Faculty Members Published in APA Handbook

Nov. 12, 2014

Dr. Mary L. Anderson
Dr. Mary L. Anderson
Dr. Stephanie Burns
Dr. Stephanie Burns

Dr. Mary L. Anderson, along with her co-author Dr. Jane Goodman, and Dr. Stephanie Burns have contributed chapters for the APA Handbook of Career Interventions.  The two-volume APA Handbook of Career Intervention aims to consolidate and advance knowledge about the scientific foundations and practical applications of career intervention. It offers an inclusive resource for understanding and applying principles and practices of career intervention to assist diverse individuals and groups across developmental stages to construct personally meaningful and socially relevant work lives.  The handbook presents information about the historical, contemporary, theoretical, demographic, assessment-based, and professional foundations of career intervention (Volume 1), as a well as specific career intervention models, methods, and materials within each career service noted above and applied to easing career transitions (Volume 2).  In whole or in part, the Handbook aims to be useful to researchers, practitioners, educators, consultants, policy-makers, and students alike across a full array of professions, including psychology, counseling, education, and business and industry.

In their chapter entitled Professional Development:  Who We Are and What We Do, Dr.’s Goodman and Anderson discussed professional development, especially as this relates to career practitioners working within the diverse field of career counseling and finding their way into various specialized, yet inter-connected fields.  Professional development was discussed in terms of a life-long process with the turning points and challenges that may occur along the way. The authors also addressed the necessity of advocacy and supervision, along with self-care and career-sustaining strategies necessary for continuing on the journey of professional development.

In her chapter entitled Person Matching for Career Exploration and Choice, Dr. Burns discusses the three psychometric methodologies used to currently score career interest inventories:  empirical, theoretical, and person-match approaches. Next she explains person-matching as a postmodern model of prediction in career interests and how person-matching is performed as a psychometric scoring methodology. The remainder of the chapter offers counselors a process for incorporating person-matching into career counseling sessions. The person-matching theory, method, materials, and intended populations are described and further explained using a case study example.