52-1 Strength-Centered Career Counseling and Career Calling: The Effect and Affective Experience
| Yu-Chen Wang | |
| National Taiwan Normal University |
For undergraduate students who are going to experience a role transition process from student life to work life, the objective of career guidance and counseling in school is to help these students facilitate self-exploration, job discovery, and employment preparation in order to be better prepared for an unknown future of employment. Being aware of and developing career calling experience are helpful for these young adults to confront and cope with a chaotic and constantly-changing environment. The current study aimed to explore the effect of strength-centered career counseling on improving career calling experience and the affective experience of career calling. The study used a mixed-methods research design. The quantitative study explored the effect of strength-centered career calling on improving career calling experience and career self-efficacy and reducing depression of undergraduate students. The participants were 28 undergraduate students in Taiwan, 7 men and 21 women, whose average age was 21.54 (SD = 0.98). The participants were randomly assigned to an experimental group and a control group. The former received strength-centered counseling treatment and the latter took tests. Both groups completed the career calling scale for college students, career self-efficacy scale, and depression tendency scale before, immediately after, and 40 days after treatment. The collected data were analyzed via nonparametric statistics.
The results indicated that the strength-centered career counseling treatment had a great effect on improving participants’ overall career calling experience and career self-efficacy. The qualitative study aimed to understand the affective experience and enablers of the counseling in participants in the strength-centered career counseling treatment. The participant was a senior undergraduate student at the age of 22. The study designed an interview outline and conducted three interviews. The thematic analysis concluded that affective experience was involved with several processes including initiation, connection, and integration. Enablers were induced into two categories as attitudes and intervening factors within which were several themes.
The quantitative results of this study indicated that strength-centered career counseling effectively and immediately promoted career calling experience of the participants and this finding corresponded to some previous studies. Besides, studies in the past reported that strength counseling was effective in promoting individuals’ happiness and well-being. This indicates that the strength-centered counseling may be significantly more effective in the influence on implicit, spiritual, and meaning dimensions in life of individuals. The value of the current study is to confirm that the strength-centered career counseling treatment had an effect on improving undergraduate students’ career calling experience and their career self-efficacy. Hence, we put forward some suggestions for the practice of strength-centered counseling that: (1) The core target of strength-centered counseling is to help individuals integrate and balance all self aspects and apply which to promote inner, spiritual, and meaning dimensions in life. We suggest promoting and integrating strength counseling with other counseling approaches for enhanced effectiveness. (2) We suggest helping individuals to explore their core or signature strengths and link which to different life dimensions and to different selves. This process requires more exploration processes via dialogues to identify and magnify individuals’ strengths in more depth. (3) Career calling experience can be fostered through counseling intervention. In addition to administering strength-centered career counseling treatment, we propose that school courses or group guidance that are related to career exploration may adopt a series of questioning techniques to assist individuals in raising the awareness of career calling experience. Also, from this study we can learn that strength-centered career counseling treatment may significantly improving career calling experience of individuals. We suggest that in future, practitioners may apply strength-centered career counseling treatment to the groups with different backgrounds as well as try to undersand its following effectiveness in them.
Keywords
Career calling, strength-centered career counseling, undergraduate student.
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