The Challenges of Life Design Counseling in the Times of the Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19)

What future are you talking about? Efficacy of Life Design Psy-Lab, as career guidance intervention, to support university students' needs during COVID-19 emergency

The pandemic increased world's uncertainty, and led to deep change in daily habits, generating disorientation, and inevitably affecting people life and professional plans. Young adults and students' future perspective and satisfaction with life were widely affected, especially for those facing school/ work transitions. Nevertheless, it was of primary importance for career guidance psychologists to intervene to support students despite having to navigate "on sight" and with little literature available. This paper will thus describe how the Life Design Psy-Lab, a career guidance service from Bicocca University (Milan, Italy) implemented a thematic online group intervention with 103 students enrolled. The intervention was based on the theoretical model of Life Design and was performed by career counselling psychologists. The intervention's goal was to foster students' development of skills and mindset to face complexity and unpredictability, shifting their time perception from an uncertain present to a more optimistic future scenario. The intervention's impact was assessed using pre and post online questionnaires. Results show how students increased their precepted level in a set of skills to face change and complexity after participating to the intervention. In more detail, students' precepted levels of career adaptability, courage, time perspective and resilience rose. Also, data show how the intervention strengthened students' life satisfaction. This paper will thus contribute to expand the growing yet still newborn set of knowledge about career guidance interventions in times of COVID-19 emergency, specifically addressing the issue of design interventions that can improve young adults' skills to visualize and project present and future for themselves, especially during uncertain times.

University students' career adaptability as a mediator between cognitive emotion regulation and career decision-making self-efficacy

As modern society experiences rapid changes, the unpredictability of the labor market is increasing. University students preparing to join the workforce may experience increased anxiety and stress due to the heightened uncertainty regarding their career plans. Regulating such negative emotions and adjusting to the changing circumstances may influence their career development. Thus, the current study aimed to investigate the relationship between cognitive emotion regulation (CER) - specifically adaptive CER and maladaptive CER - and career decision-making self-efficacy (CDMSE), with career adaptability (CA) as a mediating factor. The path analysis model consisting of adaptive CER, maladaptive CER, CA, and CDMSE was tested with 357 Korean university students who were facing the school-to-work transition. The results of the study were as follows. First, adaptive CER was positively related to CA and CDMSE, while maladaptive CER was negatively related to CA only. Second, CA and CDMSE were positively related. Third, CA partially mediated the relationship between adaptive CER and CDMSE and fully mediated the relationship between maladaptive CER and CDMSE. Based on these results, theoretical and practical implications are proposed, and the limitations of the study are discussed.

Life Design Counseling: Theory, Methodology, Challenges, and Future Trends

With the rapid development of society and the dramatic change of environment, previous career counseling focusing on personal choice has been difficult to meet individuals’ needs. It is very meaningful and valuable to introduce the ideology of Life Design Counseling (LDC). In this mini review, we introduce and analyze the theory and methodology of LDC. This review puts forward challenges in the field of LDC, including the lack of attention to clients from multiple backgrounds and professional counselors, the lack of diversified methods in the intervention process, and the lack of diversified research. The theoretical research, practical research, and the integration of theory and practice of LDC still need to be further concerned by researchers.

Academic performance under COVID-19: The role of online learning readiness and emotional competence

The COVID-19 pandemic caused school closures and social isolation, which created both learning and emotional challenges for adolescents. Schools worked hard to move classes online, but less attention was paid to whether students were cognitively and emotionally ready to learn effectively in a virtual environment. This study focused on online learning readiness and emotional competence as key constructs to investigate their implications for students' academic performance during the COVID-19 period. Two groups of students participated in this study, with 1,316 high school students (Mean age = 16.32, SD = 0.63) representing adolescents and 668 college students (Mean age = 20.20, SD = 1.43) representing young adults. Structural equation modeling was conducted to explore the associations among online learning readiness, emotional competence, and online academic performance during COVID-19 after controlling for pre-COVID-19 academic performance. The results showed that, for high school students, both online learning readiness and emotional competence were positively associated with online academic performance during COVID-19. However, for college students, only online learning readiness showed a significant positive relationship with online academic performance during COVID-19. These results demonstrated that being ready to study online and having high emotional competence could make adolescents more resilient toward COVID-19-related challenges and help them learn more effectively online. This study also highlighted different patterns of associations among cognitive factors, emotional factors, and online academic performance during COVID-19 in adolescence and young adulthood. Developmental implications were also discussed.

Researching employee experiences and behavior in times of crisis: Theoretical and methodological considerations and implications for human resource management

Over the past 2 years, numerous empirical studies in the fields of human resource management, organizational behavior, and industrial, work, and organizational psychology have investigated employee experiences and behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. The goal of this paper is to take a step back and to outline several theoretical and methodological considerations when researching employee experiences and behavior in times of crisis more generally. These insights may be useful when developing conceptual models, designing empirical studies, and managing people in the context of future crises. We first review theoretical approaches that could be applied to explain changes in employee experiences and behavior in times of crisis, including stress theories, theories of adjustment to work-related changes, career construction theory, event system theory, transition-adaptation theories, the crisis management and resilience framework, and the social identity model of identity change. Second, we outline methodological considerations and best practices regarding the research design of quantitative empirical studies, sampling, measurement, and analytic strategies. Throughout, we highlight empirical studies on employee experiences and behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic that have adopted these theoretical approaches and methodological best practices. We conclude with several suggestions for future theory development and empirical studies on employee experiences and behavior as well as human resource management in times of crisis.

Career Adaptability Research: A Literature Review with Scientific Knowledge Mapping in Web of Science

With the rapid development of society and technology, personal adaptability is becoming more and more important. Learning how to adapt to a changing world is becoming one of the necessary conditions for success. Career adaptability can help individuals to smoothly adapt to changes when coping with their career roles, and maintain their ability to balance their career roles, which will affect their important psychological resources for career development and achieve more meaning in life. In recent years, career adaptability has gradually attracted the attention of researchers. Therefore, in order to explore the main factors, such as research focus, the main researchers, its evolution, and the important results of career adaptability in the last ten years, this study used the scientific knowledge mapping software CiteSpace as a research tool, and select related articles from the Web of Science between 2010 to 2020 under the theme of “career adaptability” for data analysis, which can help future researchers to understand current and future career adaptability research and control the research direction of career adaptability. The results of this research indicate that there are direct or indirect connections between different themes, such as the career adaptability scale, career construction, positive personalities, and so on, but few articles integrate multiple research topics. At the same time, the main researchers, research frontiers and network relationships were also obtained. Based on the above findings, the correlative main concept, theoretical structure, evolution, and research progress of career adaptability in the past ten years are discussed.