Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION: AN INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF CAREER GUIDANCE

A key question is “why an international handbook”? Indeed there are a large number of handbooks on career guidance available all over the world. They exist in different languages and are updated regularly. In general, however, most of these handbooks are strongly related to one country or to one cultural or linguistic region (e.g., Brown, 2003; Herr, Cramer, & Niles, 2004). Accordingly they are written from a specific point of view and based upon academic developments, guidance practice and societal situations specific to the readers they target. Beyond any doubt, it is an obvious and appropriate choice but it has one disadvantage. The readership will not be confronted with what is going on in the rest of the world and the global diversity in the field of guidance. Accordingly it is a disadvantage in view of an increasing globalisation and the newly required competencies for professionals. Knowing more about the world-wide diversity will help to uncover better practice examples that may be of use for some specific clients or yield new ideas to adapt existing approaches. It also can help to grasp the new developments in the required competencies for career guidance professionals or to acquire a better understanding of them. Some of these well known handbooks (e.g., Guichard & Huteau, 2006) respond to this disadvantage and include references to research results, theory development and practice in other countries, mainly the USA. This is certainly an improvement from a global point of view but does it solve the shortcoming? This may solve it to the extent that the handbook reflects on the differences between the situation of the area where the handbook originates and the situation from which the other theories or examples were taken and the impact on the applicability of these foreign models. The major issue in this perspective is the transferability of theories, research results, measurement instruments and guidance practice from one region to another. For several years a major debate has been opened on the cross-cultural applicability of theories (see, e.g., Leong, 1995). The same is true for instrument development that was, for example extensively debated at the International Association for