Career Counseling in the New Career Era

Increasingly, policy makers and academics are becoming convinced of the need for lifelong access to external, i.e. employer-independent, career counseling. As careers are becoming increasingly turbulent, traditional career counseling services, which mainly focused on supporting students with making a career decision, are considered to be no longer appropriate. Contemporary career counseling centres are expected to be available to people in any stage of their career and to include help with developing the competences necessary to self-direct one’s career. Though there is large agreement on this new task of career counseling, empirical studies on career counseling keep focusing on samples of students and on variables related to the traditional goal of career counseling. In order to tackle this gap, we performed three empirical studies on issues related to the new role of career counseling. In this article, I describe these studies and discuss their implications for policy and practice.