Weekly Insight 8

            Last week’s class project helped me gain better knowledge on the importance of accessing occupational systems on the internet and how to guide a client that may need to change their career because of life situations.  Also, this week’s reading on Metacognition and Multicultural Competence: Expanding the Culturally Appropriate Career Counseling Mode gave me great insight on being aware of culture-specific assumptions.  I would, of course, have to further my own education in multi-cultural counseling to gain more expertise in working with minority clients.  

During class, it was helpful to learn how to use the internet to assist the “client” in finding a new career.  Having access to systems like O*Net are important in helping a client because of the information offered on the site.  Some information offered is the job title, tasks, income levels, Holland Codes (personality traits), and other occupations related to their choice.  This information is vital to the client in deciding if the occupation chosen for them meets their ability to complete the tasks, income requirements to take care of their household, match their personality traits, and possibly other occupations they did not even think would be available to them.

The article was very informative on helping a counselor becoming aware of their culture-specific assumption by going through a self-reflective process. “By engaging in this ongoing self-reflective process, they will be more likely to make accurate assessments of their counseling effectiveness based on active self-awareness and multiple sources of data from the client and be challenged to actively build their repertoire of culturally appropriate intervention strategies with racial and ethnic minority clients.” (Byars-Winston & Fouad, 2006, p. 197) I believe the intentions of the article are to help a counselor relate more with minority clients and help guide them through career decision-making based off the client's beliefs and barriers. While this is a great concept, I have researched our local school district (School District of Lancaster) to find out their graduation rates.  I chose this school district because the majority of students are minorities.  Considering the article was published seven years ago, it looks as if not much has changed as far as minority students’ graduating high school.  "During the school year 2010-2011 the graduation rate was 74%.  Of those who graduated 49% were Hispanic, 24% Black, 7% Asian, and 18% White." (Pennsylvania Department of Education, 2011) While career decision-making is important, looking at these low graduation rates, it seems career counselors have not come far in assisting minority high school students in obtaining post secondary education.  Maybe money should be spent researching how to assist minority students through to graduation.

Byars-Winston, A. M., and Fouad, N. A. (2006). Metacognition and Multicultural Competence: Expanding the Culturally Appropriate Career Counseling Model. The Career Development Quarterly, 54, 187-201.

Pennsylvania Department of Education. (2011) 4-Year Cohort Graduation Rates. Retrieved from      http://www.education.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt/community/pennsylvania_department_of_education/7237/info/757639