Abstract. This paper examines the emerging trends in counselling, particularly career counselling, in relation to education, career and employment. It deals with the counselling issues associated with each of these emphases and with the comprehensive populations for whom education, career, and employment content may be different but important in various settings: schools, universities, business and industry, community. Particularly important are the counselling emphases associated with unemployment, underemployment, career and job change, and persons with disabilities. Major attention is given to emerging perspectives on the relationship of career counselling to mental health, stress and anger management, and behavioural health.
Emerging trends in career counsellingIt is a great privilege to provide this theme paper on the broad topic of counselling with respect to educational, career, and employment concerns. If there is a topic which clearly unites counsellors internationally, it is the growing importance of counselling, and more specifically career counselling, as a major sociopolitical instrument in national development plans and the concern of these plans for educational, career and employment issues, As individual nations become increasingly interdependent players in what is clearly becoming a global economy, they share concerns about strategies to develop functionally literate and productive work forces; mechanisms to help youth make the transition from school to work and to distribute persons among available occupations; procedures to help persons make the adjustment to work effectively and obtain job satisfaction; plans to deal with high rates of youth unemployment and/or rapidly aging work forces; and methods by which employers and work settings can be increasingly attentive to the needs of employees, seeing them in holistic rather than in fragmented ways 1. These issues and related ones are played out differently within nations at 1 Selected passages from this speech which was delivered in 1988 have been subsequently published in Career Guidance Through the Lifespan: ~,stematic Approaches (Herr and Cramer, 1992). 256 different levels of industrial development or of different political perspectives, but they are substantive concerns worldwide.In essence, the international reasons for and approaches to career counselling and guidance form a mosaic. Since career counselling and guidance are shaped by the economic conditions and political belief systems that prevail in any nation, differences across nations in these characteristics will yield significant variations in the shape and substance of career counselling and guidance, in who provides such services, in who should receive such services, and in their location (e.g., schools, universities, ministries of labor, workplaces). These national differences in the raison d'etre for counselling, career counselling or career guidance extend to the social and political purposes to be served by such processes: as sources of human capital distribution or of inform...