2. Effective career counseling for Indigenous groups revolves upon the idea of cultural competence. Why is it crucial to acknowledge cultural diversity in this setting, how can career counselors actively respect and engage with the legacy of Indigenous communities?

Reference:

If you have taken some psychology courses, you will no doubt have come across the name of Carl Rogers. He introduced the notion of client-centered or person-centered therapy (Rogers, 1951). Unlike most of his contemporaries, Rogers considered himself a humanist. He believed that everyone has some good in them, and that everyone has the capacity to solve their own problems and to grow and thrive. His model of counselling had, and still has, a tremendous influence on the counselling profession and on the way that we interact with our clients. Rogers believed that the counselling relationship was key to client success in counselling. He believed that there are three conditions of the relationship that are necessary and sufficient for therapeutic change to occur. These are:

• Empathic understanding: You are able to see the situation from the clients' perspective, as if you were walking in their shoes, and communicate your awareness to the client.
• Genuineness: What you feel on the inside matches what you are showing to the client on the outside.
• Unconditional positive regard: You respect and care for the individual and the goodness within, even if you don't like the things the person has done.

There is considerable empirical evidence that therapeutic change is less likely if these conditions are not met. While some scholars argue that these conditions are not sufficient, most agree they are the foundation of a therapeutic relationship.

Creating a Mattering Climate is not simply about showing others you care. It is more complex. It involves a set of beliefs about how we integrate into the various social contexts of our lives. It constitutes and sustains one's meaning to others and one's importance in the interpersonal world (Schultheiss, 2007).

Four different levels of mattering have been described in the literature (Amundson, 2003):

1. Visibility: Having clients feel that someone recognizes their presence and that efforts are being made to ensure that they feel welcome
2. Importance: Taking the time to listen to the problems that are being presented along with the underlying feelings. A unique aspect of counselling sessions is the fact that clients have the undivided attention of another person (the counsellor). The acronym SOLER is often used to describe the attending stance that is used by counsellors in individual career counselling:
   • Squarely facing the client
   • Openness of posture
   • Leaning forward slightly
   • Eye contact (this depends on the culture of the client and may not be appropriate)
   • Relaxed
3. Dependence: The third level of mattering occurs when clients have an opportunity to not only receive help but also to offer help to others. For many people, seeing themselves as having something to offer others is a major step forward in terms of rebuilding self-confidence. In career counselling, this can occur in group situations when an individual has an opportunity to help other group members. Finding client strengths and then ways in which they can help others using those strengths is another way to facilitate a client's sense of personal worth.
4. Ego-extension: The fourth level of mattering is about having established a personal as well as professional relationship with the client. In many ways this positive feeling is a natural consequence of responding to clients with empathy, genuineness, unconditional positive regard, and flexibility. This does not mean that personal friendship is established, but rather a condition of personal caring that goes beyond the perceived boundaries of professionalism. With this level of connection, clients believe that counsellors care for them as people and are interested in following their progress over an extended period of time.

The most important instrument you have as a counsellor is YOU. You need to be comfortable with being authentic and open. Be a therapeutic person and be clear about who you are. You need to be willing to grow, to risk, to care, and to be involved.

Clients come to see counsellors because they are stuck. We, as counsellors, are essentially "reframing agents" in that we help clients look at their concerns from different angles. All clients present a complex, detailed story regardless of the complexity of their presenting issue; however, many clients may begin with silence. They may feel awkward in the presence of an "expert." The counsellor is an expert but only as it relates to facilitating the client finding their way towards meeting their counselling goals. The client is the expert on their own experiences, needs, values, interests, and worldview. To get things started a counsellor may ask something like "what brings you here today?" or "what would you like to talk about today?" The client may or may not talk about career concerns, but it is the counsellor's job to establish rapport and safe, caring environment for the client. Clients will begin talking about their career concerns when they are ready.

Some typical career concerns are:

• Making informed, suitable career decisions
• Accessing training to follow career goals
• Finding job opportunities
• Understanding career options and labour market realities
• Preparing work search materials (e.g., resumes)
• Developing work search strategies (e.g., networking, informational interviews, presentation/interviewing skills)
• Maintaining stable, decent employment
• Improving personal and professional skills (e.g., co-worker relationships)
• Dealing with challenges (e.g., childcare, drug abuse, wages issues, burn-out, workplace bullying)

As you can see, there is a wide range of issues that clients may present with. They transverse work, life, and learning domains. The problem is viewed through the eyes of the client and is accepted by the counsellor as stated by the client.

Client problems are most often ambiguous and complex. Follow-up questions are a good way to begin to explore the problem further (e.g., What do you want to achieve? Where would you like to be?). General counselling techniques such as empathy, summarizing, paraphrasing, clarifying, and probing will be used throughout. A counsellor may work with props such as a flip chart to help organize the client's stories and provide a visual that helps the problem seem more manageable to the client. The counselling goal at this stage is to find out about the social-contextual, cognitive, affective, and behavioural factors that inform the client's problem. A counsellor and client may explore influences of family, culture, gender roles, social roles, traumatic experiences, and client physical health. It is critical that throughout their interactions, the counsellor communicates their understanding of what the client is saying with accuracy, empathy, and compassion. The counsellor needs to understand the meaning of events for the client in the context of the client's worldview.

One way to access what is important and meaningful to the client is to consider the use of visual aids to clarify and capture the significance of the problem and where the client sees themself in relation to it. Card sorts, journaling, lifelines, freehand drawings, and photographic images can help your client use both right and left-brain functions to access what is important.

The term "assessment" is often used synonymously with "test" or "tool." Although career counsellors may use a variety of tests/tools, this is part of a larger and ongoing assessment "process." The Ordre des Conseillers et Conseillres d'Orientation du Qubec & CERIC's 2010 publication, Assessment Guide for Career and Guidance CounsellorsLinks to an external site., described assessment as an ongoing process and shared a four-phased conceptual model:

• Gathering: Obtaining information that is relevant to the person's situation
• Decoding: Organizing the information in clear and career/guidance counselling purpose-oriented language
• Analyzing: Systematic and methodical review of the information collected and decoded in order to gain sufficient understanding of the person's situation
• Communicating: Written or oral expression of the information resulting from the professional judgement concerning the person's situation

Although specific tests/tools can support these phases, more broadly assessment can serve as a:

• Method for enhancing therapy
• Problem-solving aid
• Decision-making aid
• Aid to focus on developmental issues
• Psycho-educational tool
• Descriptive tool

In his article, Niles (1996) talked about emotional support, informational support, and appraisal support. Emotional support is generally achieved by the types of relational interventions described in the former lesson. Informational support enables clients to help themselves, facilitating self-efficacy and a sense of control over their counselling and career development processes. Appraisal support provides opportunities to acquire information in service of making self-evaluations and to facilitate client self-awareness that aids in problem solving and decision making. It also offers a way of clarifying career concerns and identifying their career counselling goals, shedding light on the salience of career in a client's life (i.e., central or on the periphery). For example, it reveals how clients view career: Is it the expression of personal fulfillment, fulfillment of familial expectations or of financial needs/goals, or a combination of these?

The Hope-Action Theory you were introduced earlier in the course describes a hope-centred model of a career development process situated within contextual environmental factors. The first two phases are Self-Reflection and Self-Clarity:

• Self-Reflection encompasses the examination of individual characteristics and qualities. It can be thought of as asking questions about oneself (e.g., what do I enjoy doing?).
• Self-Clarity occurs when the answers to those questions are clear. Assessment tests/tools can certainly support this process but so can open-ended questioning, journalling, or other less formal/structured processes.

Amundson and Poehnell's Career Pathways (1998) presented the Wheel framework which provides guidance on what characteristics career counsellors might consider within the assessment process. The bottom half of the wheel comprises internal, individual characteristics (i.e., skills, interests, values, and personal style). You will find Modules 6-7 examine these categories in more depth. The upper half of the wheel comprises external factors (i.e., significant others, learning experiences, work and life experiences, and career opportunities). You will find Module 8 covers this topic more deeply. The lines between the segments of the wheel are dotted to illustrate that the relative weight or importance of each of these segments might not be equal or might change over time. For example, a new parent might prioritize significant others whereas a student might prioritize applying for appropriate learning experiences and a recent graduate might require work that will develop competencies in specific skill areas to prepare for certification or licensure.

It is beneficial to use more than one form of data during the gathering phase. First, different kinds of data give us different kinds of insights into the person. Second, client issues and goals arise in different contexts, so the data generated may capture those contexts. The counsellor and client can "triangulate" their impressions of the client to get a rich well-rounded description of the client. Each form of data has some strengths and weaknesses associated with it, so avoid a lopsided overreliance on one form of data.

Traditional quantitative testing approaches are based on the psychology of individual differences informed by statistical applications. They evolved when psychology was informed primarily by a positivist epistemology. They support the trait and factor theories of career development. Recall that trait and factor theories say we can match the person to the occupation. Problem solving is the goal of this approach and it offers a finite solution. It has also been called the "test-and-tell approach." When these approaches were the dominant form of assessment, the counsellor was considered the "expert," and the therapeutic alliance was not considered to be important. Contemporary thinking has influenced how we now view quantitative tests. They are no longer seen as the only information needed to make a career decision. Clients are invited to share in the assessment process and goals.

For effective and ethical administration, career counsellors must understand the properties and purpose of each tool and the effects of taking each test on the test-taker. They work collaboratively with the client to determine what, if any, instruments to use, and to interpret client results in conjunction with alternative sources of information. Counsellors need a thorough understanding of how each test they use is constructed, and what it can and cannot do, so that a client can realistically understand its purpose and value. They need to be able to explain the test to a client in plain language and to answer the client's questions about what the test "says" about them. Therefore, career counsellors need to understand the psychometric properties of the specific tool. Before administering any instrument, counsellors should be trained in test administration and have read the manual and the latest research about the instrument.

Here is some of the basic information about the psychometric components of these types of assessment interventions.

Validity	Validity equals accuracy. A test is valid if it measures what it is intended to measure.
Reliability	Reliability equals consistency. A test's consistency depends on its ability to provide dependable, consistent results (i.e., scores), for example, across time.
Standardization	This is extremely important if you want a test that can be administered across groups in the same way and still be reliable and valid. To assess overall performance, many psychological tests employ a standardization sample which allows the test makers to normal distribution which can be used for comparison of any specific future test score. A standardization sample is a large sample of test takers who represent the population for whom the test is intended. This standardization sample is also referred to as the norm group (or norming group). This aspect of a test is necessary when a counsellor is assessing a person's standing on an attribute or trait in comparison to others (the norm group), for example: a random sample of Canadian adults a sample of middle managers a sample of people with schizophrenia
Response Bias	People may be motivated to disguise or distort their true feelings, attitudes, and traits for a variety of reasons. Note that not all response biases are a deliberate or conscious effort to undersell or oversell oneself. Tests often include items which are designed to statistically distinguish between "honest" and "dishonest" responses or to statistically correct for any response biases.

Qualitative testing, on the other hand, evolved in response to the more humanistic, contemporary approaches to psychology. Qualitative methods of assessment are flexible, open-ended, holistic, and non-statistical. In these approaches the client becomes the expert rather than the counsellor. It is assumed that clients can solve their own career problems and will benefit from doing so. Personal and career issues are no longer seen as separate. There is a greater acknowledgement of contextual factors. Career has become a subjective construction, with emotional components. It is no longer restricted to objective, quantifiable data. Qualitative assessment "is intended to encourage individuals to tell their own career stories, and uncover their subjective careers and life themes" (McMahon & Patton, 2002, p. 59).

By blending results from both quantitative and qualitative methods, a rich array of information can be blended into the client's story. Quantitative measures provide some level of standardization while qualitative methods provide information that is often not captured by traditional "tests." Unfortunately, despite the plethora of effective qualitative tools to help clients meet their career counselling goals, some practitioners are still reluctant to incorporate qualitative measures.

An important note on the impact of culture: If the counsellor uses standardized testing for the purpose of interest, personality, and aptitude assessment, if possible, the results should be interpreted based on the norms of the culture of the client. If the test has not been normed for that population, the test should be scrutinized for Western bias (especially in terms of the language used and the theory, constructs, and concepts behind the test) and applicability to the individual test taker. It is imperative that the counsellor be familiar with the norms and other psychometric properties of each instrument, especially its weaknesses in terms of application for a diverse clientele. In some cases, the instrument will have been normed for a number of groups and may be available in different languages (e.g., Holland's Self-Directed SearchLinks to an external site., has been published in 25 languages). The counsellor must be aware, however, that cultural factors will undoubtedly affect the interpretation of the results.

It has been suggested that the use of objective measures like those espoused by trait and factor adherents can be problematic. For example, Neumann et al. (2000) argued that using objective measures, as opposed to qualitative or subjective interventions with Indigenous clients, "is likely to stunt the career development process if not alienate the client for two reasons: Failure to acknowledge the rich web of relationships between Aboriginal people and other aspects of creation may result in the imposition of mainstream values on Aboriginal people... Furthermore, the introduction of a counselling framework so out of line with Aboriginal worldview may result in the loss of clients' perhaps already tentative faith in the career exploration process" (p. 174).

Subjective, more qualitative assessment tools tend to be more culturally sensitive because the interpretation of the results, although collaborative, is primarily client generated. Leong and colleagues have developed a culturally sensitive model of career counselling - the Career-Development Assessment and Counseling model or C-DAC (Leong, 1996). The C-DAC model focuses on the concept of cultural identity to help therapists understand career development, career processes, and goals. The theoretical foundation of the model is Super's Life-Space Life-Span theory of career development that includes culturally determined work values and roles. Assessment tools are used qualitatively within the therapeutic relationship which allows considerable flexibility in interpretation.

5.4: Selecting & Administering Tools

Firstly, consider what you know of your client and the presenting problems. Would a qualitative assessment tool be a better choice to address the information you and your client are seeking? Perhaps a combination of both quantitative and qualitative is warranted.

Consider the items themselves. Think about what might be missing. Consider the test's face validity; do the items seem oddly worded or frivolous and will they make sense to clients? Does the assessment use language that is biased against a particular group (e.g., gender stereotypes)? Are definitions of the constructs being measured provided (i.e., scale and/or sub-scale descriptors)? Do the items easily relate to what results look like? Is there sufficient information provided to help you interpret the results? Is the test dependent on mood or other contextual factors? Is it a long test that may require more than one session or breaks?

Consider the parametric data on the norms of the test and claims of reliability and validity. Is there standardized administration information available and is it understandable?

Once you've selected an appropriate tool and you're ready to administer the tool, the following steps are generally recommended:

• Develop rapport - think back to the first lesson in this Module
• Identify the client's goal/concerns first - i.e., select tools tied to the reason a client is seeking support at this time
• Invite clients to participate in the process
• Provide a rationale for testing
• Explore client's expectations - i.e., tests don't offer magic answers; they are one source of information
• Obtain consent/agreement to do the test(s)
• client for the test and make accommodations if needed
• Follow the manual guidelines
• After administration ask your client about their experience of taking the test