). The proc...