Story crafting: strategies for facilitating narrative career counselling

an article by Mary McMahon and Mark Watson (affiliation(s) not provided) published International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance Volume 12 Issue 3 (October 2012)

Abstract

Narrative career counselling is a growing force in career guidance and counselling that offers a direction for the field to respond to the needs of increasingly diverse client groups.

In this article, we review established and emerging approaches to narrative career counselling, then focus on the emerging story telling approach.

We offer examples of how career counsellors may facilitate narrative career counselling through three levels of story crafting questions, as well as mapping and scaffolding, which are illustrated by a case example.

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Telling Stories of Career Assessment

an article by Mary McMahon (The University of Queensland, Australia) and Mark Watson (Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Port Elizabeth, South Africa) published in Journal of Career Assessment Volume 20 Number 4 (November 2012)

Abstract

In the field of career development, there is an acknowledged relationship between career assessment and career counselling.

Traditional career assessment and more recent narrative approaches to career counselling are perceived as having an uneasy relationship because of their different philosophical bases.

A sustainable future story for the field could be constructed that is guided by the complementarities of both.

This article considers this potential complementarity and describes a qualitative Integrative Structured Interview (ISI) Process to construct stories about Holland’s Self-Directed Search (SDS).

Narrative career counselling and the story telling approach are the foundation of a qualitative ISI process based on story crafting questions to demonstrate the complementarity of career assessment and story telling.

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