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

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 formental 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.