Users Guide to the Principles for Professional Conduct
| Index to Ethics Guide |
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Principles for Career Services Professionals
3. Providing students with a breadth of valid data about careers, and accurate institutional information to employing organizations
"Career services professionals will provide students with information on a range of career opportunities and types of employing organizations. They will inform students of the means and resources to gain access to information that may influence their decisions about an employing organization. Career services professionals will also provide employing organizations with accurate information about the educational institution and its students and about the recruitment policies of the career services office." (See Employer Principle 3)
Intent
Students will be empowered to explore and evaluate the fullest range
of career and employment options possible. Employers will be able
make the most informed judgment possible about their recruiting
options.
Rationale
As noted in Principle
1, career services professionals must make every effort to avoid
interfering with the student’s right to make an independent
decision on career direction and employment options by imposing
personal judgments. The career services professional’s opinion
might come in the form of steering a student toward certain career
areas or employing organizations, limiting the employer literature
available to students, or even affixing critical news pieces about
an organization to the literature it provides for the career services
resource library. And in keeping with the fundamental precepts of
the Principles for Professional Conduct, most notably "support[ing]
informed and responsible decision making by candidates," the
career services professional is expected to pave the way for students
to make their own choices for their future.
Employers, too, must be treated by career centers in a way that allows them to make the most valid decisions about the desirability of recruiting students. While the career center’s institutional responsibility is to attract the interest of employers, the career center has the obligation to be truthful to employers about the quality of programs, student strengths and institutional success. Enticing employers to recruit at the college with misleading information not only does employers a disservice, it speaks poorly for the college and ultimately harms the students, providing a poor image that may discourage employers from considering their applications.
Respect for the human right of autonomy, i.e., respecting an individual's right to function independent of the control of others, serves as the foundation of this principle. Individuals whose autonomy is respected will be provided information or directed to sources of information that he/she can evaluate and use in making a career decision. This places a responsibility on the career services professional to be aware of his/her values or biases and to make a concerted effort to keep them out of dialogue with the student. From an educational standpoint, it is the career service professional’s obligation to teach students how to be effective decision-makers, which places the ultimate responsibility of career decisions in the hands of the students, where it should be.
The notions of agency and fidelity also enter into this rationale. The career services professional is the agent of the student, not unlike the way an attorney is the agent of a client. An agent is expected to work in the sole and best interest of his/her client, placing all personal needs aside. This implies a faithfulness to the client. According to all human development theory and decision-making models, fidelity to the client consists of providing assistance that permits full expression of the individual’s potential. The imposition of personal biases violates this role.
Principle
4. Providing comparable services to employers
