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While the work of career development practitioners has been shown to lead to positive mental health outcomes, many career development professionals (CDPs) struggle with their own mental health due to difficult working conditions. Imagine, for instance, a CDP with 10 years of experience earning under $60K in a contract role whose renewal is dependent on funding. Their workload is increasing, and they have no professional development funds for certification or training. Meanwhile, they must advise their clients on how to navigate the same issues they’re facing.
Many CDPs are also experiencing trauma at work – defined by CAMH as “the lasting emotional response that often results from living through a distressing event.” They may be bringing their own traumatic experiences to work, experiencing secondary trauma through their work with clients and/or enduring trauma via their working conditions.
In 2024, Zeinab Alamagan and I conducted a survey on “Supporting the mental health of CDPs” with CDPs across Canada. We identified five dominant issues facing CDPs, which we will explore in this article:
- Precarious work
- Burnout
- Poor compensation and lack of recognition/appreciation
- Little to no support for professional development
- Lack of managerial support
Precarious work
Precarious employment can look like short-term contracts without certainty of renewal, last-minute contract renewals or a series of short-term contracts. It creates financial instability, temporal uncertainty (making it very difficult to plan for the future), marginal status and employment insecurity (Irvine & Rose, 2024).
CDPs working in programs dependent on funding – non-profits and many post-secondary institutions – have fewer opportunities for standard employment. For CDPs working in post-secondary, international student caps and drops in provincial funding also threaten programs, staff and student services.
Burnout
The most-cited source of workplace trauma was overwhelmingly burnout (more than 80%). While the survey wasn’t statistically significant, it provides clues as to what factors are contributing to workplace trauma and to negative effects on mental health.
Comments indicated the following contributors to burnout:
- Increased or uneven workloads – CDPs are being asked to do more with less: “unfair distribution of work”, “hir[e] more staff to decrease our workload,” and “always more work…and less time to do [it].”
- Lack of control over their work – Frontline CDPs are assigned student/client appointments, workshops or drop-in clinic shifts, often without a say in how many clients they see.
- Lack of recognition –Due to funding pressures, workloads are spread across fewer team members with no change in pay. CDPs want to “feel supported/heard” and “appreciated.”
Figure 1: What is the nature of the trauma you’re experiencing or have experienced at work? (Check all that apply)
All data taken from Survey Monkey survey, Supporting the mental health of CDPs, conducted in November 2024.
Poor compensation
Many career development practitioners are poorly compensated for their work. In CERIC’s “2019 Survey of Career Service Professionals,” only 29.5% of respondents reported earning at least $70,000 per year. For further context, 50.4% of survey respondents had worked in career development for 11 years or more, and more than 75% held at minimum a bachelor’s degree. In Job Bank’s 2024 Wage Report, career development practitioners across Canada averaged a salary of $58,240.
Furthermore, CERIC’s report, Career Development in 2040: Preparing for Possible Scenarios of Work & Careers identified that “CDPs’ wages are not viewed as competitive for attracting talent.” Hajnal and Quressette note that “wages are even lower than similar work in complementary fields.”
What’s the impact on CDPs? Financial stress, the strain of looking for higher-paying roles and feeling underappreciated.
Like many human services professionals, CDPs don’t choose their occupation for its high salary prospects, but they do want fair pay for their work. Will increased professionalization and the new national certification lead to higher wages and greater recognition of CDPs’ work? Let’s hope so.
Insufficient opportunities for growth and professional development
According to the Code of Ethics for Career Development Professionals, CDPs have a responsibility to “engage in professional development and to contribute to the advancement of the field.” Yet, inadequate financial resources and time constraints due to a heavy workload affect CDPs’ ability to pursue professional development opportunities. CERIC’s 2019 survey showed that only 36.3% of career service professionals had access to more than $500 per year for professional development, and 26.7% of respondents reported “no budget provided.”
“Like many human services professionals, CDPs don’t choose their occupation for its high salary prospects, but they do want fair pay for their work.”
Comments in our survey also suggest that a lack of management training was leading to inadequate managerial support, which negatively affected the mental health of CDPs. Respondents felt that managers were suffering from a lack of professional development; their own skills were outdated, and they seemed ill-equipped to effectively support their teams. Anecdotally, the training provided to staff typically focused on topics relevant to early career CDPs (e.g. customer service, crisis intervention, case note documentation).
Lack of managerial support
An overriding theme in our survey was that many CDPs felt unsupported, unheard and not understood. Many felt that the demands of their work were not understood by management or funders and that their concerns fell on deaf ears. Some cited feeling alone, and others felt that the team dynamic could be more positive and supportive.
CDPs’ responses also indicated their awareness of how this lack of support was affecting their client work. When asked about specific skills or tools they’d like to learn about, several comments echoed this one: how “not to spread the effects of our burnout to students…”
They wanted more compassion, understanding and awareness of the demands being placed on them. CDPs also sought increased resources to support them in providing high-quality service to clients, while sustaining their own mental health.
On the upside
While I have focused on the mental health challenges of CDPs, a smaller number of respondents did feel supported by their management teams and described a healthy, supportive culture. Increased workloads were a shared challenge across respondents, but some placed more of the blame on funders than their employer.
Interventions that assist CDPs with their mental health needs – workshops promoting self-care, EAPs, health benefits and wellness programs – are helpful but insufficient. Let’s consider: What more can managers, organizations and funders do to ensure that career development professionals have access to decent working conditions and support for their own career development?
