Vocational counseling is always based upon a guidance model. By this we mean that any counselor acts upon a set of notions about the way the guidance activities should proceed: what aspects ought to be considered, what decisions should be taken and how the outcomes should be evaluated. This is true, whether the counselor is a non-professional, who in the course of other duties may give adviceto young people with regard to their choice of a career and a study or training program, or a professional, who specializes in providing assistance in solving difficult career problems. For many years the model that has been used generally in vocational counseling is based upon the three propositions of Parsons (1909): persons have characteristic traits; occupations (as well as training and study) have specific requirements that correspond to personal traits; decision making should be based upon the matching of personal characteristics and occupational requirements, through, as Parsons called it, 'true reasoning'.
This well-known model still is extensively used, despite the fact that the theoretical basis for the model has long since gone.Trait psychology has disappeared from the scientific field. It has been found that occupational requirements certainly have no one-to-one correspondence to specific human characteristics. Matching and true reasoning, then, become meaningless. In other respects too the model has been subjected to scathing criticism. In fact, already some twenty years ago two American authors (Barry and Wolf, 1962) wrote an 'epitaph for vocational guidance', i.e., for the guidance based upon the Parsons' model. Their criticism may in some respect have been needlessly harsh, but it was not unjustified. Nevertheless, the Parsons' model continues to be used on a large scale, with only some success. In our opinion, this is not so much because the model is wrong, but because it is a very much simplified representation of the real situation. For uncomplicated cases, which fortunately still form the great majority, such a model can serve well. This is the reason why lay-counselors, who deal mainly with every day problems, can work successfully with a (mostly implicit) model that is essentially the Parsons' one. This is also the reason why this model can be recognized as the governing prin-