Week 10

            I found Chapter 18 to be an interesting chapter, not so much because of how helpful the content would be for me as a clinician, but in how career counselors are dealing with creative destruction. Creative destruction is one my favorite concepts in economics, which is simply the notion that as technological innovation occurs, simple, mechanical jobs are replaced by more complex, cerebral jobs. For example, modern advancements in engineering made having certain types of laborers unnecessary, however it also required companies using this new technology to hire trained individuals to run the machinery.

            So as we progress as a species, our jobs are going to become more complex as technology advances and jobs for unskilled and untrained individuals will steadily decrease. Now to apply this to career counseling, one of the trends that they mention is “graduate school courses dealing with career development information will continue to decrease their emphasis on occupational information” (Brown, 2012).  This makes a lot of sense with the information that is available with ONET. If Career Counseling was simply matching a person’s traits with jobs that fit that personality, then Career Counseling as a field would be slowly replaced by this new technology. All you would have to do is log into a computer, take the appropriate personality assessment and be paired with a number of options that fit the results of that assessment.  So it makes sense that Career Counselors are thinking ahead and realizing that they need to focus on the actual process of counseling an individual by taking into account a number of factors that would influence the career decision-making process.

            What hasn’t made a lot of sense to me throughout this class is why I need to take an actual class on Career Development to learn about ONET. Maybe it’s because I went to a Catholic High School, and my experience differed from my peers in public high schools, but it would have been really nice to have access to a database like ONET. I sort of wonder whether some career counselors have the mindset that they’d rather take a reactive instead a proactive approach to using ONET because it’s more likely to ensure the future of their career. If every student in high school was required to use ONET and was aware of the process, I wonder whether many individuals would feel the need to go to a career counselor. I don’t mean to demean what a career counselor is capable of accomplishing with a client, however if an individual feels like he has the tools (ONET) to accomplish a task himself then he is less likely to spend the time or resources on seeing a professional.

References
Brown, D. (2007). Career information, career counseling, and career development (9th ed.). New York: Pearson Education, Inc.