The Future of Career Counseling as an Instrument of Public Policy

Since the early 20th century, career counseling has been the 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 migrate 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). …