career development and guidance programs across cultures: the gap between policies and practices

The Career Development Quarterly September 2005 • Volume 54 57

Career Development andGuidance Programs AcrossCultures: The Gap BetweenPolicies and Practices

Jane GoodmanSunny Hansen

The authors summarize the presentations and discussions contributed to thesymposium International Perspectives on Career Development by members ofGroup 5, who considered the topic of the structure and organization of careerdevelopment programs in different nations. A capsule picture of the nationalsetting, primary goals, components, objectives, and implementation strategiesis presented. Papers fell largely into 4 categories: national programs with sev-eral components; large, but more specific programs, serving a national popula-tion; smaller programs serving diverse populations; and focused programs. Onetheme emerged strongly from virtually every presentation: There is a gap, oftenprofound, between policy or vision and reality. Although every nation aboutwhich participants heard had laudable policies and had made genuine attemptsto assist its people with life career development, many individuals do not haveaccess to quality, or even any, services.

Group 5’s focus in the symposium organized by the International Asso-ciation for Educational and Vocational Guidance and the National CareerDevelopment Association was the structure and organization of careerdevelopment programs in different nations. The planning committee de-scribed the group’s focus in this way:

There are large differences in the way in which career development provi-sions are made available among countries and regions. These structures haveconsiderable influence on what the guidance practitioners can do and how ithas to be done. The impact on the efficiency and outcome of certain tech-niques and methodologies is related to these structures and the policies,legislation, or other factors that shape such structures. Developing a compre-hensive view of the structures in which programs of career development functionmay increase international understanding of why guidance methodology ISoften different across settings and nations.

The group’s chairperson pointed out that it is difficult to discuss thestructure and organization of career guidance programs without sayingsomething about the context in which programs are being developed.With this in mind, participants were asked to provide a capsule picture of

Jane Goodman, Department of Counseling, Oakland University; Sunny Hansen,Counseling and Student Personnel Services, Department of Educational Psychol-ogy, University of Minnesota. The authors contributed equally in writing this article.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jane Goodman, 715Wimbleton Drive, Birmingham, MI 48009-7604 (e-mail: [email protected]).

58 The Career Development Quarterly September 2005 • Volume 54

the national setting, along with the definition of career guidance beingused in each country. They also were asked to describe the primary goals,components, objectives, and implementation strategies. Additional infor-mation about context included describing primary populations, a briefhistory of career guidance in their country, and the theoretical frame-work used, if any. They were also invited to share information aboutprogram funding; involvement of government, business, and industry;and the training available to career service providers.

Questions were raised about programs for specific populations, such asethnic minorities, girls and women, persons with disabilities, and others.Another important question was on the effectiveness of programs and themethods used to evaluate them. Presenters were asked to describe howprograms have changed over time. Because of time limitations and thedifferences in the stage of career development and guidance across coun-tries, the speakers were not able to address all questions.

The papers presented fell largely into four categories: national pro-grams with several components by country (e.g., Australia and the UnitedStates); large, but more specific programs, serving a national population(e.g., United Kingdom and Slovenia); smaller programs serving diversepopulations (e.g., Torres Strait Islanders, Colombians, African Ameri-cans, and Finns); and focused programs such as career centers in China,lack of career counselor training programs in Japan, and adult programsthat address gender issues of women and men in the United States.

Because of the nature of the group’s topic, which was to learn about howthe wide range of ways that nations are approaching the challenge of help-ing their citizens prepare for, find, and manage the transitions and deci-sions necessary in today’s global world of work, the members of the groupdid not invest time in coming to conclusions. They instead attempted tolearn about the programs of career development in diverse nations andprovided the opportunity for several additional members to provide infor-mation about their country’s programs. One theme emerged strongly fromvirtually every presentation: There is a gap, often profound, between policyor vision and reality. Although every nation about which the group heardhad laudable policies and had made genuine attempts to assist its peoplewith life career development, many individuals do not have access to qual-ity, or even any, services. We present the papers approximately in the orderin which they were delivered during the symposium.

Wendy Patton (2004), from Australia, continued the theme of the dif-ferential between the ideal and the real in her paper as she summarizedthe state of career development policies and realities in Australia, empha-sizing recent changes in coordination of efforts, federal support, andcredentialing and standards. The discussion included a question aboutcounselor–student caseload, which she said was typically 1 counselor to1,500 students. She was also asked to describe TAFE (technical andfurther education). It was noted by some participants that the programsand services provided by these institutions seem to be quite similar tothose provided by community colleges in the United States.

Career development work, originally called career guidance, is a term ap-plied across a spectrum of career-related processes, including the provisionof information, counseling, curriculum, and program interventions, suchas work experiences, and the coordination of events, such as career mar-


kets. It is conducted by a large variety of professionals, including teachers,counselors, and career advisers. Recently, career has been related to life-long learning, especially with the creation of a National Careers Task Forceresponsible for oversight of most policy and practice. A recent develop-ment is the Australian Blueprint for Career Development.

In Australia, career education is the responsibility of states and is incon-sistent across them. Career education has received little attention in cur-riculum reforms across the country and, in the postschool context, isconsidered to be uneven, although a number of tertiary institutions havebegun offering career development programs as credit-granting electiveunits. Targets for the programs have moved from students in secondaryschools to people at all ages and career development stages. There hasbeen a dearth of training provisions for career development practitioners.

Regarding the provision of guidance services, the Australian House ofRepresentatives Standing Committee on Vocational Educational traininghas recommended that career education be a mandatory part of the corecurriculum of the compulsory years of schooling, distinct from voca-tional educational training programs; that all secondary schools have atleast one full-time professional career adviser who has appropriate spe-cialist training; and that the professional development needs of careereducators be better met through appropriate training and a clear-cut setof standards for delivery of career education in schools. Although theAustralian Association of Career Counselors has expressed the need forquality standards of training, an overall lifelong career development strat-egy has not yet been articulated.

Norman Gysbers (2004), from the United States, summarized in hispaper the history of the K–12 comprehensive guidance movement, in-cluding the trend that guidance in schools includes vocational and educa-tional guidance with an early emphasis on holistic and developmentalprograms, such as those developed by the University of Missouri and theUniversity of Minnesota. Recently, counselors are paying more attentionto the personal/social needs of their students, as defined in the new stan-dards of the American School Counselors Association. Gysbers describedcomprehensive guidance and its alignment with academic standards, in-cluding a guidance curriculum and individual planning.

After hearing Gysbers’s (2004) paper, participants wondered if the cur-riculum was provided for students of all ages and if counselors were thesole providers of this curriculum. He explained that in an ideal program,students of all ages were to be served by counselors but that many schoolsused other, often less well-trained, personnel, and in many places, elemen-tary students ages 5–12 had little counseling available except through teachers.The issue of theory versus reality in schools was raised here, an issue reit-erated often in the working group, as was the need to work with adminis-trators and school district policies. The initiative for implementing a com-prehensive program often comes from an individual counselor in a schoolor district rather than from administrators or school governing bodies. Inresponding to another question, Gysbers indicated that keeping personaland career guidance functions separate by having different people providethe different types of guidance has been less effective in meeting students’needs than having well-trained counselors responding to and providingprograms that address an integrated set of needs.


Sasa Niklanovic (2004), from Slovenia, gave details about specific issuesof guidance in Slovenia’s Public Employment Service. Slovenia, a develop-ing country, joined the European Union in 2004, after a 7-year process,and Niklanovic stated that Slovenia was highly developed compared withother new European Union countries. He told the group that the Employ-ment Service of Slovenia, for which he worked, was very strong, providingprimarily job placement services. Approximately 5% of staff are psycholo-gists who are trained to provide more intensive counseling, and schoolsalso have counselors. Staff members have surveyed their customers, andthe satisfaction rate is about 50%; however, he perceived a problem in thatthe indicators used to evaluate such programs were all quantitative. Hebelieved that they also needed to use qualitative measures. There is a dan-ger in judging outcomes solely by the number of people placed into jobs orinto training for jobs; that perspective eliminates the role of counseling andthe needs of individuals. The aim is to keep the guidance principles but beless mechanistic in how services were provided.

Niklanovic was also asked to describe policy duties that are seen as adistraction from career guidance. The answer was that employment ser-vice personnel must spend a great deal of time dealing with benefits andeligibility and monitoring the activities of the unemployed as they look fora job.

Niklanovic continued the theme of the policy–practice gap by describing tothe group that school counselors have similar jobs to those described byGysbers, with problems similar to those in the United States in the differencebetween policy and practice. In addition, policies are still focused on reduc-ing unemployment rather than looking at longer term interests.

Agnes Mieko Watanabe-Muraoka (2004), of Japan, chose to focus onthree critical issues in her paper on the three major programs that areneeded by Japanese society. She first described four major developments.They were introduction of a career education program for 1st through12th graders, college education reform, career programs for highly edu-cated women, and career management programs for midcareer workers.Second, she identified four competency areas for these programs, basedon the American National Occupational Information Coordinating Com-mittee model: future planning, information management, decision mak-ing, and human relations. Her third major point was that there is a needfor professional training for career counselors.

Watanabe-Muraoka (2004) expressed concern about the fact that coun-selor training in Japan has now become a business, with emphasis onadapting the U.S. Career Development Facilitator training model to pre-pare career advisers (career paraprofessionals). No university has pro-vided a career development training program in graduate schools, as hasbeen done in the United States.

Sunny Hansen (2004; also an author of this article), from the UnitedStates, gave a brief history by decades of career development and careerguidance over the last 40 years in her discussion on adult career develop-ment programs. Consistent with the theme of career development over thelife span and building on Gysbers’s K–12 Career Profile, she providedexamples of career development programs for adults: traditional-agecollege students and adult learners, individuals in business and industry,human resource personnel, women and multicultural populations, and


additional specific and multilevel populations. Her paper provided a se-lected overview of adult career development programs (note that in theUnited States, the term career development rather than career guidance isused to discuss programs for adult populations). Such programs began inthe 1970s with the advent of the adult development movement.

Hansen (2004) pointed out that the systematic programs in collegesand universities often had a career center as the most visible component.She also noted the trend toward organizing specialized college and uni-versity career centers in various academic disciplines, such as liberal arts,medicine, business, technology, agriculture, and other fields. Career centershave also been created to serve specific cultural groups and for personswith disabilities.

Programs for specific adult populations were also cited (e.g., programsfor women and specific multicultural populations). Multilevel programs(kindergarten through adult) such as the National Career DevelopmentGuidelines and BORN FREE, the recently updated University of Minne-sota multimedia training program to expand career options and reducesex role stereotypes for women and men, were also described. Hansen(2004) also discussed Integrative Life Planning, a holistic model that shedeveloped for the career development of adults. It seems clear that al-though the United States has created a number of adult education pro-grams, the people—from college students to midlife adults to older adults—who receive the most attention are college students and unemployed adults.The gap between the ideal of life span career development and the realityof career development programs for adults is still wide.

During the discussion, Jeff Garis, of the United States, described acollaborative relationship between Florida State University and the Peoples’Republic of China to help China develop college career centers. He de-scribed the deep sense of responsibility felt by Chinese universities toplace their more than 9 million graduates annually in jobs and stated thatit may well be an impossible task. His team found that career center staffhad little formal training in career development, which presented a chal-lenge as they attempted to change from offices of career assignment totrue career centers. Florida State is working with its Chinese counter-parts in an ongoing training relationship.

Xiaolu Hu, who is now with a university in the United States but wasoriginally from China and had just returned from a visit there, respondedto Garis’s presentation. She agreed that the universities have a responsi-bility to place students, as both students and the universities agree, butthat placing students is often not possible. The training that studentsreceive is frequently too theoretical to lead to easy placement; this is trueeven at the graduate level. This situation has led to real problems and aproblematic gap between students’ expectations and reality. Hu statedthat universities are looking at creating learning societies that focus moreon the career implications of various courses of study.

She also discussed the problem of forced early retirement, which hap-pens at age 50 for women and 55 for men in China. She believed thatretirement at these ages forces people to retire when they are too youngand creates societal problems of how to support such a large group of thenonworking population. One response to addressing many of these prob-lems has been the formation of a professional association similar to the


National Career Development Association. Although here the gap is be-tween desired policies and the reality of students’ lives, it seems again toshow a gap between what is wished and what is real.

Heather Jackson (2004) reported on a unique approach to career guid-ance for workers in the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS),for which she worked. Employees of the NHS in Britain were the targetof the program. The NHS is working to develop programs for changeand to create its own university. The National Health Service Universityis responsible to more than 2 million NHS employees. NHS is the largestemployer in Europe and the third largest in the world. The governmentensures that the health and social care sector reviews its practice in lightof social, demographic, environmental, and technological changes. Jack-son identified three barriers to learning: individuals’ state of readiness,level of self confidence/self-esteem, and motivation. The size and com-plexity of the NHS make change and modernization a real challenge. Shealso stated that effective information, advice, guidance, and personal supportare required to tackle the barriers to access.

Twinet Parmer (2004), from the United States, presented a paper oncareer development programs for African Americans that addressed thequestions: Has the concept of career development and its many facetsadequately addressed the career needs of African Americans based ontheir work history? Specifically, has career development examined thecultural context, lifestyle, and identity issues from a holistic perspective ofAfrican Americans that is consistent with race and class issues across thelife span and life context? Her paper diverged from the theme of the gapbetween policy and practice to suggest that appropriate policies to meetthe needs of African Americans might not even exist.

Parmer (2004) stated that discouragement about positive work experi-ences is common among African Americans; many do not have careerdreams, except for hopes of “making it big” in sports or entertainment.Others only dream of a “good job,” defined as a blue-collar occupationproviding enough money to lead a middle-class life and to have security,requiring hard work but having little educational requirements; however,many African Americans will never work in legitimate jobs. Furthermore,they have the highest unemployment rate in the United States, officiallyabout l0%, although this probably is an underestimate because discour-aged workers are often not counted in government statistics.

Parmer (2004) reminded the group that African Americans’ historyof work is unique. A history of slavery is different from a history ofimmigration. Emancipation changed the situation of American Blacksfrom full employment (as slaves) to a group with high rates of unem-ployment. She suggested that work provides purpose, meaning, anddirection to life and criticized the lack of relevance of many career de-velopment theories to Blacks and other minorities. She presented herholistic model of culture, identity and lifestyle, life span, and life contextas a suggested way to improve career development models to bettermeet the needs of African Americans.

In Anna Lichtenberg’s (2004) presentation on practical steps for devel-oping resources for an indigenous population in Australia, she describedthe current career development situation for Aboriginals and Torres StraitIslanders, in particular the barriers they face and their disadvantaged


condition in the labor force. For example, they have higher unemploy-ment and lower literacy than the Australian population in general.Lichtenberg then described a project (a program of research and strate-gic consultation and then resource development) designed to amelioratethese conditions.

Lichtenberg (2004) concluded that the usual Western models for careerdevelopment seem to be less effective with this population and stated thatnew, collaborative, and more holistic research approaches may be re-quired to identify appropriate career practices strategies and resources.She also emphasized that new approaches and ways of thinking will beneeded if career counselors are to empower young people to live andwork in this new era. This presentation provided reinforcement for Parmer’scontention that current models do not necessarily meet the needs of Af-rican American youth and adults, again pointing up the gap not onlybetween policy and practice but the gap in knowledge about what makesgood policy for increasingly diverse populations and cultures.

Heli Piikkila, from Tampere, Finland, delivered a paper, coauthored byHelena Kasurinen and Elise Hanninen (2004), that described projects thatpromoted the social inclusion of young people in Finland. One of the projectsdescribed was aimed at young people who do not complete basic educationprograms or who do not find “a study place” after graduation. The projectwas directed by a consortium of stakeholders, including representatives ofeducation, labor, teachers’ union, municipalities, and students, among others.Also organized collaboratively by various stakeholders, a second projectfocused on students in the final stages of compulsory education and thosein transition between primary and secondary education. The third projectdescribed was a special program in Tampere that again focused on mobi-lizing assistance for students who might need extra help to navigate theirtransition from school to work or further education.

Marcela Mesa (2004), from Colombia, described her country’s careerprograms in a presentation on vocational guidance in Columbia. Becauseonly about half of Columbia’s students go to high schools, and fewer stillto tertiary or collegiate education, good career development is criticallyimportant from the standpoint of effective use of resources. Mesa in-formed the group that international and private schools have elaboratevocational guidance programs; public schools, however, have very fewprograms. They do have extensive plans and goals based on policies andprograms they have learned through the International Association forEducational and Vocational Guidance.

Mesa (2004) described a growing, “consciousness about the impor-tance of vocational guidance in our [Colombia’s] educational context”(p. 4). Between them, two conferences in the last 2 years attracted morethan 600 participants, including counselors, teachers, and students fromall over Colombia. These conferences focused on vocational guidanceand academic counseling in both public and private educational settings.She believed that these landmark meetings were representative of a growingconsciousness about the needs for these services but that “the politicaland social will” is not yet there to make this happen. Mesa concludedwith a series of recommendations.

Dennis Engels (2004), from the United States, presented a paperthat addressed four ethical issues across cultures that relate to career


counseling: (a) the universality of ethics, that is, the concept that di-verse professions share beliefs of respect for human beings, privacy,accountability, and honesty; (b) the distinction between ethical andlegal principles, making the point that the two types of principles maybe in conflict; (c) the relative paucity of articles and literature on ethi-cal issues in career counseling; and (d) the visibility of ethics, “inspirit, motivation, intention, and focus” (p. 7) as empowering counse-lors to focus on “promoting human worth, dignity, uniqueness, andpotential” (p. 7). Points that arose during discussion included the state-ment that ethics are easy to overlook if they are infused in graduateeducation rather than being addressed separately and specifically.

ReferencesEngels, D. (2004, June). Ethical issues in career development across cultures. In Inter-

national perspectives on career development. Symposium conducted at a joint meet-ing of the International Association for Educational and Vocational Guidance andthe National Career Development Association, San Francisco.

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Hansen, S. S. (2004, June). Adult career development programs: From school careerguidance to specific populations to programs for diverse adults. In Internationalperspectives on career development. Symposium conducted at a joint meeting of theInternational Association for Educational and Vocational Guidance and the Na-tional Career Development Association, San Francisco.

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career development and guidance programs across cultures: the gap between policies and practices

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