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You may have noticed that the Pride in Your Path, LLC, mission statement refers to career coaching in a specific way: career guidance. Why do I use this term to refer to the work I do?

There are a lot of ways that people who do work about careers refer to their work. Career coaching, advising, and counseling are all essentially the same activity—working with a client or a group to explore career options, build confidence in their working lives, succeed in a job or internship search by learning tangible tips and tools that they can apply throughout the process, and so on. There are some differences between coaching, advising, counseling, and other approaches to this work that I’ll talk about in a later blog post, but for now just know that these are all very similar roles that help people with their career development.

Career development is defined by vocational psychologists at Florida State University as “the total constellation of economic, sociological, psychological, educational, physical, and chance factors that combine to shape one’s career” (Reardon et al., 2019) 1. If that sounds like a lot to process—it is! Our careers touch every aspect of our lives and vice versa. Making sense of that and reclaiming our agency to make intentional, confident decisions about and in our careers can be a big undertaking. That’s why career guidance is such an important field of practice.

In brief, career guidance refers to the activities that career coaches, advisors, and counselors, as well as others in helping and teaching professions, do to support the people they serve in matters related to that “total constellation” around a career. The form that support most often takes involves job searching: writing a resume, practicing interview skills, learning how and when to negotiate a job offer and salary. But career guidance can include a lot more, from learning more about your personality and clarifying your values to determining what role you want work to have in your life—including if you even want to follow a conventional career path at all.

A number of scholars, thought leaders, and organizations have written definitions of career guidance throughout the years. The one that I personally like and want to share with you comes from Hooley et al. (2017) in their chapter “The Neoliberal Challenge to Career Guidance.”2 This definition goes beyond listing the types of activities that career guidance involves and gets right to the heart of our work:

Career guidance supports individuals and groups to discover more about work, leisure, and learning to consider their place in the world and plan for their futures. Key to this is developing individual and community capacity to analyse and problematise assumptions and power relations, to network and build solidarity and to create new and shared opportunities. It empowers individuals and groups to struggle within the world as it [is] and to imagine the world as it could be.

Career guidance can take a wide range of forms and draws on diverse theoretical traditions. But at its heart it is a purposeful learning opportunity which supports individuals and groups to consider and reconsider work, leisure and learning in the light of new information and experiences and to take both individual and collective action as a result of this. (p. 20)

This vision is so inspiring to me, and reflects the core of how I approach my work. Whether advising university students or building my side business, I am always considering the long-term possibilities of work and how the careers landscape of today fits into the larger economic and social context. I root my work in a commitment to social justice, and aim to empower individuals to not just succeed in the system as it currently exists, but to change it for a more equitable future.

Career guidance, then, is not just about helping others learn to navigate the current system, but about always considering how to make it better, starting with each individual’s capacity to make a positive difference for themselves, their families and friends, and their communities.

  1. Reardon, R. C., Lenz, J. G., Peterson, G. W., & Sampson, J. P. (2019). Career development & planning: A comprehensive approach (6th ed.). Kendall Hunt. ↩

  2. Hooley, T., Sultana, R., & Thomsen, R. (2017). The neoliberal challenge to career guidance: Mobilising research, policy, and practice around social justice. In T. Hooley, R. Sultana, & R. Thomsen (Eds.), Career guidance for social justice: Contesting neoliberalism (pp. 1-27). Routledge. ↩