Continuity of Career: The Vocational Script in Counseling Older Workers

Abstract

In this article, the authors propose that counseling can assist people who are in their late 40s and early 50s and who are about to enter retirement or are in retirement to become aware of their perceptions of their vocational roles. It can do so through encouraged reflection on, reminiscence about, and definition of the various aspects of their work roles, how those roles became formed, and how those roles played out in the context of their family and social relationships and across various contexts. Through such counseling, these older adults can develop “vocational scripts”—adaptive views of the self at work that enhance personal perceptions of productivity and agency. Selected theoretical bases for the vocational script concept are summarized. Three distinct counseling phases and methods are described.