Collaborative Career Counseling for Clients with Special Needs: Applying Counselor-Initiated Support

Abstract

This article focuses on provision of counselor-initiated support in collaborative career counseling for clients with special needs in Malaysia. The article responds to Malaysia’s call for inclusive human resource development by enabling persons with special needs to benefit from the application of counselor-initiated support in their collaborative career counseling programs so as to become self-reliant and contribute to the Malaysian workforce. Thus, this article aims at raising awareness among career counselors by highlighting that: (1) counselors can engage clients with special needs in meaningful partnerships to identify the types of support that career counselors can provide upon the clients’ request; (2) counselors can sustain these meaningful partnerships by attending to the various pointers such as client readiness, clarity and pertinence of support, the counselors’ non-judgemental attitude as well as the need for the counselor to work with the client to identify and understand the use of support to enable the client’s effective career functioning. Hence, it is not within the scope of this article to discuss the methodology of building partnerships in collaborative counseling or report the progress of various stages of counseling. As such, this article highlights a selected sample case, which has been edited to show portions that illustrate the use of the types of support provided by the career counselors in collaborative career counseling. This article concludes that career counselors must be trained and educated professionally and acquire multicultural counseling competence in assisting clients with special needs in a collaborating counseling partnership.