Career Tips - The Very First Stage Up to 1919 in Career Counseling History

Career counseling within the U.S. was created within the latter area of the nineteenth century from social upheaval, transition, and alter. This new profession was referred to by historians like a "progressive social reform movement targeted at eliminating poverty and low quality living conditions created through the rapid industrialization and consequent migration of individuals to major towns in the turn from the twentieth centuryInch (Whiteley, 1984).

The social upheaval that delivered career counseling was indicated by losing jobs within the farming sector, growing demands for employees in heavy industry, losing "permanent" jobs around the family farm to new emerging technologies for example trucks, the growing urbanization of the nation, and also the concomitant requires services to satisfy this internal migration pattern, all to retool for that new industrial economy. Coming back veterans from The First World War and individuals displaced by their return also increased the requirement for career counseling.

The main focus from the first stage was job positioning. Parsons (1909) is frequently known as parents of career counseling and started like a social worker heavily affected through the work of Jane Addams in Chicago. In Boston, Parsons established funds house for youthful individuals who were either already employed or presently unemployed, or have been displaced throughout this era of rapid change. The positioning of those youthful people into new jobs was among the initial and many important reasons from the new agencies which had come to light throughout this era.

Key point within the establishment of career counseling was the growing participation of mental testing with advisors. Mental tests grew to become an essential and necessary area of the first functional stage, that's, self-assessment. Testing gave counselor respectability in American society (Whiteley, 1984). With no scientific procedure to warrant this primary step of career counseling, it's unlikely that career counseling could have been so commonly recognized. Within the late 1800s, Francis Galton, Wilhelm Wundt, James McKean Cattell, and Alfred Binet made important contributions towards the recently emerging area of mental testing. You should observe that most of the early founders were quite reluctant in prescribing mental tests because many such commonly available tests was not carefully analyzed and investigated for specific application to careers.

Another essential element in the establishment of career counseling was the first support for vocational guidance that originated from the progressive social reform movement. "The linkage between this movement and vocational guidance was largely built around the problem from the growing exploitation and misuse of people" (Aubrey, 1977, p. 290). Child labor laws and regulations provided much impetus for such collaboration because this campaign to stop the exploitation of kids increased. Even though some states, starting with Pennsylvania, had established minimum age laws and regulations within the latter 1 / 2 of the nineteenth century, the very first decade from the last century ongoing to determine over 500, 000 children from 10 to 13 years old employed, and effective federal legislation wasn't passed before the passage from the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. Parsons would be a prominent leader within the find it difficult to eliminate child labor.

Using this transition came the founding in 1913 from the National Vocational Guidance Association (NVGA the National Career Development Association [NCDA]) in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Third National Conference on Vocational Guidance (Maker, 1942).