Many clients enter therapy seeking career guidance—and many career counselors find themselves supporting clients through deeper issues. While not often acknowledged, there is a real overlap between career counseling and psychotherapy. This video offers perspectives and interventions that both types of practitioners can utilize. Through interviews with career counselors and clients, segments of actual sessions with people experiencing a range of vocational issues, and an overview of the skills and techniques used, this video demonstrates how to give our clients the best of both worlds.
You’ll watch established counselors work with five clients in different life stages and with different goals. Bud is an ambitious high school graduate exploring options for his first career; Melanie is an inquisitive mid-career woman contemplating next steps after an unexpected layoff; Angela, a high school senior and dancer, wants to be a choreographer but is unclear about how to get there; Jeff is a sought-after college student evaluating which path to take; and Val is a middle-aged woman seeking guidance through a difficult transition into entrepreneurship.
In each case, the counselors employ field-specific exercises such as written self-assessments, the career wheel, and brainstorming. In addition to understanding the intention of such practices, you’ll see how these structured activities are integrated with interventions from psychotherapy, including empathy and reframes, use of metaphor, identifying client strengths, and role-playing. Like psychotherapists, career counselors must contend with resistance, misperceptions, and self-defeating behaviors, and you’ll see how each is managed within the context of this approach. By the video’s end, the clients report feeling more hopeful, more confident, and more in control of their future.
In a time when more people are utilizing career counselors and coaches, this video offers a solid introduction to the essential interventions of a growing field. You’ll gain confidence of your own as you take in the teachings of this important clinical resource.
