ABSTRACT
A defining feature of career counselling in the twenty-first century has been the exponential growth in the influence of constructivism, which has irrevocably changed the process of career counselling and the relationship between and expectations of career counsellors and clients. Influenced by holistic understandings of career and the inseparability of career and life, discussion about the fusion of career counselling and personal counselling has ensued and resulted in constructivist approaches becoming firmly established. In 1993, a ‘wake-up call’ was delivered to career counselling in the form of Savickas’s seminal article that drew attention to the mismatch between the rapidly changing world of work, the greater diversity of client groups and the relatively unchanged field of career counselling, which was, at that time, still steeped in the positivist traditions of the early–mid-twentieth century. This article and subsequent calls for reform in the field (e.g. Savickas, 2003) were founded on concerns that, without change, career counselling was in danger of becoming less relevant as a helping profession because of its inability to adequately respond to the increasing complexity of constructing careers in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
