An exploratory study on employee assistance program for career development counselling

The human resources development strategies are required in terms of strengthening the company's competitiveness in a highly volatile and rapidly changing business environments, occupational structures and labour market structures these days. In this vein, the paper tries to emphasise introduction and activation of career counselling system within companies through an exploratory study on career development/career counselling noting the importance of career development, especially, career development counselling as a tool for human resource development within the organisation. To this end, first of all, the paper examined the existing studies on the concepts and contents of employee assistance program (denoted as EAP) within companies, career counselling and career development. In addition, the paper attempted to propose a career development counselling model and present the effects of the model by introducing counselling cases utilising the counselling model. The paper will propose that EAP career counselling system is one of the practical and affordable institutions for human resource development strategies within the organisation as a long-term sustainable process of companies considering the current situation that relevant career development counselling system or institutions are not implemented properly in most of Korean companies except a few large enterprises or foreign companies.