ABSTRACT
Supporting clients to make effective decisions is at the heart of careers work, and yet who decides what is effective? Despite the dominance in the West of the rational matching approach, providing information and reviewing the pros and cons are rarely sufficient to make a decision. This might work for bounded decisions where all the information is known and there are few variables, but career coaching is a complex domain. Clients can also experience “choice overload”.
In this chapter, we explore how people actually make decisions, in terms of both their behaviour and internal cognitive processing. The implications for career coaching are considered: in particular, how to explore the client’s decision-making and enable the client to evaluate its effectiveness. We also outline a career decision-making method to use with clients that incorporates both reason and intuition.
