Career Counseling (American Psychological Association Series, Vol. 2: Specific Treatments for Specific Populations)

In "Career Counseling", Dr. Mark Savickas demonstrates his narrative counseling method for helping clients to fit work into their lives, rather than fit themselves to jobs. This approach looks at a client's life as a "novel being written," and it emphasizes recurring themes that reveal how the client uses work to advance his or her life projects. The career construction theory of vocational development and career counseling, simply stated, holds that individuals build their careers by imposing meaning on vocational behavior. Personality types and developmental transitions deal with what a person has done and how they have done it. However, they do not address the question of why they do what they do, nor do they focus on the spirit that animates nor the values that guide the manifold choices and adjustments that build a career.