Career Development

Melissa & Doug LLC, a fast-growing toy maker in Wilton, Conn., puts applicants through an interview process so grueling that one job seeker says she left in tears and felt psychologically traumatized.

So, as you might expect, there are those who have NOT knocked my socks off. In fact, their actions left me wanting to double knot the shoe laces. Bad people? No, not at all. Maybe lazy. Or perhaps, just perhaps, these folks had never been in a positive networking environment before. One in which people give first - not as a result of being helped in advance.

Every year at about this time I find myself humming, "It's May; it's May," a song from the musical Camelot. This year I took a closer look at the lyrics. I had missed the second half of a couplet mid-song: "The month of great dismay." For the many people on the job market who are still in limbo, that line has probably become a too-familiar refrain. Now that you've reached May without a job, what are your options?

Michael Van Gorkom was laid off by Yahoo in late April. He didn't panic. He didn't rush off to a therapist. Instead, the 33-year-old Santa Monica resident discovered that being jobless "kind of settled nicely."

Michael Van Gorkom was laid off by Yahoo in late April. He didn't panic. He didn't rush off to a therapist. Instead, the 33-year-old Santa Monica resident discovered that being jobless "kind of settled nicely."

With the unemployment rate hitting a new 25-year high Friday, many workers and layoff victims in the worst-suffering industries are looking for safer sectors.

Melissa & Doug LLC, a fast-growing toy maker in Wilton, Conn., puts applicants through an interview process so grueling that one job seeker says she left in tears and felt psychologically traumatized.

A few months ago, Andrea Kornfeld was working on a computer program to shave milliseconds off of transactions at Merrill Lynch. Now, she's spending her severance pay on a mosquito net and malaria pills for her new job: as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching computer skills to high-school students in Cameroon.

For learning to occur, younger students in particular often need to experience learning in a way that is meaningful to them. Teaching about careers to these students can be challenging especially since the concept of a career represents an aspect of human development which is far off in the future and associated with something that is "adult-like." The idea of a vocation or career represents a certain level of abstractness that students may not be developmentally ready for. Teaching middle and high school students about careers through activities and games may serve as the perfect conduit as students naturally like to learn while being active and engaged.

When I was training to be a professional counselor (1969-1971), the vast majority of my professors (and my colleagues) stressed that the "ideal" counselor would strive to view all clients with 'unconditional positive regard' and conduct their counseling sessions in a 'client centered' and 'client directed' approach taught by Carl Rogers, the most prominent and respected counselor educator of the era. While my natural personality is to be very extroverted, assertive, and directive, I learned and practiced the Rogerian techniques as I began to provide career counseling and train other counselors.

Those who are unemployed certainly undergo one of life's most traumatic experiences. It is a stressful, life-changing event that can lead to negative mental, physical, and emotional consequences, jeopardize financial security, erode the sense of identity, and cause family relationships to deteriorate.

The recession is driving home a bitter truth about the 21st-century job market: A tidy, linear path to a secure career is increasingly hard to find.

Promoting Career Counseling: Ideas from NCDA

Q: I'm mentoring a young, ambitious engineer in our company. He's competent and demonstrates his energetic drive every day. However, he constantly makes spelling and grammatical errors in his writings. I've asked him to utilize spell-checking and re-read his emails. But mistakes such as confusing "our" with "are" and "there" and "their" aren't picked up with the computer tools. It's been over a year and he's still making these mistakes. What would you suggest as an appropriate next course of action? I am not sure if there are any additional classes he can take to improve his grammar/spell-checking skills.