CAREER COUNSELING IN HIGHER EDUCATION

The career services office supports the educational mission of a college or university by helping students to develop, evaluate, and pursue career goals. In the process, students acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to make lifelong career decisions. Career services offices accomplish these goals through career counseling and a range of programs and services designed to help students make the connection between the academic program and the workplace.

Career Counseling

Ideally, the career services office assists students throughout their stay at the institution, providing appropriate assistance at each stage of the student's career development. This process often begins with career counseling designed to help students develop the self-knowledge and awareness of options needed to select an academic major or a tentative career direction. Students are guided in thinking about their interests, values, competencies, and personal characteristics. Through conversation and exercises, students often discover previously unidentified interests.

Career counseling is frequently offered on a one-on-one basis, but at times this service is provided through group workshops, classes, or computerized guidance systems. When a student is asked to begin the exploration on a computer, an individual follow-up session with a counselor is generally encouraged. Career counseling often includes the use of standardized assessment instruments such as the Strong Interest Inventory, the Self-Directed Search, or other instruments designed to clarify career interests, values, personality, or self-identified skills.

As part of the career counseling process, students may be asked to research careers through either reading or interviews with professionals. Thus, a career resource library is an essential component of the career services office. These libraries generally include books on a wide range of career options as well as job search manuals and information on employers. Some information formerly provided in book form, such as directories of employers, is increasingly being delivered through the Internet.

New Trends

In the last decades of the twentieth century, the career services field began to place an increasing emphasis on experiential learning, the mixed bag of ways that students can connect classroom learning with experience in the world around them. The forms of experiential learning that most commonly fall under the career services umbrella are internships and cooperative education. Cooperative education is a full-time, paid work experience that generally occurs during a regular semester. Students receive credit for the work and do not take classes during that time. Internships are usually served part-time, concurrent with classes or during the summer or other school breaks, and may or may not be paid. In some institutions, internships and cooperative education are part of the academic program and may be handled by faculty departments. However, career services offices are becoming increasingly involved at a variety of levels. Some simply provide resources such as internship directories or online databases of available experiences; others develop internships, place students at the sites, and monitor their progress.

Another trend in career services is for colleges to engage alumni as career resources for students, thereby teaching students the skill of networking. Many colleges make alumni career resource databases available to interested students. These databases include employment and contact information on alumni who have volunteered to serve as mentors or otherwise assist students with career-related questions. Some colleges also coordinate events designed to connect students with alumni. These can include panels of alumni who speak at student events, dinners at which students are seated with alumni in relevant fields, or field trips through which students spend time shadowing relevant alumni.

The Job Search

A traditional function that remains an essential part of the career services role is helping students to develop job search skills. Career services counselors critique students' résumés and letters, provide booklets on résumé and employment letter writing, and teach résumé writing, job interviewing skills, and job search strategies in group sessions. In practice job interviews, students are videotaped so they can see themselves in action. Some career services offices involve alumni or employers in critiquing résumés, conducting practice interviews, or leading workshops. Many also offer sessions on related topics such as networking, professional dress, or the transition to the work place. Etiquette dinners, designed to train students in the etiquette needed for job interviews and professional dinners, have become popular events on many campuses.

Nearly all career services offices also help students connect with potential employers for postgraduate positions. This is handled through a variety of methods. In on-campus interview programs, employers are invited to spend a day or more on campus, interviewing student candidates. Students who make a positive impression are later invited to the employment site for more extensive interviews. Some campuses give students access to a large number of employers in one day by coordinating career fairs, at which employers are stationed at tables to screen candidates and give information about their job openings. A trend that became popular in the 1990s and continues to be widely used is the consortium job fair, in which a number of colleges collaborate to coordinate a large event for the students at all participating schools.

Additional strategies designed to connect students with employers are résumé mailing services, in which career services offices send batches of applicable résumés to requesting employers, and candidate matching databases, which do the same thing electronically. Some colleges disseminate booklets of student résumés or offer credential services, in which student's résumés, letters of recommendation, and other application documents are mailed to employers at the student's request. For students who choose to go to graduate school rather than enter the workforce, career services offices often offer services such as graduate school fairs and databases to assist students in identifying programs that meet their criteria.

The Impact Of Technology

The career services field has been strongly affected by the rise of the Internet in the 1990s. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, most career services offices had websites through which they offered career information and links to outside sites applicable to their student populations. Many also provided students with the option of scheduling appointments or campus interviews via the World Wide Web. Web-based databases, including employer databases, candidate résumé databases, internship databases, and job listing databases, are becoming increasingly common. In many cases, career services offices are forming partnerships with outside vendors to offer these services.

Many of the services named above are made available to alumni as well as current students, sometimes for a fee and sometimes at no charge. Some offices also offer fee-based services to community members.

See also: Academic Advising in Higher Education; Adjustment to College; College Student Retention; Internships in Higher Education; Student Services, subentries on Colleges and Universities, Community Colleges.

bibliography

Boles, Richard N., and Figler, Howard. 1999. The Career Counselor's Handbook. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press.

Brown, Duane, and Brooks, Linda. 1996. Career Choice and Development. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Hoeflin, Nancy M.; Anderson, Thad D.; and Timmins, Susan F., eds. 1998. Choices and Challenges: Job Search Strategies for Liberal Arts Students. Bloomington: Indiana University Custom Publishing and the Indiana University Career Development Center.

Kummerow, Jean, ed. 2000. New Directions in Career Planning and the Workplace. Palo Alto, CA: Davies-Black Publishing.

Luzzo, Darrell Anthony, ed. 2000. Career-Counseling of College Students: An Empirical Guide to Strategies that Work. Washington, DC: American Psychological Institute.

McDaniels, Carl, and Gysbers, Norman C. 1992. Counseling for Career Development: Theories, Resources and Practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

National Association of Colleges and Employers. 1998. Professional Standards for College and University Career Services, May 1998. Bethlehem, PA: National Association of Colleges and Employers.

Melissa K. Barnes

MARLAND, SIDNEY 1914-1992

U. s. commissioner of education; president,
the college board

Career Education

Sidney Marland, Nixon's commissioner of education from 1970 to 1973, came to be known as "the father of career education." His term began at a time of violent turmoil in U.S. education: more than four hundred campuses were on strike or disrupted after the invasion of Cambodia in May 1970; students had been shot dead by the National Guard at Kent State in Ohio and by the police at Jackson State in Mississippi; and an army research center had been blown up on campus in Madison, Wisconsin. It was Marland's responsibility to assume federal command for U.S. schooling, and he focused attention on the element of education that could reach the widest nonradical audience—careerism. Job-training, wage-earning, the transition to adulthood, writing, and reading became the goals of the federal education bureaucracy.

Marland's Political Skills

According to his memoirs, Career Education (1974), Marland was given a mandate by the Nixon administration to devote "immediate attention to increasing the place of Vocational education' …with no increase in the budget." The difficulties of achieving this goal with no money did not deter Marland, who quickly devised the name "career education" and planned the new program to relate "occupational aspects of human development to all levels of learning and all relevant parts of academic success." He then promoted model career-preparation programs in districts eager for a more focused curriculum and subsequently channeled federal money into those areas. His success at marketing reform was due to three things: a commanding communications strategy designed to publicize the idea; the creation of a curricular philosophy; and the creation of detailed grade-by-grade guidelines that would free school districts from having to invest in their own curriculum design. Marland's focused management style and his skill in marketing and implementing a federally devised educational plan in districts that had heretofore screamed "local control" gave him power that former commissioners had lacked.

Repudiation

Marland's premise that career education would radically improve U.S. education was not borne out by a Department of Health, Education, and Welfare study called Work in America (1973). Coordinated by manpower specialist James O'Toole, the report suggested that the vast oversupply of college-educated labor which existed at the time had caused the arbitrary raising of the credentials required for a job without raising the wages or the skill levels. The report also found an ineffective link between occupational education and future employment, with more than half of high schools' vocational graduates taking jobs unrelated to their training. Ironically, it was at this time that Marland left the federal position and assumed the presidency of the College Board. In 1975, when the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores of college-bound students reached their lowest level in twelve years, Marland became a driving force in a national movement to combat the erosion of students' math and literacy skills.

Marland and the SAT

Marland knew which educational issues commanded public attention. He seized on these "hot button" problems, and media coverage always followed. For example, when he appointed a panel "to do all that we can to investigate and interpret this phenomenon (the decline in scores) to the public," his pledge appeared on front pages of newspapers across the United States. Funds for the work of the panel came from the College Board and from Educational Testing Service (ETS), the producer of the SAT and other tests administered by the College Board, both of which had a political and financial interest in the problems. Essentially, the panel identified two phases in the long score decline. The first phase, up to 1970, was identified as a demographic decline because the numbers of the test-taking group were growing so rapidly, with more people from nontraditional, nonscholastic backgrounds going on to college in greater numbers. The next phase, however, was described as a cognitive falloff, because the composition of the test-taking group had stabilized and only about 20 percent of the decline could be attributed to the nontraditional students taking the SAT. Marland's appointed panel suggested that this second phase of the drop in scores could be attributed to causes such as more electives and fewer traditional courses, less homework, too much television, unstable family life, and the political disruptions of the prior decade. It was with the identification of these factors that Marland's strongest influence was felt in the schools. Opponents of school liberalization used them as part of the intellecutal basis of a strong backlash against curriculum innovations, driving a shift toward what came to be known as the back-to-basics curriculum.

Sources:

Sidney Marland, Career Education (New York, 1974);

Ira Shor, Culture Wars: School and Society in the Conservative Restoration 1969-1984 (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).