Career Style Interview: A Contextualized Approach to Career Counseling

Clarification of a client's self-concept and its implementation in the world of work remains an overarching goal of career counseling. To date, counselors have largely used objective measures of interests, values, needs, and abilities in their efforts to accomplish this goal. Objective assessments alone offer decontextualized views of the self, often disregarding nuances in individual differences. To address this problem, counselors can use the Career Style Interview (CSI), which forms the assessment as a method for attaining a more comprehensive and personally meaningful representation of the self. A description of the CSI and a case study are presented to promote counselor understanding of this method.