Awareness of cultural context and technology as key career counseling competencies: standards, guidelines, and future perspectives for life-design interventions in adult transition.

Considering future perspectives is crucial to staying relevant in a rapidly changing world, and the ongoing trends in the global labor market are challenging career counselors. We strive to understand which competencies they need to help people better cope with crises, and support them through the various cultural transitions they will face over their adult lives. After reviewing the perspectives of 40 ACA counselors, we identified two trends as future directions that these professionals highlighted. We then set out to determine how these trends are supported by the competency standards and guidelines for career counselors that have been published by professional organizations (e.g., ACA), accrediting bodies (e.g., CACREP) peak bodies (e.g., CICA), and certification bodies (e.g., NBCC) across APAC, EMEA, and US. The emphasis on the value of integrating technology into counselor training and practice is still controversial, while multicultural competence is broadening according to the necessity to be combined with social justice. These trends and themes in current literature were discussed.