Copyright American Psychological Association

The World of Work

and Career Interventions

W ork in the 21st century leaves people feeling anxious and insecure.
Societal changes affecting employment continue to set an increas-
ing number of workers adrift as they endeavor to chart their futures, shape
their identities, and maintain relationships. During the first decade of the
21st century, Western societies experienced a break with previous forms
of jobs and occupations. Rapid advances in information technology and
opening of world markets produced a globalization that is reshaping
forms of employment and transforming ways of living. Furthermore,
emerging technologies and robotics place 47% of total United States
employees at high risk of having their jobs automated within 20 years (Frey
& Osborne, 2017). Previously, the stable employment and secure orga-
nizations of the 20th century offered a solid foundation on which to
build a life. Such stability and security have now given way to a liquid life

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0000105-001
Career Counseling, Second Edition, by M. L. Savickas
Copyright © 2019 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

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(Bauman, 2013) of new beginnings in which people cannot solidify their

positions or chart a course into the future. The new social arrangement
of flexible work and fluid organizations in liquid societies continues to
distress many people.

THE NEW WORLD OF WORK

The digital revolution requires that organizations become smaller,
smarter, and swifter in responding to market conditions. This has been
accomplished by reducing layers of decision making and removing barriers
between functional units to produce what Jack Welch (1992), then presi-
dent of General Electric, called a “boundaryless” organization. Changing
the shape of organizations changes the shape of careers. The employee
in a postmodern, 21st-century organization becomes unbounded and
ungrounded. Now organizations mix standard jobs with nonstandard
assignments. Using temporary assignments rather than permanent jobs
creates “jobless” work. This “dejobbing” shapes work to begin as a project
and end with a product. A prime example of work as a project is produc-
ing a motion picture. For that project, the producers assemble a large
team of specialists with diverse skills to work for a set period of time to
make a movie. When the movie wraps, the team disassembles, with each
member seeking employment on a new project.
Although full-time employment remains a dominant form of work
and long-term careers still exist, temporary and part-time employment
are increasingly commonplace following the flattening of organizational
hierarchies. In addition, of the standard jobs started by workers between
the ages of 18 and 24, 69% ended in less than a year and 93% ended in
fewer than 5 years. This was true not only for emerging adults but also for
those adults who in previous times had stabilized in jobs and families. Of
jobs started by 40- to 48-year-olds, 32% ended in less than a year and 69%
ended in fewer than 5 years (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015). Do note
that careers bounded by bureaucratic organizations still exist for many
people. Nevertheless, we have entered the age of insecure workers who
are no longer bounded by a single organization nor grounded in the same

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job for 3 decades. The new employment market includes a “gig economy”
that calls for viewing career not as a lifetime commitment to one employer
but as selling services and skills to a series of employers who need projects
completed.

INSECURE WORKERS
Jobless work and automation have produced “insecure workers,” espe-
cially those peripheral and external employees who perform tempo-
rary assignments (Wilkinson & Johnstone, 2016). Full-time company
employees with permanent contracts are designated core employees. In
contrast to core employees who compose about half of the workforce,
peripheral and external workers perform short-term projects rather than
long-term jobs Part-time company employees with flexible work arrange-
ments are termed peripheral employees and compose about 40% of the
workforce. And employees who do not work directly for a company but
rather for an outside contractor or consultant are termed external workers.
Peripheral and external workers have also been called temporary, contin-
gent, casual, contract, freelance, part-time, atypical, adjunct, consultant, and
self-employed. Peripheral and external employment do not provide the
benefits of a traditional, standard job enjoyed by core workers. For all
three types of insecure workers, matters once taken for granted such as
job security, health insurance, and pensions have become problematic.
Furthermore, multiple career transitions and periodic geographic dis-
location pose new questions about work lives—most especially, how may
individuals negotiate a lifetime of job changes without losing their social
identity and sense of self? The 20th century metanarrative of an organiza-
tional career no longer answers this question.

CAREERS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Twentieth-century organizations provided a metanarrative for the life
course, a career story with coherence and continuity. The metanarra-
tive clearly outlined trajectories with stable commitments around which

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individuals planned their lives. The 21st-century organizational narrative

about career is ambiguous and discontinuous, so individuals cannot make
life plans around institutional commitments (Kalleberg, 2013). Their
compass for action must point to possibilities in a liquid society with fluid
boundaries rather than predictions in a stable society with solid boundar-
ies. Because boundaryless organizations provide individuals with so little
career structure, individuals now must take more responsibility for man-
aging their own work lives. Rather than living a narrative conferred by a
corporation, people must author their own career stories.
This loss of stable structures and predictable trajectories has led to
the “individualization of the life course” (Beck, 2002). The individualism
of postmodern life emerged because the work role no longer serves as the
axis around which other roles revolve. Nonstandard work produces non-
standard lives. Individuals cannot securely identify their place in the world
with the work they perform. Individualization of the life course calls for
individuals to navigate transitions by using what has been referred to as
biographicity (Illeris, 2017), which is the self-referential process by which
individuals integrate new and sometimes puzzling experiences into their
biographies. This identity work involves narrative construction and revi-
sion to cope with the uncertainties provoked by life tasks, transitions, and
traumas. Identity work includes the interpretative activities of “forming,
repairing, maintaining, strengthening and revising the constructions that
are productive of a sense of coherence and distinctiveness” (Sveningsson
& Alvesson, 2003, p. 1165).
Protean and boundaryless are two metaphors that symbolize the new
career, one now authored by the person rather than the organization.
Realizing that the individual rather than the institution shapes a 21st-
century career, Douglas Hall in 1996 formulated the concept of a protean
career as flexible, versatile, and adaptive. Hall defined a protean career as
self-directed and shaped by intrinsic rather than extrinsic values. In the
pursuit of self-directed values, the individual uses the two metacompe-
tencies of identity and adaptability to chart a course through the work
terrain; together, the metacompetencies give individuals a sense of when
it is time to change and the capacity to change (Hall, Yip, & Doiron,
2018). Hall’s conceptualization of the protean career, which concentrates

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on inner psychological variables, finds a complement in Arthur’s (2014)

conceptualization in 1994 of a boundaryless career. Rather than stability
tied to one firm, an unbounded career consists of a sequence of posi-
tions characterized by physical and psychological mobility across organi-
zations. Individuals with greater career competencies, including identity
and adaptability, may find more opportunities for mobility.
It is increasingly difficult to comprehend careers with theories based
on stability rather than mobility. While the form of career changes from
commitment to flexibility, so too must the conceptual models of careers
and work lives. Existing career theories do not adequately account for the
individualization of the life course in the rapidly changing occupational
structure, nor do they address the needs of peripheral and external workers.
Even for core workers, there are fewer identifiable and predictable career
trajectories because many organizations have dissolved established paths
and traditional scripts. Rather than developing a stable life based on secure
employment, most workers today must maintain flexible employability
through lifelong learning or, as some say, “learn for a living.” Rather than
developing a career by making plans that plant them in a solid context,
they must manage a career by noticing possibilities in a liquid environment.
New conceptual models of vocational behavior across the lifespan must be
accompanied by career counseling methods that help individuals construct
and use their life stories to order their careers and give meaning to their
choices. Theories of career and techniques of career counseling must evolve,
as they always have, to better assist workers throughout the world adapt to
liquid societies, gig economies, and flexible organizations. The present book
describes methods of career construction counseling based on the concep-
tual model of life designing. Before beginning to examine career construc-
tion counseling in detail, the following section defines counseling and how
career counseling has evolved over the last century.

CAREER THEORY AND COUNSELING DISCOURSE

Career theory as a conceptual model differs from career counseling dis-
course as practice methods (Savickas & Savickas, 2017). The APA Diction-
ary of Psychology, Second Edition, defines theory as “a principle or body

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of interrelated principles that purports to explain or predict a number

of interrelated phenomena” (VandenBos, 2015, p. 1081). In vocational
psychology, a career theory is a set of principles used to explain vocational
behavior and its development. For the present book, the three most per-
tinent theories are Holland’s (1997) person–environment theory, Super’s
(1957) career development theory, and Savickas’s (2013) career construc-
tion theory.
Practitioners have applied these career theories to specify the goals of
career counseling along with models, methods, and materials to accom-
plish these goals. While some would refer to these conceptual models and
techniques as career counseling theories, others prefer to refer to them as
discourses. Career counseling models are better called discourses rather
than theories because the models focus on practice-based knowledge and
observable outcomes not measurement, prediction, and experimentation.
Thus, career counseling models are disciplinary discourses that provide
language and definitions for writing and speaking about career practices,
paradigms for thinking about client concerns, and methods for help-
ing clients resolve their concerns. Different discourses understand careers
from distinct perspectives or philosophies; such as logical positivism for
person–environment fit, humanism for career development, and social con-
structionism for career construction. What the conceptual models share in
common is that each one prescribes particular counseling methods.
The American Counseling Association defined counseling as “a pro-
fessional relationship that empowers diverse individuals, families, and
groups to accomplish mental health, wellness, education, and career goals”
(Kaplan, Tarvydas, & Gladding, 2014, p. 368). The Association encour-
aged particular specialties to elaborate this basic framework by adding a
statement about their area of focus. From my perspective, this elaboration
would simply adopt Super’s (1951) definition of career counseling as
the process of helping a person to develop and accept an integrated
and adequate picture of himself [or herself] and of his [or her] role
in world of work, to test this concept against reality, and to convert
it into reality, with satisfaction to himself [or herself] and benefit to
society. (p. 92)

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Today, career practitioners may use the three different philosophical

perspectives of positivism, humanism, and constructionism to substanti-
ate counseling discourses and structure patterns of practice as well as to
continue to develop these discourses through a process of evolution.

EVOLUTION OF CAREER COUNSELING

During the last 100 years, the counseling profession has evolved three
distinct conceptual models to direct how they conduct career counseling:
guiding, developing, and constructing (Savickas, 2015). These three para-
digms both define career counseling as a scientific discipline and structure
patterns of practice that address predominant career problems during a
particular time period (Kuhn, 1996). Early in the 20th century, the first
scientific model for career intervention emerged to address a question
asked by Western societies as they coped with industrialization, urbaniza-
tion, and immigration: How may workers be efficiently matched to fitting
work? The answer to this question came in Parsons’s use of the individual-
differences paradigm (Hollingsworth, 1916) to match a person’s abilities
and interests to an occupation’s requirements and rewards. In first stating
the matching method, Parsons (1909) outlined three steps (a) study and
understand the self, (b) get information about occupations and oppor-
tunities, and (c) reason correctly about the relations of these two groups
of facts. During the next 5 decades, the individual differences model and
Parsons’s matching method defined the field of counseling. After World
War II, practitioners elaborated Parsons’s method for matching people to
positions into the trait-and-factor method (Guilford, 1948) and eventu-
ally the person–environment fit method (Holland, 1997). Practitioners
apply the individual difference model when they use the methods of voca-
tional guidance to help clients (a) enhance self-knowledge, (b) increase
occupational information, and (c) match themselves to fitting occupa-
tions. A more recent application of the matching model has emerged in
higher education as student personnel workers expanded the scope of
traditional academic advising to guide students through the educational
and vocational decision-making process. Gordon (2006) defined career
advising as a process that “helps students understand how their personal

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interests, abilities, and values might predict success in the academic and
career fields they are considering and how to form their academic and
career goals accordingly” (p. 12).
Following World War II, the United States experienced the rise of sub-
urban, middle-class individuals employed by hierarchical bureaucracies
located in vertical skyscrapers. Consequently, in the middle of the 20th cen-
tury a theory of vocational development emerged to address the question
of how to climb career ladders in hierarchical professions and bureaucratic
organizations. To complement the matching model’s focus on the content
of career choices Super (1957) applied the life-cycle paradigm (Bühler, 1933)
to psychosocial education about the process of coping with a progressive
sequence of career stages and developmental tasks. Super’s counseling
method concentrates on helping clients to choose and adjust to occupa-
tions, not on which occupational choices to make. Practitioners apply the
life-cycle model when they use the methods of career development educa-
tion to help students and career coaching to help adults (a) envision the
future to plan ahead; (b) learn about imminent developmental tasks; and
(c) rehearse the attitudes, beliefs, and competencies needed to master those
tasks. The counseling methods of vocational guidance and career education
remain useful today when considering how to match workers to occupa-
tions and how to develop careers within bureaucratic organizations.
As corporations changed shape at the dawn of the 21st century, the
nexus of career moved from the organization to the individual. Rather
than develop a career within a stable organization, the digital revolution
requires that individuals manage their own careers. This shift in respon-
sibility from the organization to the individual posed the new question of
how individuals may negotiate a lifetime of job changes. The life-design
paradigm (Savickas et al., 2009) emerged as one answer to this question
about individualization of the life-course. It moved career counseling
to a new vantage point from which to view how insecure workers with
precarious employment design their lives. The conceptual model of life
designing concentrates on how individuals bridge transitions through
autobiographical reasoning to further self-making, identity shaping, and
career constructing (Savickas, 2012). Practitioners apply the life-design

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conceptual model when they use the method of career construction dia-
logues to prompt clients to (a) construct careers through small stories,
(b) deconstruct and reconstruct these stories into an identity narrative or
life portrait, and (c) coconstruct intentions that extend that portrait to the
next action episode in the real world.
The paradigms of individual differences, life cycle, and life design
each structure a distinct pattern of practice: Vocational guidance matches
to an occupation, psychosocial education with students and coaching
with adults develops a career, and constructing designs a life. To suc-
cinctly explain the three counseling methods of guiding, developing, and
constructing, Figure 1.1 outlines each fundamental pattern. Vocational
guidance, from the objective perspective of individual differences, views

CAREER
COUNSELING

GUIDING DEVELOPING CONSTRUCTING

Actor Agent Author

Scores Stages Stories

Traits Tasks Themes

Resemblance Readiness Reflexivity

Object Subject Project

Figure 1.1

Comparison of counseling methods for guiding, developing, and constructing.

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clients as actors who may be characterized by scores on traits and who

may be helped to match themselves to occupations that employ people
whom they resemble. Career education and coaching, from the subjec-
tive perspective of individual development, views clients as agents who
may be characterized by their life stage and readiness to engage appropri-
ate developmental tasks and who may be helped to learn new attitudes,
beliefs, and competencies that advance their careers. Career constructing,
from the project perspective of life design, views clients as authors who
may be characterized by autobiographical stories and who may be helped
to reflect on life themes with which to script their career transitions. The
three distinctions in Figure 1.1 are explained more fully in book chap-
ters: McAdams and Olson (2010) differentiated actor, agent, and author;
Savickas (2015) differentiated traits, tasks, and themes; and Savickas
(2011) differentiated object, subject, and project.
Depending upon a client’s needs, practitioners may provide different
career services: vocational guidance to identify occupational fit, career edu-
cation and coaching to foster vocational development, or career construc-
tion to design a work life. Each career intervention—whether it be guiding,
developing, or constructing—is valuable and effective for its intended pur-
pose. As practitioners select an intervention for a particular situation, they
answer anew the essential question first posed by Williamson and Bordin
(1941, p. 8): What method will produce what types of results with what
types of clients? The current book is about career construction. The remain-
der of this chapter explains why career construction counseling discourse
meets the needs of individuals preparing for and participating in the new
world of work forged by the digital revolution and the global economy.

A NEW PARADIGM
New theory cannot be just an addition to or extension of the old ideas. New
theories and counseling discourses must emerge from a new philosophy or
world view. The philosophy of positivism, replacing 19th-century roman-
ticism, provided a new perspective from which the individual-differences
paradigm emerged. Following World War II, the philosophy of humanism

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led to the life-cycle paradigm, which supplemented rather than replaced

the differences paradigm. The societal reorganization beginning late in the
20th century was accompanied by a philosophy of social constructionism
that provided a different perspective from which to envision careers and
elaborate new premises. For example, the humanistic idea of actualizing
an essential self that already exists within a person served career counseling
well during the second half of the 20th century. However, for careers in the
21st century, that idea may be replaced with the postmodern idea that an
essential self does not exist a priori; instead, constructing a self is an unfold-
ing life project. This view considers self to be a story, not a substance defined
by a list of traits. Needless to say, self-actualization and self-construction
offer fundamentally different perspectives on and prospects for counseling
methods.
Accordingly, career construction theory (Savickas, 2013), as a theory
or conceptual model, concentrates on the self as a social actor, motivated
agent, and autobiographical author. The theory concentrates on self-
construction through work and relationships. Well-being in knowledge
societies requires that individuals take possession of their lives by connect-
ing who they are to what they do. The conceptual model is accompanied
by a counseling discourse that concentrates on identity and adaptability
relative to vocational development tasks, occupational transitions, and
work traumas. Career construction counseling discourse responds to the
needs of today’s mobile workers who may feel anxious and angry as they
encounter a restructuring of occupations, transformation of the labor
force, and multicultural imperatives. In an uncertain world, accumulat-
ing skills and developing talents remains important, yet there is no sub-
stitute for a grounded sense of self. To provide counseling to individuals
that moves from fitting life into one’s work to fitting work into one’s life
requires constructionist interventions that deal with designing a life and
deciding how the work role serves that life. The new question is not what
do you want to be but rather how do you want to be?
To be clear, the ideas in this book emerge from a constructionist nar-
rative psychology, not from Holland’s (1997) positivist differential psy-
chology nor from Super’s (1990) humanistic developmental psychology.

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The foundational theories of vocational behavior articulated by Holland

and Super are neither true nor false; they substantiate a set of practices
crafted to organize the work of vocational guidance and career develop-
ment education. Because of their proven effectiveness, these theories and
their counseling methods remain essential in certain contexts and for par-
ticular goals. However, these established theories of vocational behavior
cannot be readily stretched to provide new counseling methods that meet
the needs of mobile workers in the flexible organizations of fluid societies.

OVERVIEW
Before presenting the constructionist career counseling discourse, Chap-
ter 2 examines the core concepts of self, identity, meaning, mastery, and
mattering. Chapter 3 explains how practitioners use narrative psychol-
ogy to help clients revise their career stories to increase comprehension,
coherence, and continuity. Chapter 4 describes the framework and ele-
ments of the Career Construction Interview during which practitioners
ask story-crafting questions, which scaffold career construction. The next
three chapters discuss systematic assessment of the data elicited during a
Career Construction Interview. Chapter 5 presents the assessment goals
that concentrate on extracting client preoccupations and problems from
the early recollections that sustain them. Chapter 6 describes how to
identify client solutions to the problems they pose in their early recollec-
tions. Chapter 7 discusses how to use career themes or central tensions to
extend clients’ occupational plots by identifying fitting settings, possible
scripts, and future scenarios. Having completed discussion of the career
construction assessment protocol, the final two chapters concentrate on
using the assessment results in career construction counseling. The penul-
timate chapter describes how practitioners compose an identity narrative
that reconstructs clients’ small stories into a large story that encourages
reflexivity to clarify choices. The final chapter explains the importance of
turning intention to action in the real world, first through exploration and
trial, then through deciding and doing. The chapter concludes with the
case of Raymond to illustrate career construction counseling. A glossary
defines specialized words used in the text.

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