Motivating and Counseling the Unemployed

During a ‘learning goal orientation’ training course for unemployed people, one of the participants, a woman in her forties, had a lot of resistance to participate in the course. I persuaded her to stay and assured her that all she had to do was sit down and watch. She persevered in her idea that this was a waste of time and even tried to convince me that I was also wasting my time. Two weeks after the training course, I called her for a follow-up interview to measure her job-search intentions and behavior. Her first response was: “I have to apologize for my behavior. After the training course I passed a temporary agency for elderly people and remembered what you had said about trying different strategies. And guess what, I now have a job and not just any job but exactly the job that I have wanted for so long”. This anecdote illustrates the potential impact that employment counseling and training courses can have on individuals who have lost their job. Losing one’s job is a life event with far reaching economic, psychological, and physical consequences (McKee-Ryan, Song, Wanberg, & Kinicki, 2005; Paul & Moser, 2009) and is considered to be one of the top 10 traumatic life experiences (Spera, Buhrfeind, & Pennebaker, 1994). Besides these consequences, unemployment also deprives a person of the additional gains from being employed, such as time structure, personal identity, interpersonal contact, and activity (Jahoda, 1982; Warr, 1987). Furthermore, the negative consequences of being unemployed tend to increase with increasing duration of unemployment (Rowley & Feather, 1987). Unemployment affects a substantial number of people in present day economies. For example, in the first three months of 2012, 11% of the labor force in Europe and 8.2% of the labor force in the United States were unemployed (Eurostat, 2012; U.S. Department of Labor, 2012). Approximately half of these individuals were long-term unemployed (i.e., more than six months) at that time. These numbers equal the numbers of the 1980s recession.

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