Life and Career Design Dialogues and Resilience

Abstract

Resilience is a concept first used in physics to describe the capacity of materials to resist to pressure. In the field of psychology, the first definition came with the works of Redl (Adolescence: psychosocial perspectives. Basic Books, New York, pp 79–99, 1969) on “Ego-resilience”. From a health recovery perspective, it denotes a set of biological, psychological, psycho-emotional, social and cultural processes, allowing a new self-development after a major psychological trauma (Cyrulnik in Un merveilleux malheur. Odile Jacob, Paris, 2012). In career counseling, the concept of career resilience has emerged from the propositions of London as part of her model of career motivation (London in Acad Manag Rev 8(4):620–630, 1983) and refers to “the ability to adapt to change, even when the circumstances are discouraging or disruptive”, (London in J Career Dev 24(1):25–38, 1997, p. 34). From a Life designing perspective (Savickas et al. in J. Vocat. Behav 75(3):239–250, 2009), career resilience is sometimes compared to the career adaptability concept as part of a “meta competence” for being more protean in order to face career transitions. Resilience in the field of career counseling seems then to hesitate between a search for ‘protective factors’, and a “recovery process” perspective. The purpose of this chapter is to study this concept in the field of career counseling, from a life designing perspective, and as a recovery process. The chapter describes a case study in the French counseling context of skills assessment (bilan de competence). The process of resilience is presented via a thematic and dialogical analysis of the interviews, to show how the counselor can be a «tutor for resilience».