Individualized Career Counseling Outcome Assessment: A Case Study Using the Personal Questionnaire

Abstract

Career counseling has evolved to include practices that attribute a central importance to context variables and meaning‐making processes. Accordingly, there is a need for client assessment tools that consider the subjectivity and cultural specificity of clients and the interface between their work and life concerns. The idiographic assessment of outcomes, which uses individualized measures that involve clients in the definition of person‐specific items, is a promising approach. This article explores the use of the Personal Questionnaire (PQ) as an individualized outcome measure that complements standardized outcome career measures. The authors identify the factors leading to the emergence of idiographic assessment in career counseling, review existing research relevant to the need for the PQ, and present a case study of career construction counseling that illustrates how the PQ helps counselors to obtain sensitive and contextualized assessments of career counseling outcomes, guides interventions, and facilitates meaning making.

Attending to Clients' Psychological Needs During Career Construction Counseling

“…This task is facilitated by using the Career Construction Interview (Savickas, 2019), a semistructured sequence of questions in which counselors inquire about five topics to evoke life episodes: (a) childhood role models to explore clients' values; (b) favorite TV shows, magazines, and websites to assess manifest interests; (c) current favorite story from a book or movie to facilitate narrative elaboration of plots and themes that can be of help in understanding clients' intuition about possible solutions; (d) favorite motto or saying to articulate next moves in enacting a solution; and (e) early recollections to explore clients' perspectives on, preoccupations with, and needs regarding their current career issues (Savickas, 2019). The evocation of clients' self‐constructing episodes, as well as the exploration of career constructs emerging throughout this process, allows clients to continue the process of distancing from career problems, that is, to solve the third counseling task of this phase (Cardoso et al, 2019).…”

“…In this process, clients elaborate on life themes, allowing them to link life episodes into a continuous and coherent career story. This process eases the resolution of the next counseling tasks of this phase: moving to a new perspective and making career plans (Cardoso et al, 2019).…”

“…In Phase 3, counseling tasks involve the revision of actions intended to implement career plans, facilitating clients' reconceptualization of their changes, and encouraging action in the real world. CCC concludes as clients consolidate their transformation through a metareflexive process in which they elaborate on the changes achieved and the factors underpinning such changes (Cardoso et al, 2019).…”

The Challenges of Life Design Counseling in the Times of the Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19)

“…If individuals or groups cannot get targeted LDC, they will encounter many difficulties, such as lack of vocational certainty, difficulty in re-employment after unemployment, and reduced quality of life (Maree et al, 2018a ; Cardoso and Sales, 2019 ). On the contrary, individuals would benefit greatly if targeted LDC was made available to those in need.…”

Innovative Moments in Career Construction Counseling: Proposal for an Integrative Model

“…We illustrate our proposal of a systematic sequence of client change across the three CCC phases with vignettes from the three previously described cases: Michael (Cardoso et al, ), Ryan (Cardoso et al, ), and Vanda (Cardoso et al, ). We also selected two vignettes from the cases of Maria (Cardoso, ) and Sofia (Cardoso & Sales, ), because, although they are not intensively analyzed from the IMs perspective, they fit our proposal and can illustrate more clearly the sequence of client change during CCC.…”