Expectations of Career Counselling

Abstract

The research in this study is based on the work of Tinsley (1982, 1992) on expectations of counselling and work of Galassi, Grace, Martin, James, and Wallace (1992) on the expectations of career counselling. The perspective taken by this paper, in support of Galassi et al. (1992), is that career counselling needs to be investigated as a discrete area of counselling. The brief version of the Expectation of Counseling (EOCB) and additional items based on a decision-making model of career counselling were given to 278 respondents from educational institutions. The findings indicate that the expectations of the groups converge. There was a general expectation that career counselling would take more than three sessions. The significant differences in the scores on the subscales for the groups do not indicate that counsellors, providers, clients, and students are working on substantially different models. The preferred model of the respondent group was for some elements of the career counselling decision-making model using a client centred humanistic approach rather than a testing and guidance model. Clients/students indicated that they expected the process to be pleasurable, whereas counsellors/providers did not expect this. There is a surprise finding that the central elements of the decision-making process, self exploration and decision-making were not part of the expectation set. It is recommended that future research in this field use a career counselling specific instrument.