Towards an Integral Career and Employment Counselling

Towards an Integral Career and Employment Counselling
Durwin Foster
This article introduces the Integral approach to the fields of career and employment counselling. After describing major elements of the Integral model such as quadrants, lines and levels of development, and psychological types, the author develops a template for case conceptualization and assessment. Important career and employment counselling topics such as skills, multiple intelligences, self and values development, Holland’s RIASEC model, diversity issues, and the labour market are all analyzed through an integrally informed lens. An Integral Case Conceptualization Template is introduced as a practical tool designed to assist counsellors wishing to translate this innovative, exciting, and promising theory into practice.Introduction
The purpose of this article is to introduce to the fields of career and employment counselling the Integral approach, an innovative, meta-theoretical synthesis developed by philosopher Ken Wilber.1 Key elements of the model will be introduced–in particular, quadrants, lines of development, levels of development, and psychological types–and these concepts will then be applied in the service of developing a more comprehensive, inclusive, and therefore more effective approach to career and employment counselling. The goal of the Integral approach is to find a pattern that connects as many of the multiple perspectives and truth claims from diverse sub-fields as possible, thereby effecting a genuine theoretical integration. Having developed the fundamentals of this meta-theoretical framework over the past thirty years, Wilber is now working alongside a growing number of academics and practitioners from multiple fields in the application of the model. Strengths of the Integral approach include at least the following: first, Integral Theory represents a constructive postmodern approach, addressing itself to the increasingly well-recognized problems inherent in social constructionist and other postmodern approaches to career counselling.2 Second, Integral Theory is emerging as valuable on entirely pragmatic grounds; in other words, elements of Integral Theory demonstrate their usefulness as heuristic devices. For example, this article hopes to put forward the usefulness of the quadrants to organize the assessment of career counselling clients. A third and strong claim of Integral Theory is that the model represents the structure of experience itself; thus, at this level of claim, by learning and using Integral Theory we become more familiar with the very contours of our own awareness, moment by moment. In this way, Integral Theory can help both counsellors and clients engage their experience more deeply and fully. Given all these reasons, the time is ripe for exploring the potential benefits of an Integral approach in enhancing theory and practice within employment and career counselling.

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The Five Elements of Integral Theory
The Integral approach proposes an irreducible set of five elements, as follows: quadrants, levels, lines, types, and states. As Integral theorists Sean Esbjrn-Hargens and Ken Wilber explain: These five components represent the basic patterns of reality that occur over and over in multiple contexts. To leave any one of them out in any given inquiry or exploration is to forgo a truly comprehensive understanding of that which you seek to understand. By including these basic elements an Integral practitioner ensures that they are covering the main aspects of any phenomena.3 In this article, I will be focusing on four of these five major elements: quadrants, levels, lines, and types. (States will likely be addressed in a future work.) The first of these elements, quadrants, includes experiences (subjectivity), behaviours (objectivity), cultures (intersubjectivity), and systems (interobjectivity).4 These fundamental perspectives are referred to as “quadrants” because they can be mapped out conveniently on a two-by-two grid (see figure 1).5

Figure 1. Some Aspects of Quadrants

Note that the quadrants are often referred to by location: Upper Left (UL) for individual interior, Upper Right (UR) for individual exterior, Lower Left (LL) for collective interior, and Lower Right (LR) for collective exterior. They are also associated with certain pronouns that most intuitively reference a particular perspective: “I” for the Upper Left; “You/We” for the Lower Left; “It” for the Upper Right; and “Its” for the Lower Right. The quadrants address the major first-person, second-person, and third-person perspectives available to us to take on phenomena; thus, we can already begin to grasp the integrative possibilities of Integral Theory.

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This conceptualization of some of the most fundamental perspectives available to human beings can help us engage in more comprehensive and inclusive–and therefore more effective–approaches to career and employment counselling. In effect, we can look through each of these perspectives when investigating a particular issue, problem, or case. One immediate advantage of the quadrant model is that it helps illuminate distinctions between career counselling and employment counselling. Referring to the diagram above, we note that the quadrants on the Right-Hand side denote exterior aspects of reality; that is, elements that can be seen or otherwise perceived through any of the five senses, or through sense-extending instruments (e.g., microscope). The quadrants on the Left-Hand side, in contrast, denote interior aspects of reality; that is, they refer to those aspects of reality that cannot be seen or touched or measured directly but rather are known through interpretive methods such as introspection, hermeneutics, ethnography, and others. In the past, employment counselling has tended to refer to what we see when we look through the exterior, Right-Hand quadrants: job search skills and labour market information, for example. On the other hand, career counselling has tended to refer to what we see when looking through the interior, Left-Hand quadrants: values, interests, needs, and cultural and personal narratives about the role of work in one’s personal system of meaning. By demonstrating the inseparability of interiors and exteriors, the Integral model allows us to readily see how important it is that career and employment counselling form two interrelated parts of one whole approach to helping others. To illustrate the utility of the quadrant model, we will investigate a generic career/employment counselling case, viewing it through each of these four perspectives. We can start with any quadrant, although all four will be included before finishing our study. We might choose to start with the UR quadrant of behaviours, noting that this quadrant also includes material aspects of the human being such as the body and the brain, or any other aspect as seen through a primarily third-person, objective, “scientific” mode.

The Upper-Right Quadrant
Thinking about the fields of career/employment counselling, and looking through the UR perspective, we can see all material or physical elements of the individual, including the enactment of skills in behaviour and the presence or absence of physical dis/ability. Information from assessments of physical strengths and limitations, as well as interventions related to ameliorating physical problems such as adaptive devices, would be included here. Also included here would be information related to other micro-physical, neuro-physical or bio-psychiatric issues amenable to medication. While the counsellor may not be trained to directly address any or all of these issues, they are important for a counsellor to be aware of in her roles of case manager and referral agent.

The Upper-Left Quadrant
When we look at the individual subjective dimension, what we find are three different types of developmental lines, defined as aspects that evolve through multiple levels of complexity.6 The first type of developmental line is that of cognition, with cognitive development here defined in a broad sense as the increasing capacity to take and coordinate multiple perspectives. The second type includes the self and self-related lines, development which is brought about as a function of the self-system’s capacity for identification. The self or ego-line has been studied in depth by Jane Loevinger.7 Key self-related lines are those of morals (e.g., Kohlberg; Gilligan), values (e.g., Graves), and needs (e.g., Maslow). Within Integral Theory, cognitive development is seen

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as necessary but not sufficient for the development of the self and self-related lines, since in order to identify with something we must first be able to register it in awareness. The third type of line is that of skills, capacities, or talents. Gardner’s list of multiple intelligences are a good example of this third type of line: linguistic intelligence, logical-mathematical intelligence, musical intelligence, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, spatial intelligence, interpersonal intelligence, and intrapersonal intelligence.8 Viewed as central to employment counselling, skills are often further sub-categorized by type as soft, hard, or transferable. Soft skills would include intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligence, for example, while hard skills generally refer to abilities for interacting with tools such as computers, machinery, and so on. A skill is considered to be transferable when it can be applied across contexts. For example, word-processing skills are transferable across a range of work contexts including education, business, law, and office administration. Taking computer skills as an example, we note that a low level of computer skills development is characterized by relatively little mastery of the complexity of this domain. Thus, a person with what we could simply call a “Level 1″ in computer skills might only be able to turn the machine on, navigate the operating system in a rudimentary manner, compose simple documents in the word-processor, and send and receive e-mail. At Level 2, a person’s skills may have developed to master a considerably higher level of complexity such as creating documents that include power-point slides, excel spreadsheets, and pictures downloaded from the internet. Finally, at Level 3, an individual’s skills might include advanced troubleshooting and programming capabilities. Additional skills that could be conceptualized in this manner include resume-writing skills, time management skills, and job search skills, among others. In sum, any skills that can be viewed as hierarchically organized towards greater complexity or mastery can be conceived within the Integral model via the concepts of lines and levels. While conventional employment counselling has tended to focus on skills as the most important lines of development, career counselling typically broadens its focus to include self-related lines such as values. One contribution of Integral Theory to both these fields is its focus upon additional lines of development that may prove to have significant value, such as a person’s overall self-identity development. Discussing clients’ self-development in counselling, CookGreuter and Soulen write: Although people may use several perspectives throughout the day, they tend to prefer to respond spontaneously with the most complex meaning making system, perspective, or mental model they have fully mastered. This preferred perspective is called a person’s “center of gravity” or their “central tendency” in meaningmaking.9 Understanding an individual’s level of ego-development is important because it can help the counsellor to achieve the kind of empathic resonance essential for a good therapeutic relationship, as well as to provide developmentally-appropriate interventions.10 One of the best validated measures for self-development is Cook-Greuter’s Sentence Completion Test (SCTi), which she developed based on her earlier extensive study with Jane Loevinger, author of the well-established Washington University Sentence Completion Test.11 An additional source is the Subject-Object Interview, which has been used in at least one study of career transition.12

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While values have been used in career counselling through interventions such as values sorts, they have not been viewed through the developmental lens described here.13 Pioneering work elaborating the development of values systems was completed by Graves, popularized in a system called Spiral Dynamics by Beck and Cowan, and more recently refined by Cowan & Tordorovic.14 Familiarity with these developmental models and their associated worldviews (e.g., does a client have traditional Blue values or modern Orange values?) can greatly help a career counselor in supporting their client. Introducing the Psychograph After assessing (through informal or formal means) the client’s general level of development on a number of a relevant lines, an Integral career or employment counsellor can organize this data into a psychograph.15 Creating a psychograph is valuable because it provides a picture of the client as a whole and, most importantly, allows the counsellor to tailor interventions to meet the client where he or she is at in various domains of functioning. For example, when working with a client who is high in cognitive development but low in self-development, a career counsellor might initially use a more intellectual approach. As the therapeutic relationship develops, however, the counsellor might gradually challenge the client to explore her interior sense of self through process-experiential methods. An example of a psychograph that includes all three types of lines is shown below. Note that the x-axis illustrates four generic levels of complexity.

Figure 2. Psychograph with Three Types of Developmental Lines

Relationship of Lines/Levels to Types: Expanding Our Map of the Psyche Discerning the relationship of lines/levels of development to personality types is crucial for forming the most adequate and helpful map of the interior subjective (UL) aspect of the client. Of the various typologies currently being used within career/employment counselling, perhaps the most well-known is Holland’s RIASEC model.16 Holland’s theory of “vocational personalities” outlines six major type distinctions: realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, and conventional (RIASEC). Completion of the Self-Directed Search assessment

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