Using various approaches in career counselling for traditionally disadvantaged (and other) learners : some limitations of a new frontier

Abstract

Career counselling in a post-modern South Africa needs to shift from an objective approach to a more interpretative process. New and creative ways of assessment need to be developed. Counsellors need to be facilitators rather than experts who do all the thinking and decision making. They should allow their clients to speak, act, think and choose for themselves: in other words, clients must be led to accept responsibility for their own choices and development. In a post-modern, multicultural country this is not always as easy as it may appear to be. The purpose of this study was to compare the traditional and post-modern career-counselling approaches towards traditionally deprived learners and all other learners, focusing specifically on the practical implementation of both approaches. A case study is used as an example of efforts to justify the use of various approaches in the collection and utilisation of comprehensive data (both objective and subjective) for career counselling