Reflecting the Times: Effective Strategies for Advising Clients in a Tough Job Market, Providing Career Support with Both Hope and Transparency

By Kaila Kea-Lewis

Acknowledging a complex job market, this article highlights the importance of addressing clients’ current challenges with both realism and optimism. It also presents strategies for career development professionals to provide support. The article concludes by noting career practitioners as artists who shape the client experience and help them adapt to evolving workforce changes.

Connecting Career and Mental Health from a CIP Perspective

By Denise Saunders, Debra Osborn, and Seth C.W. Hayden

Cognitive Information Processing (CIP) Theory provides a framework for consideration of mental health concerns in the career development process. Connecting mental health and career offers insight for both career service providers and clients. This article provides a brief overview of CIP theory as related to mental health and shares CIP-based interventions for use in practice.

An International Practitioner’s Tools for Expanding Cultural Competence

By Rasha Abul Nasr

Both the culture shock process and the change cycle are marked by an emotional and mental journey that includes phases of adjustment, adaptation, and acceptance. They reflect the challenges and growth that come from stepping out of one’s comfort zone. Understanding and utilizing these processes supports practitioners’ work with both international and local clients as “culture” can have multiple definitions.

Test-Driving Success: How High School Internships Are Aided by Assessment

By Allison Montiel

High school internships serve as transformative bridges between academic theory and real-world practice. They empower students to discover their passions, build professional networks, and gain invaluable skills that textbooks alone cannot teach. Career assessments can aid career development professionals in connecting students with internships that best fit their needs.

The Path from School to Work: Career Self-Management Behaviors and Their Allies

Nurten Karacan Ozdemir & Hakan Buyukcolpan

To understand how career service professionals can develop career management skills, researchers examined the relationship between social-emotional learning, career decision self-efficacy, vocational outcome expectations, and career engagement. Social-emotional skills were positively related to career decision self-efficacy, vocational outcome expectations, and career engagement. Career practitioners can use this research to support students’ school-to-work transitions.

Demystifying Quiet Quitting and Quiet Firing Through a Racialized Lens for Career Practitioners

By Frank Gorritz FitzSimons

This conceptual article ties together the processes of quiet quitting and quiet firing through a racialized lens. The underpinnings of these phenomena in a world significantly impacted by structural violence and oppression towards minoritized communities are holistically explored. It is the first in a series on this topic.

Creating My Career Path: Embracing Change in My Journey: the 59th Annual NCDA Poetry and Art Contest

By Kymmie Cartledge

NCDA encourages the use of artistic expression to reflect on a personal journey, career goals, and aspirations while embracing change. The annual Poetry and Art Contest is one tradition that engages all ages in the celebration of National Career Development Month.

CareerBot 3000 Powered by ChatGPT

CareerBot 3000 is a free generative AI tool that helps people explore careers or get job search help. Enter your top priorities and resume to receive a list of ten job titles with explanations of why those might fit you. Select a preferred job title and location to get suggestions of top employers, keywords, and resume and interview advice. The final prompt allows you to seek additional guidance. Practitioners will appreciate CareerBot’s ability to help generate ideas and to be tailored (remixed) to fit clients’ needs.

Tech Tip submitted by Kathyy Battee-Freeman, kathyy@uis.edu