Chapter 11: Best Practices in Incorporating Cultural Values into Career Education Programs: What Do We Know and How Do We Do It?

There is widespread agreement that career counselors and researchers need to incorporate diverse cultural values into career interventions and counseling (Fouad & Byars, 2005). Fouad and Byars (2005) elegantly articulate this point and argue that career specialists must integrate a broader understanding of cultural context in conceptualizing vocational behavior. Moreover, they suggest that this should be done by incorporating macro-environmental variables such as race, social class, and cultural context, within career theory, research, and practice.

While attempts have been made to do this through discussion and implementation of multicultural career counseling techniques and standards (Flores & Heppner, 2002), very little literature exists on the myriad of career education programs and how cultural values can be incorporated into these programs when working with diverse students. In this chapter, we will: (a) provide a cursory overview of some of the research on career counseling and interventions and cultural values (What do we know?); (b) address the current status of career education programs for diverse students (How do we do it?); and (c) provide suggestions on how to better incorporate cultural values into career education programming (How do we improve it?).