Considering Online Career Interventions

Considering Online Career Interventions Tannis Goddard President Training Innovations Inc. www.training-innovations.com March 23, 2009

Introduction Published literature discussing facilitated online career interventions is in its infancy; however, my interaction with many practitioners around the world over the past two years, provides a strong indication that this area is growing in interest and attention. In my own practice, I have been involved in the development of e-learning software, the design of online career interventions, the delivery of e-career services to clients, and the teaching of practitioners. I find myself constantly moving between counseling and education literature as I find a home for my own thinking about this topic and what makes e-career counseling a viable and effective method of delivery. In this paper, I am attempting to summarize key foundational questions I regularly discuss with others in my field and anchor my thinking across various perspectives and disciplines. Specifically they are: 1. What are the current conditions in the career development field that point toward the potential usefulness of online career interventions? 2. How is technology used in the career development field and what does the literature currently say about facilitated online career counseling? 3. How can the online space support constructivist learning and narrative counseling perspectives? 4. What are critical areas for research that will begin to establish a body of literature for the effective development and delivery of online career practice? I am writing this paper to provide an accessible and theoretically grounded account of how my thoughts are forming regarding the potential of online career services. My perspectives are forming out of my dayto-day reality of leading an organization that actively delivers career services across the Vancouver region as I witness the emotional and cognitive challenges individuals are confronted with when facing job loss and the task of reorienting one s career self. I also have the privilege to engage in conversation with other practitioners about their curiosities, interests and uncertainties related to the notion of using online spaces as a location for career intervention. Career as a Socially Situated Experience The career counselling field is a social practice in the midst of significant change. Born out of an industrial economy, the early practice of career counselling stressed the relationship between matching individuals characteristics with the available and prevailing work in the society (Parsons, 1909). Throughout the 20 st century, theorists have continued to expand upon the basic matching of personality traits and occupational duties to include more complexities, with Super (1957) recognizing and beginning to study the impact of lifelong career development. Although life long life span career theories were emerging as a strong theoretical foundation in the late 20 th century, the socially dominant perspective was that individuals would have one primary occupation with many staying with one or two employers for their working lives. Tannis Goddard Page 2

This positivist approach to matching personality characteristics with occupational tasks met the needs of employers and individuals in a stable, moderately predictable economy; however, as the 20 th century drew to an end, the impact of fracture lines, (Morgan, 1988) began to signal the radical changes coming for industry. As this reality took hold in organizations, new questions about the essence and nature of career and what it meant for individuals and for organizations emerged (Arnold, 1997, Arthur & Rousseau, 1996, Hall 1996). With technological advances, globalization, new organizational structures, changing work patterns, and expanded workforce diversity, it became more difficult to capture and define only one, representative, career norm (Amundson, 2005; Stead, 2004). To address this changing context, career theories began to place greater focus on constructivist and social constructivist approaches as constructs for understanding individuals career realities (Savickas, 1993; Cochran, 1997; Peavy, 1998). The notion of Career as an organizationally bound experience, with linear and hierarchical movement, shifted to Career being conceived of as a subjective experience with its meaning personally derived by individuals within their own life context rather than an objectively observable phenomenon of paths and patterns of promotion (Mallon & Walton 2005). This new career context has been defined as boundaryless (Arthur & Rousseau, 1996) and protean (Hall et al.,1996). Boundaryless and protean terms of reference are commonly used together to describe the fundamental shifts in an individual s orientation to his/her own career. For Arthur and Rousseau (1996), boundaryless career signified independence, rather than dependence on, traditional career arrangements. The protean career definition concentrates on the changes in one s psychological boundaries. Hall (1996) argued that the protean career is driven by the person, not the organization, based on individually defined goals, encompassing the whole life space, and being driven by psychological success, (rather than) objective measures of success such as pay, rank or power. Both concepts offer a fundamental shift from earlier career theories that assumed that an individual s career would primarily follow a linear process, occur in a few organizations, and result in continual upward mobility (Baruch, 2004). With increased acknowledgement and acceptance of multidirectional, dynamic and fluid career paths, individuals are required to define their careers without the external physical or psychological boundaries that organizations offered in the management employees career progression through hierarchical movements. The role of career practitioners must therefore also shift, to meet the needs of individuals in career transition. Gibson (2004) claimed that what individuals need most from career counseling is assistance in authoring their own story and career identity. Wise and Millward (2005) found that the following themes typically surfaced for individuals in career transition: interpreting the flow of the past into the present and future, attempting to create order, rationalization and the retrospective process of defining meaning (pg. 401). However, the process of clarifying, interpreting and defining one s career path is not formulaic. Rather, it is an iterative process without an absolute truth (Weick, 2001). Tannis Goddard Page 3

It can be difficult for individuals to see how drastically the notion of career has changed over the years. Many working adults continue to see their career paths as working towards one ultimate goal, and lack the awareness that one s goal is often contextual. For example, what was one s ultimate goal at age 25 may not be their ultimate goal at age 45. Because many individuals in the workforce are faced with the need to understand and potentially shift their career paradigms, practitioners are being called on assist individuals with the interpretation, rationalization and iteration of individual career stories and how those stories fit-forward with their workplace and career strategies. Ultimately Career Practitioners are supporting individuals as they seek to understand themselves through their career stories. Because understanding one s identity or meaning of career needs to be constructed and iterated using different criteria of measurement, this type of paradigmatic change might also be considered transformational. Mezirow s defines transformational learning as: the process of becoming critically aware of how and why our presuppositions have come to constrain the way we perceive, understand and feel about our world; of reformulating these assumptions to permit a more inclusive, discriminating, permeable and integrative perspective; and of making decisions or otherwise acting on these new understandings (1990, p14). When considering the narrative and dialogic processes that foster and support clients through this process of becoming critically aware, it becomes essential to design models of career assistance that allow individuals an opportunity assess, articulate, reflect and discuss specific career issues within their work/life context. The location of work and career in people s lives is shifting. As such, the way we approach our clients and the interventions we design to support clients as they strive to answer the question how to you want to live your life (Viljamaa et al., 2006, p.194) are also under-going reconsideration. Re-thinking Career Development Interventions With this change in theoretical understanding about career development, comes a need to reconceive the approaches and practice of career counselling. Herr (2001) describes the duality of meaning inherent in the term career development as two sets of theories or conceptual categories, one that explains the development of career behavior across the life span and the other that describes how career behavior is changed by particular intervention (p. 196). This paper is exploring key aspects of the careers field to situate how online spaces may provide a new context for hosting a career intervention that can assist clients to make meaning and personally satisfying change in their careers using interpretive approaches (Collin and Young, 1992). Career interventions can be generally defined as any treatment of effort intended to enhance an individual s career development of to enable the person to make better career-related decisions (Spokane Tannis Goddard Page 4

& Oliver, 1983). With a shifting interpretation of career is conceived, so too has this lead to a new interpretation about the role of career interventions. Guichard (2003) summarizes this change with three main points. First, career interventions are conceived as being applied over the life span no longer only at work entry points for vocational decision making. Second, the career development process is viewed as including all the transitions that an individual experiences: school, job, and personal. Third, Guichard argues is that clients are considered to be actors in their own career development - the goal is to help them to be the subject of their own existence. (p.306). Career interventions for adults are largely focused on supporting clients to develop storylines of career identity, drawn together from a society and workplace made up of episodes and fragments (Collin 2000). This focus on assimilating and narrating a cohesive understanding of the many stories in one s life, invites the career field to integrate creative counselling and learning approaches. The goal of this is to support clients in their own development of personal agency and to establish continuity (Ricoeur, 1992) of their career stories across their lifespan. The practice of career development is spread across social locations from schools to universities to community based initiatives. Although the global recognition for the importance of career development interventions is increasing the location and funding source of the services is at best, precarious. This brings with it power tensions related to the purpose of career service funding and practitioners are regularly balancing the expectation for a performance based outcome (ie: a client obtains employment) with the need to design cost-effective program models that are theoretically grounded and client centred. With a goal to quality service for clients across their working lives, Amundson (2006), recognizing the tension for counselors and program designers notes that to be effective in the 21 st century career counselors will need to expand both their thinking and their intervention repertoire (p.12). Herr (2001), discussing an historical perspective of career development points toward the need for career counselors to take on expanded role such as planners, applied behavioural scientists, and technologists as they tailor their career practices to the settings and populations they serve (p. 208). Acknowledging that the twentieth century laid the foundation for researching and presenting scientific knowledge of career behaviour, Herr (2001) reminds practitioners and policy makers that the twenty-first century offers an opportunity to grow the knowledge of effective techniques and processes for the newly emerging work and social conditions. As we continue to embark on the development of new interventions to meet new career realities, considering the potential of career interventions delivered through online spaces opens up a new perspective for designing post-modern career services. Technology in the Careers Field The use of technology in the careers field has a rich and long history. Comprehensive computerbased career planning systems were the first technology used in the career development field. These systems were designed to computerize aspects of the career assessment process to either replicate what Tannis Goddard Page 5

the counselors were already doing or to provide a process to improve or enhance the counselling exchange (Harris-Bowlsbey & Sampson, 2001). The career development field s early adoption of technology saw the development of at least 12 different systems between 1956 and 1970 (Myers, 1970), with the heyday of the development of career information systems growing in the 1970 s (Harris- Bowlsbey, 2003, p.21). Harris-Bowlsbey (2003, p.21) provides the following description to capture the common features included in computer-based career planning systems: a) the presence of a user record, allowing an ongoing monitoring function of the student s career guidance activities; b) the implicit or explicit teaching of a career development process; and c) online assessment or use of off-line results as a part of the process d) the provision of databases and searches of extensive files of occupations and colleges Although systems have developed and changed, these systems still hold a significant place in the career development field. Sometimes used as self-directed stand alone systems and sometimes used as a supplement to f2f services, these systems seem to be in the collective consciousness of the career practitioner community as the touchstone of what the use of computers in a counselling process means. The wide-spread use and development of the internet carried forward the next major wave of technology within the careers field. Computer based guidance systems, as described above, became an accessible fee-for-service option for users at home, not just users at career centres. This period also saw the explosion of non-standardized self-assessment questionnaires and the packaging of career advice and information that formed a smorgasbord of disjointed information available to the public free of charge and without consumer protection (Harris-Bowlsbey 2003, p.21). The presence of the internet leads to near certainty that clients supplement career conversations with self-directed online research. This, combined with a likelihood that clients will reach out to their practitioners by email, has required that career counselors increase their own computer competencies and information literacy (Stevens & Lundberg, 1998). However, in my own experience, this appears to be met with mixed levels of willingness by practitioners. Recent publications (Amundson et al. 2005; Brown, 2003; Harris-Bowlsbey, 2003; O Halloran, Fahr & Keller 2002) have forayed into the possibility of career cyber-counselling or virtual career centres, with much trepidation. Despite a rich and long history as a field using and integrating technology into our practitioning work, the idea of moving the interactions between client and counselor into an online space appears much less comfortable to adopt. While writers will signpost this as a future possibility, the dominant discourse focuses on the questions of whether a human connection can form and an over-whelming focus on the ethical disturbances associated with such an idea. The literature also makes a poor distinction between the various styles and approaches of online service that could be Tannis Goddard Page 6

delivered. It seems the conversation is largely focused on open-access, information dominant websites or private counselors that market a fee-for-email practice with few credentials or guidelines of practice posted. There is a marked absence in the discussion related to the design and delivery of more formal career interventions that include assessment prior to a client beginning in a facilitated online intervention. This is the context through which I practice and conduct my research and hope, through continued dialogue and research, to help point the careers field to this area of study so the richness and opportunity can be explored within a safer container. Harris-Bowlsbey (2005) does call to the field to research and determine which clients can profit from services in this mode, which content topics can be adequately addressed, what the optimal combination of technology is for delivery, and the effectiveness of this method of intervention (p. 23). An article titled Constructivist Career Tools on the Internet was recently published in, Career Counselling: Constructivist Approaches (McMahon and Patton, 2006). This chapter discusses the benefits of the internet as a mechanism for information dissemination and also explores how structured software assessment programs can offer service extensions. The authors spend little time exploring the socially interactive opportunities of the online space (or ICT); however they do state that : A number of authors have acknowledged the transforming role of the interest in career information and guidance practice, with Watts identifying the potential of ICT to significantly increase access to guidance services, freeing it from constraints of time and space (p.144). In doing so he also acknowledges the restrictions in terms of access to the internet, and possession of skills to effectively use the internet and related resources. While this view is shared by many, it is clear that inclusion of ICT alone into career guidance practice is not sufficient. (p. 189) This open call of potential, juxtaposed against the fear and resistance of what ICT could offer the career field, is a conversation I spend much of my time in. For a field with a long rich history of using technology, there is a strong desire to preserve the face-to-face practitioning relationship. In earlier papers I have explored the stance of the online space as a third space a space to be viewed with its own qualities and considerations. As practitioners there is an exciting opportunity to name the qualities we value in our relationships such as trust, human connection and unconditional positive regards and challenge ourselves to consider how these qualities can take shape in a new space, online, reaching across time and space. As I consider the career field s history of using technology combined with the dominant resistance to considering online delivery methods, I find myself wondering if it is our long relationship with technology as a tabulator, store-house, and retriever of information that limits our potential to see it as a space for human connection. Harris-Bowlsbey (2005) who was a developer of the early career systems Tannis Goddard Page 7

and who has written extensively on technology in the careers field recalls the sentiments and hopes that were driving the field in the early days of technical creation in the 1960 s. These include: a) Systematizing career planning while also personalizing the process b) Making the career-planning process more engaging c) Fostering acceptance and adoption d) Reducing costs and improving capability As Harris-Bowlsbey (2005) casts her vision forward to new technology and its imminent impact on the career field, she writes: As we enter the age of cybercounselling, counselors desperately need research about its effectiveness. One of the profession s foundational principles has been that a face-to-face, facilitative relationship is an essential component for effective counselling. Given this premise, will support using e-mail or even video yield effectiveness in assisting a client or student to reach identified goals? Will this method of intervention be equally effective will all clients and for all kinds of career-related topics (p.22). As I read over her hopes that capture feelings of innovators forty years ago, I am comforted that my own energies and dreams for a new way to use technology are, like theirs, for the good of the client and the process. Online Spaces as Constructivist & Narrative Experiences Background & Context To situate the position I bring to this discussion, I will first offer a brief introduction to how my learning and perspectives have developed. After engaging in my Masters course work, between 1997-1999, through an online, cohort-based learning program at the University of Calgary, I became intrigued by the theoretical and practical affordances of online learning and the potential benefits it could bring to the delivery of career counselling interventions. At the time, there was little access available to costeffective learning platforms and certainly none available that blended the features I was seeking for a welcoming, easy to use environment for counselling and human development learning. Over a five year period, a colleague and I undertook the task of designing and building e-learning software to meet our vision. In this undertaking we approached our technical design with a goal to creating spaces and features that could enable an instructional designer to build an accessible, constructivist counselling or learning episode. To us, this meant approaching the assumption of learning and counselling from a proactive stance, with individuals actively engaged in the creation, understanding and interpretation of their own reality along with the co-participative role of the counsellor or facilitator. Based on educational Tannis Goddard Page 8

interpretations of constructivist principles our goal was to create a technical platform that supported contextual; intentional; reflective; active and collaborative learning and counselling (Jonassen, 1992). Our goal was to create an accessible, navigable, informative, and interactive platform that was welcoming and effective for clients in transition, regardless of age or computer experience. We challenged ourselves to create a platform and counselling learning modules that enabled clients to engage, grapple and seek to make sense of their career lives (Perkins, 1992), with a goal to create a space where clients and practitioners could, through their exchanges deepen meaning making and offer an opportunity for clients to construct and re-construct individual s career narratives. After promoting the concept of online career services to the Canadian government, we won a contract to deliver our first career intervention online in 2004. This program is four weeks in length and is designed for mid-career adults to provide support in repositioning their career-selves along with learning current work search practices. The program is designed to offer an individual experience allowing users to self-navigate and interact throughout the process while having multiple interaction points throughout with their facilitator. Although the program has been designed with a focus on individual counselling, we do register participants into the program as a cohort which also allows collaborative learning and peer support through forum discussion. Participants work through up-to 25 career guidance modules during the four week experience, with the priority and structure agreed to in a phone meeting assessment prior to the client beginning the program. Since the launch of this program, we have designed, and are delivering, online career services for foreign trained professionals, shorter e-workshops to supplement offerings at career centres, and train-the-trainer courses for new e-career counselors. For the past five years, I have witnessed clients and counselors actively and successfully engage in online career counselling through my organization. Why Does Constructivism Matter to Career Development? Emerging theoretical frameworks, discussed at the beginning of this paper, point to a changing process for the practice of career guidance and the design and delivery of interventions. By seeking to assist individuals as they address career shifts throughout their working lives and as they make meaning of their shifting identities, constructivist approaches are being explored in career interventions. Using facilitated online delivery within the careers field can be another example of a potential constructivist approach to career service. McMahon and Patten (2006) provide a definition for considering career constructivist practice: Fundamental to the constructivist approach is the proactive, self-conceiving and evolving nature of human knowing. In career counselling individuals work to construct and reconstruct reality through the use of language and dialogue with the counsellor. Language is fundamental to the creation of the meaning and knowledge. Knowledge is shaped through dialogue between the career Tannis Goddard Page 9

counsellor and the client, a process which incorporates the construction and coconstruction of an individual s reality (p.7). Inherent in a constructivist paradigm is a goal for meaning-making. In the case of career counselling, it s usually making sense of one s personal drivers and agency and how past experiences and a current context can inform decisions related to one s career. These developmental decisions may be of a more objective nature such as a search for an occupation or career trajectory to match their vocational identity against extrinsic typologies or of a more subjective nature that support the client to focus on their own perspectives of what their career may look like in relation to their own life context and identity (Christensen & Johnston, 2003). Mahoney (2003) describes constructivist practice as approaching the process from the following assumptions: o Active Agency individuals are actively engaged in constructing their lives o Ordering Processes are focused on patterning one s experiences so they provide meaning o The ordering process is mainly self-referent the focus is on personal identity o Development of Self is embedded in social and symbolic systems that surround the individual o These activities are embedded in an ongoing developmental process. Viewing career guidance through a constructivist lense describes a counselling activity that is active, reflective, contextualized and understood through language. Viewing online spaces as a new container for text-based interactions, offers a new experience for articulating, capturing, and reflecting on the language exchange to create meaning. Career Interventions Online One of the challenges when discussing online learning or counselling, is establishing an understanding of what is meant by the online space being referred to and how it is designed to help clients reach learning and career development goals. While instructional design methodology for career interventions is an important consideration for the field as it integrates online services (Sampson, 1999), this paper will not attempt to provide that guidance. To provide a foundational argument for the potential of online spaces as an environment for hosting constructivist career interventions the following assumptions are made: the online intervention is designed with thoughtful consideration to evoke constructivist engagement the experience has a beginning, middle and end and that clients have intentionally registered to participate in the intervention the intervention is a blend of self-directed learning and facilitated counselling conversation and the language of the counselling conversation is primarily conveyed in a-synchronous, text based exchanges Tannis Goddard Page 10

Working from this premise allows an examination into the written narrative exchanges and the space of flow and exchange that extends in an online experience outside of the physical exchange of time and space (Castells, 1996). As career interventions integrate constructivist models, significant attention is focusing on the role of narrative career counselling (Cochran, 1997; McMahon, 2006; Peavy, 1998). To consider the role of narratives, within career counselling is to consider how clients use language to tell the story about their careers and uncover and make meaning of the sometimes hidden stories in their own plots. With a constructivist approach and effective counselling strategies, the client and the counsellor can experience the story together and create a space for clients to write the next chapter of their story, creating their preferred future. McMahon expands on the multiplicity of our life stories and the counselling exchange in this way: The notion that our lives are multi-storied warrants further consideration in relation to our work as career counselors. For example, clients choose the stories they tell us, most usually their dominant story. However, there are also stories they don t tell us, stories that they don t know or realize, stories that they have forgotten and stories that have been silenced. The counsellor and client dialogue facilitates clients connecting with new stories, new meaning, alternative stories or new endings to stories and with a future that prior to their involvement in career counselling they may not have envisioned as possible (2006, p.18). Locating the story-telling in text, online, offers a space for the client s narrative to live, in his/her language, intermixed by the prompts, reflections and dialogue exchanged with the practitioner. Ziegahn (2001), conducted a study of graduate learners to explore how the students talked about sensitive cultural subjects online. In her summary she concludes: Because of the asynchronous online environment, both students and instructors had access to written accounts of the intellectual and emotional connections students made as they pondered new ideas, responses from classmates, and memories of their own experiences. The transforming of belief systems that no longer serve the learner is characterized by many false starts, random associations, and hopefully a few ahas! as students make connection that for them constitute new ground, new associations and conceptualizations (p.149) Although not a study of career intervention, the experience she witnessed appears to be transferable to the career counselling context. This description is consistent with the process I have witnessed in viewing the online career interventions between clients and practitioners. If, as in this example, the online narratives can be a way of knowing or making-meaning (Bruner, 1986), perhaps the online space can be a new environment for the union of word and thought (Vygotsky, 1986, p.212) Tannis Goddard Page 11

Text-Based Narratives as a Meaning-Making Process As Bujold, (2004) summarizes it is not new, of course, to speak of the practice of counseling as both a science and an art, but it is perhaps more appropriate than ever to emphasize this latter aspect when considering the use of narrative in counseling, which requires creative approaches from the practitioners. Considering the online space as a container for career practice embodies this call for creative practice. As short stories are shared from the client around the career themes they ve identified, the dialogue between the client and the counsellor takes on the narrative co-authoring of a story, written in text, for viewing and re-viewing in an online pace. This act of recursive revisiting allows both the client and the practitioner to look and listen for the quiet stories that may help to bring forth new selfunderstanding meaning. As Turner, 1986, recounts meaning arises when we try to put what culture and language have crystallized from the past, together with what we feel, wish and think about our present point in life (p.33). When considering the text based language communication of online spaces, much can be brought forward from studies related to writing therapy. Wright conducted a study in 2002 that examined text-based counselling using the internet and explored the relationship to writing therapy. Specifically she noted the power of reflective focused writing, which draws on imagination and creativity to enable some people to become much more knowledgeable about themselves and to increase their sense of agency (p. 295). The benefit of reflective thinking and writing is a feature that can link closely to the study of using asynchronous online spaces for exploring one s career identity. A quality the online space offers career counselling is the ability to articulate, construct and reconstruct meanings of identity through the written word. Gage (1996) summarizes the power of writing this way: Writing is thinking made tangible, thinking that can be examined because it is on the page and not in the head, invisible floating around. Writing is thinking that can be stopped and tinkered with. It is a way of holding thought still long enough to examine its structures, its possibilities, its flaws. The road to clearer understanding of one s thoughts is traveled on paper. (p. 24) Communication in online spaces offers at once a permanent and permeable experience. The permanence can be characterized by the ability to return to one articulated thoughts through writing, in the logical and timely sequence of record. A client s personal thoughts and dialogic exchange with the practitioner is recorded and can be reviewed throughout an active career intervention or ultimately, made available to the client for review, at another career juncture. This is different from the verbal exchange that occurs in an office based dialogue where the recall of the experience and the meanings made can be harder to recall over time. Coupled with permanence, is the permeable reality of online spaces. Words, phrases, paragraphs of writing can be copied, pasted, and modified just as an author might do in the writing of a manuscript. By tinkering, and intersecting with one s own narrative, a concrete opportunity to articulate meaning and vision a personal career future emerges. By bringing together the career need of collaging stories from fragmented episodes of work life (Collin 1998), and the narrative ways of knowing Tannis Goddard Page 12

that support a self-reflexive understanding (Giddens, 1991), with the ability to organize events into meaningful stories (Polkinghorne 1988), there is a strong argument for providing the career counselling client the opportunity to build this perspective by capturing their unfolding narrative stories through their own writing in online spaces. Conclusion With online career interventions still in their developing phase, much research is required to provide theoretically grounded approaches that bridge between career counselling literature and the emerging knowledge spawned over a decade from educational technology. Based on my own reading of related, published literature; observations and supervision of online practice; feedback from our online clients; and industry discussion, the following is a brief summary of critical areas for research that would significantly contribute to this area of practice. Career Practitioner ICT Competencies Studies of career practitioner computer competencies related to information and communication technologies would provide a base of understanding the technical readiness for practitioners to effectively interact with and use the tools available for this emerging practice. e-practitioner Training & Supervision of Practice Taking one s practice online requires a different set of skills and approaches from the familiar f2f interactions. Based on our own practical observations, this transition requires thoughtful training and supervision of practice. A challenging area is that for a practice so new and unregulated, there is an inherent risk that practitioners will dabble in this field without sufficient knowledge, skills and understanding. Studies to help define the important skills sets and areas of practice along with effective online supervision approaches would validate the experimental work being done at an operational level. Effective Program and Instructional Design for Facilitated Online Career Interventions My own literature reviews have not uncovered a single piece of research targeting the effective design of facilitated, online career interventions. There is literature associated with self-directed processes, but not facilitated. Because this process is an interaction between information, activities, reflection and online counselling dialogue, ongoing research into effective design models for varying methods and needs is required. Tannis Goddard Page 13

Effectiveness of Online Working Alliance Some literature is emerging about the quality and effectiveness of a working alliance in therapeutic online counselling. A review of the literature produces one paper that considers online working alliances in careers context (Neault, 2006). Conducting experimental studies related to the quality of the online working alliance would be s significant contributor to the discussion. Translating Online Narrative Practice into effective Objective and Subjective Career Actions As discussed above, career interventions exist to assist individuals in their developmental decisions related to their objective and subjective career needs. Examining different design and facilitation models to address different intended program outcomes would help guide the industry in effectively matching client needs to online intervention models. Assessment of Client Suitability Because my own experience of witnessing clients online is limited to the use of my own platform, it will be important that research is conducted on a variety of platforms and using various technical tools to create a profile of effectiveness for varying users across age, gender, culture, language, and literacy levels, along with considerations for computer skills and ICT comfort. This paper begins a foundational discussion about where and how facilitated online services may fit within the current career service needs. As online career practice develops as an intervention, designed to meet the career needs of individuals in the twenty-first century, it is critical that thoughtful discourse develop regarding effective methods to maintaining the qualities of practitioning that hallmark career service while embracing this new delivery approach. It is important that we grapple with our own meaning about online spaces as practitioners and that strive to bring forward emerging career theory into this new intervention space. Tannis Goddard Page 14

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