Building careers through an interdisciplinary approach

Abstract

Career development support deals with the progress of the professional part of our lives. Every career is accompanied by decision situations, opportunities seized or missed, to which we respond according to our increasing or decreasing security level and the resources available. Both the theory and the daily practice of career counselling and guidance are constantly working with the concept of decision, which it puts into a life-course perspective. Thus, every decision has a past, a present, and a projected future temporal dimension. In Europe, the training and further training of career guidance counsellors is based on an interdisciplinary approach. At the same time, the way each discipline views decision-making and the issues it raises differ, while the results of each discipline have an impact on the other. In this article, I explore three concepts: a) decision, b) the life course, and c) the decision-related issues of each discipline. The literature on decision theory is now vast, and this article does not, of course, undertake a comprehensive treatment of the subject. It does, however, draw the reader's attention to aspects that can be considered in the training and practice of counsellors