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Life Design: A Paradigm for Innovating Career Counselling in Global Context

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Handbook of Innovative Career Counselling

Abstract

More than a decade has elapsed since the original statement of life design as an innovative and internationally-constructed paradigm for careers science and practice. Responding to the challenges of work and career in contemporary times, life design shifts the paradigm for career counselling from match-making to meaning making. This chapter situates life design in global context; reviews its core tenets, constructs, and practice methods; and considers its conceptual, empirical, and practice advance. Life designing offers positive direction for the careers field to foster human health and well-being through promoting work and employment in all people’s lives. Continuing to adopt and advance life-design principles and practices helps transform career counselling from a straightforward logical pursuit to a complex therapeutic endeavor to assist people to use work as a way to imbue their lives with purpose and direction. Continuing advances in the emerging life design tradition led by approaches such as Career Construction Theory and Practice help dissolve long-held false distinctions between career and mental-health counselling. Such efforts give way to innovating a perspective on work as central to counselling for mental health and well-being. Goals of the life design paradigm continue to propel it as an innovative intervention model for meaningfully construing and constructing work and career in human life.

Globalization … has one overarching feature – integration.

T. L. Friedman (2000, p. 8).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Family and Community Medicine, Northeast Ohio Medical University, Rootstown, OH, 44240, USA

    Paul J. Hartung

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  1. Paul J. Hartung
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Correspondence to Paul J. Hartung .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Educational Psychology, University of Pretoria , Pretoria, Gauteng, South Africa

    Jacobus G. Maree

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Hartung, P.J. (2019). Life Design: A Paradigm for Innovating Career Counselling in Global Context. In: Maree, J. (eds) Handbook of Innovative Career Counselling . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22799-9_1

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