The School Counselor: Competencies in a Constructivist Model of Counseling for Career Development

Counseling on career development service is difficult to quantify in the immediately observable results after completion of a certain activity. A normal question arises in this context: ‘Who is responsible for this?’ We believe it is the responsibility of several factors aimed at educating and training young people to achieve professional development, and the school counselor represents one of these factors. This paper proposes a theoretical and research approach to the process of career counseling from a constructivist perspective. Why constructivist counseling? This approach is an alternative that can be translated to a certain group of beneficiaries in order to support identification and development of a path forward in professional life which will provide them with the opportunity to achieve success. We underline the term “alternative” in order to draw attention to the fact that this is one of the working variants that can be employed by counselors in accordance with the needs and characteristics of each group of beneficiaries. This paper presents an adaptation of the constructivist approach in career counseling in the school medium, where we support it as a strategy to the school counselors, considering them as professionals. We hope that this model would be an alternative to the traditional model of counseling, based on the idea of person-job fit. The analysis of school counselors’ activities is based on two directions: a) the choice of intervention strategies in relation to activities specific to the school they work in (middle school, theoretical/technological/vocational high school), and b) professional experience (beginners or not).