Multicultural Competence in Career Counseling

I would first like to comment on last week’s class before diving into the assigned readings for this week.  While I appreciate the incorporation of getting out of the classroom and exploring resources, I found the assignment somewhat below our academic expectations.  I have not been asked to do an activity like that since I was in high school.  I understand the usefulness of becoming acquainted with the resources, however I do not think we needed to spend as much time on it and could have made the activity more practical to what we are doing with clients.  I can see using the activity as maybe a homework assignment for a client that could possibly be started in session if we had access to a computer in a clinical setting.  I would not spend an entire session or part of a session working on this with a client though.  To tailor it to my clinical needs, I would use some of the information we were asked to gather and assign it to the client for homework.  I would ask them to write down or note what they struggled with and what they learned.  This could be done to not only help them learn information gathering skills, but also improve their self-efficacy and problem solving skills.  The activity helped me understand what difficulties a client might encounter at home when assigning this for homework which is necessary information.  

Focusing on Byars-Winston and Fouad’s article (2006) on multicultural competence in career counseling, I found a specific salient line in the article that struck me.  It was about the assumed equality of opportunity and career choice being characterized in major career development theories and practice and how this is not always the case for people who are not of Euro-American decent and ideals.  Almost all of the psychological theories and practices we study are based on Euro-American culture, however everyone that we treat and everyone in our communities are not of this culture.  This statement has been in the back of my mind all semester in regards to what we are learning in the classroom and how I am applying our theories to real life situations.  I think the best perspective to take on this is to make these experiences client-centered and put culture and race out on the table.  It is not our jobs to assimilate people of non-Euro-American cultures or dominant religions to the ideals of the theories we are learning.  The most important aspect of this is to learn where your client is coming from, what their value system is, and what you can offer them within the context of those two things. 

Brown, D. (2012).  Career information, career counseling, and career development (10^th ed.). New York: Pearson Education, Inc.

Byars-Winston, A. M., & Fouad, N. A. (2006). Metacognition and multicultural competence: Expanding the culturally appropriate career counseling model. Career Development Quarterly, 54(3), 187-201.