International Partnerships in Career Guidance: Career Key Leads the Way

We believe career guidance programs can help improve economic conditions for people in other countries. The U.S. is looked to as a good example for career guidance and here at Career Key we welcome opportunities to share our career guidance knowledge with others. We recently had that opportunity when in late April we attended and gave a presentation at the International Congress of Counseling, "Counseling in International Perspective: Global Demands and Local Needs," organized by Bahcesehir University in Istanbul, Turkey and NBCC International.

In the photo are our Turkish colleagues from the conference as well as our Career Key presenters. From left: Hasan Bozgeyikli, Tareq Ragaban (Arabic Career Key) and his wife Fawquia, Nguyen Dang Tuan Minh (Vietnamese Career Key), Feride Bacanli, Juliet Wehr Jones (me) (front), Dr. Jones's wife Jeanine Wehr Jones, Susran Erkan Eroglu, and Career Key author, Dr. Lawrence K. Jones.

Dr. Jones and I were able to meet in person our partners from the Arabic Career Key and Vietnamese Career Key, Tareq Ragaban and Nguyen Dang Tuan Minh, both of whom hold Masters Degrees from the University of Westminster in London. We are so lucky to have such wonderful people to work with, in addition to Ms. Angela DeFreitas, our Caribbean Career Key partner. At the ICC conference, Dr. Jones, Mr. Rageban and Ms. Minh gave a successful and well attended presentation on "Using The Career Key in Different Countries Worldwide."

In addition, we enjoyed attending a symposium by Romanian counselors and we had the pleasure of meeting with Dr. Nicoleta Litoiu and Dr. Andreea Szilagyi afterwards. The Career Key has been professionally translated into Romanian, so we look forward to working on meeting the needs of Romanian career counselors. I am married to a Romanian computer scientist/programmer and enjoyed a wonderful visit to that country so I have a bit of bias in their favor. Much has happened since the fall of Communism in that beautiful country and they are one of the fastest growing economies in Eastern Europe, for good reason.

We have written an article about the conference that will be published next month in Counseling Today, published by the American Counseling Association. Once it goes up, we'll publish the link here with more information.