Career Construction Counseling: Exploring Intervention, Intensity, and Outcomes

Abstract

Mark Savickas’s Career Construction counseling model aims to help individuals develop a narrative identity that gives meaning to their transitions, helps with emotional regulation, and allows them to project into the future, encouraging them to act. Supporting the reconstruction of narrative identity promotes the emergence of new career plans in a constantly changing and transitioning context. This study utilized real counseling cases based on the career development counseling model to analyze the effectiveness of the intervention in relation to the number of sessions attended. The sample consisted of 43 participants, including 29 (67.4%) women and 14 (32.6%) men, with ages ranging from 18 to 52 years (M=28.79; SD=8.847). Participants completed a sociodemographic questionnaire and measures of vocational identity, certainty, career decision-making, depressive symptoms, and psychological stress at the beginning and end of counseling sessions. Results of a t-test comparing means revealed no significant difference in intervention outcomes between the group receiving three sessions and the group receiving four or more sessions. Furthermore, Spearman correlations indicated a negative relationship between decision-making ability at the end of counseling and the number of sessions attended. In conclusion, the effectiveness of the counseling model did not appear to be consistently influenced by the number of sessions, with an increasing number potentially negatively impacting decision-making abilities. These findings suggest the need for further research to explore factors that could enhance the effectiveness of this counseling model.