SIX STAGES OF CAREER COUNSILING

1. First Stage: Job Placement Service (1890-1919)

2. Second Stage: Educational Guidance in the Schools (1920-1939)
3. Third Stage: Colleges and Universities and the Training of Counselors (1940-
1959)
4. Fourth Stage: Meaningful Work and Organizational Career Development
(1960-1979)
5. Fifth Stage: Independent Practice Career Counseling and Outplacement
Counseling (1980-1989)
6. Sixth Stage: New Directions (1990-Present)
First Stage: Job Placement Service (1890-1919)

Frank Parsons, the founder of career counseling.

The first stage in the history of career counseling was job placement. Began as a
social worker heavily influenced by the work of Jane Addams in Chicago.
In Boston, Parsons established a settlement house program for young people
The placement of these young people into new jobs was one of the initial and
most important purpose of this new agency.
Parsons stated that there are three broad factors in the choice of an occupation:
(1) knowledge of self, (2) knowledge of the requirements for success in different
occupations, (3) matching these two groups of facts.
The Vocation Bureau at Civic Service House in Boston in 1908, the first
institutionalization of career counseling in the United States.
Francis Galton, Wilhelm Wundt, James McKean Cattell, and Alfred Binet made
important contributions to the newly emerging field of psychological testing and
through extension to career counseling.
 Another important factor in the establishment of career counseling came
from the Progressive social reform movement. Child labor laws were the
reason for this collaboration as this crusade to prohibit the exploitation of
children grew. Pennsylvania had established minimum age laws in the latter
half of the 19th century, the first decade of the 20th century continued to see
over half of a million children from 10 to 13 years of age employed. Effective
federal legislation did not come about until the passage of the 1938 Fair
Labor Standards Act. Parsons was a prominent leader in the struggle to
eliminate child labor.
 This transition came the founding in 1913 of the National Vocational Guidance
Association (NVGA; now the National Career Development Association [NCDA])
in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at the Third National Conference on Vocational
Guidance. The founders of NVGA included Frank Leavitt (first president),
Jesse B. Davis (second president), Meyer Bloomfield (third president and
Parsons’s successor at the Boston Vocation Bureau and teacher of the first
course in vocational guidance in 1911 at Harvard University), and John M.
Brewer (fifth NVGA president and author of the definitive history of career
guidance in the United States, 1942).
Second Stage: Educational Guidance in the
Schools (1920-1939)
 The second stage in the development of career counseling, emerged from the
work of humanitarian, progressive social reformers in the schools.
 Jesse B. Davis, who served as a counselor on educational and career problems
at Central High School in Detroit in 1898 and Eli Weaver, who was a New York
City school system principal in 1906.
 The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was established in 1933 to provide
training and employment opportunity for unemployed youth, and the
educational services of the CCC were supervised by the U.S. Department of
Education.
 In 1935, the Works Progress Administration was established through federal
legislation as an employment source for the millions of people out of work.
Finally, the B’nai B’rith Vocational Service Bureau was opened in 1938 in
Washington, D.C., and local Jewish Vocational Services were established in 25
major U.S. cities. The first edition of the Dictionary of Occupational Titles
(the official government occupational classification) was published in 1939.
Third Stage: Colleges and Universities and
the Training of Counselors (1940-1959)

 The third stage was characterized by the focus of societal resources on

colleges and the training of professional counselors as response to a new
social transition engendered by two major events that set the tone for all
subsequent worldwide actions: World War II and the USSR’s (Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics—now the Commonwealth of Independent States, including
Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova,
Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Ukraine) successful
launching of rockets that orbited Earth and even landed on the moon.
 First, World War II focused the energy and attention of all nations of the
world on this contest between nationalistic fascism (Germany, Japan, Italy)
and capitalism-communism, which were allied at this time (United States,
USSR, Great Britain, France). President Harry S. Truman’s Fair Deal program
was a response to the problems encountered by returning armed services
veterans.
 Second, the USSR successfully launched the first space probe (Sputnik I,
1957), followed by Lunik II (1959) landing on the moon.
 Two social conditions characterized the post-World War II period, (1)
the personal and career problems of veterans, especially those who
were disabled during the war; (2) the influx of new types of students
to higher education (generally older, nontraditional) as a result of the
GI Bill of Rights.
 The NVGA became one of the founding divisions of the American
Personnel and Guidance Association (later to become the American
Association for Counseling and Development, and now the American
Counseling Association) in 1951.
Fourth Stage: Meaningful Work and Organizational
Career Development (1960-1979)
 1960s were a time of idealism and hope
 John F. Kennedy’s election as U.S. president (1960), Lyndon Johnson’s Great
Society (1965), the beginning of the great modern-day civil rights movements
 the Vietnam War, and the economic highs of this stage all came together to
focus a generation of young people on the potential, myths, and illusions of
American society, providing for them a new vision of personal, social, and
cultural relations.
 The beginning of the 1960s, the unemployment rate was 8.1%, the highest
since the 1930s. President Kennedy entered office in 1961 and as one of his
first acts appointed a panel of consultants on vocational education who issued
their report through the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare
in 1962, which stated that school counselors need to also have exceptional
understanding of the world of work and its complexities. Their
recommendations were written into legislation in the Vocational Education
Act of 1963 and updated through its amendments in 1968 and 1976
 Finally, the National Occupational Information Coordinating Committee
(NOICC) and the State Occupational Information Coordinating Committees
were established by the Vocational Education Act Amendments of 1976. These
supra- and intragovernmental coordinating agencies were designated to
coordinate the delivery of labor market and other career information among
four federal agencies—the Employment and Training Agency, National Center
for Education Statistics, BLS, and the Education Commission—and among
similar state entities. Led by Juliet Lester, this forced yet historic alliance
among such federal agencies to make career information available for
coordinated public use was to have far-reaching consequences in the next 20
years, for it would supply the information needs for both the career
counselors who required such data for their livelihood and the general public
who required such data for career decision making
Fifth Stage: Independent Practice Career Counseling
and Outplacement Counseling (1980-1989)

 Fifth stage transition in the 1980s—from an industrial age to an information

and technology age. This new transition spawned another host of problems,
such as loss of jobs in the industrial sectors of our economy, increasing
demands from employers for technological skills, loss of permanent jobs to
contract labor, loss of job security, and marginalization of organized labor—
all in order to retool for the information and technology economy.
 In 1987, the Hudson Institute commissioned and published a report titled
Workforce 2000, which laid the foundation for the career development
policies of both presidents George H. W. Bush’s (1988-1991) and Bill Clinton’s
(1992-2000) federal administrations.
 During this stage, the emergence of the private practice career counselor was
the direct result of the beginnings of national acceptance of career
counseling as an important service to provide to a citizenry in occupational
transition as well as to the proliferation of mental health private practices.
 The rise in the use of technology in business and industry in the United States
led to the passage of two very important federal laws during this stage:
Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act (1988) and Carl D. Perkins Vocational
Education Act (1984). The Omnibus Trade Act included provisions to assist
persons to enter into or advance in high technology occupations or to meet
the technological needs of other industries or businesses as well as
preemployment skills training, school-to-work transition programs, and
school-business partnerships.
 The Carl D. Perkins Vocational Education Act became law in 1984. This
replaced the Vocational Education Act of 1963, which had been amended in
1968 and 1976, and extended federal authorization for vocational education
programs through 1989.
Sixth Stage: New Directions (1990-Present)

 At the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, career counseling had
found itself being extended in a variety of new directions: upward
(outplacement, senior executives, with attorneys), downward (poor people,
resume writers for homeless), outward (schools and agencies through federal
legislation), and inward (multicultural and other specialties).
 The upward extension was into the populations of business executives who
had rarely used these services before
 The downward extension was into the poor and homeless socioeconomic
classes who were being required to go to work
 The Welfare to Work Act (1997) was the harshest of these laws as it set a 5-
year limit on any person in the United States receiving economic support
through a federally administered economic support program called Temporary
Assistance for Needy Families, which replaced the federal program called Aid
to Families with Dependent Children.
 The outward extension was brought about through renewed interest and
support for career development through the policies of the federal
government.
 Beginning with President George H. W. Bush and carrying over to President Bill
Clinton, there was a resurgence in interest in the lifelong career development
of the American populace, as shown in such federal legislation as the School-
to-Work Opportunities Act (1994), One-Stop Career Centers Act (1994), and
Americans with Disabilities Act (1990), along with the reauthorization of the
Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Applied Technology Education Act Amendments
of 1998 (formerly titled the Carl D. Perkins Vocational Education Act), the
Higher Education Act, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

 This expansion has included substantial energy and economic investment in

taking career counseling to other countries. Career counselors from the
United States are doing substantial contract work in Singapore, Russia, China,
Hong Kong, Malaysia, Australia, Estonia, and Poland, to name but a few. This
is only the beginning of this trend as these technological advances drive the
worldwide dissemination of information and innovations in the delivery of
career counseling services.