Evidence Based Practice in Career and Workforce Development Interventions

Résumé 0

In this chapter, we identified two intervention strategies that we argue meet the criteria of evidence-based interventions. The first of these addresses issues of career choice and the research indicates there are five critical ingredients that counselors need to include in career choice counseling. Based on meta-analyses, these five critical ingredients are written exercises, individual interpretations and feedback, world of work information, modeling opportunities, and attention to building support for choices within one’s social network. More research in this area, however, may provide greater clarity to clinicians. We suggest that researchers continue to explore the five critical ingredients with the goal of providing more specificity to clinicians. The second intervention strategy that we consider to merit the label of evidence-based treatments is the Michigan Prevention Research Center’s JOBS program. The JOBS program was evaluated using randomized clinical trials research, which is comparatively rare in the area of vocational psychology. Although the current research on the JOBS program is encouraging, more research is needed regarding implementation and adherence. One of the strengths of the JOBS program is it use of a treatment manual, which is lacking in some areas of programmatic vocational intervention research, but there is little research on whether adherence to the JOBS manual make a significant difference. Further research is also needed on whether the JOBS program is effective with diverse groups and those groups where unemployment tends to be rampant. We further argue that it is problematic that we identified only two intervention strategies that merited the label of evidence-based practice and wish to make a clarion call for more systematic research related to career interventions.