Employment counselors are supporting individuals and corporate clients with an increasingly diverse range of challenges. The authors of this special issue come from five countries across three continents, with a sixth country represented by research participants.
Although job loss is not a new area of focus for the Journal of Employment Counseling (JEC), authors VastamΓ€ki, Paul, and Moser, in research based in Finland, take an innovative approach to understanding it. Two articles from the United States focus on special populations. Scott, Belke, and Barfield examine the school-to-work transition experience of transgender students, highlighting some of the unique challenges encountered by this group. Flansburg, in her article on vocational evaluation, explains how the process traditionally reserved for persons with physical or mental disabilities could also be useful with other types of clients experiencing challenging transitions (e.g., people seeking career advice after divorce or between school and work).
Career counseling and employment counseling are not only for the unemployed. McDermott and Neault describe an international partnership between a Canadian training provider and a financial institution based in the United Arab Emirates, where career coaching was implemented as a retention strategy for new Emirati recruits.
Amundson, Yeung, Sun, Chan, and Cheng examine stories from Chinese immigrants to Canada, identifying several factors contributing to their successful transitions. Finally, an article contributed by Shuifa, Chenguang, Jiahua, Yan, and Ying from China creatively illustrates how a focus on "green jobs" can have a multiplier effect on employment (i.e., indirectly creating jobs beyond the direct employment with the forest park tourism sector that they investigated).
Combined, these articles dramatically illustrate the roles employment counselors play in the complex, interconnected global economy, where Chinese immigrants settle in Canada, tourism fuels employment growth in China, Canadian training helps with retention of local recruits in the United Arab Emirates, Germans study job loss in Finland, and Americans support increasingly diverse clients with new applications of traditional tools. We have much to learn from colleagues who work outside of the silos within which employment counseling research has traditionally been conducted. This selection of brief articles provides an exciting glimpse into innovative work that is being done far beyond our borders.
The next issue (December 2011) will be the last I coordinate in my role as editor. Titled "Thoughts on Theories," this special issue is one that I am confident you will reference often, with 13 brief articles by 17 authors reflecting on their own professional contributions to the theories and models that guide our work. Authors include Hansen, Leong, Krumboltz, Niles, Pope, Savickas, and Schlossberg from the United