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Career development has been in the business of facilitating change since its inception. Along the way, the language career professionals use has needed to evolve to suit the knowledge and realities of the times.
We need to continue to shift our language to change our thinking. In doing so, we acknowledge that our understanding of our clients’ circumstances has evolved over time, alongside the role of career practitioners and career service organizations in community well-being.
As the WHO and UN shift from the biomedical and pathologizing model of mental health, it is time for career development to shift from a compliance-based to a healing systems framework.
Mental health is growing as a public health priority and human rights imperative. Environmental disasters, geopolitical conflicts, economic precarity, reconciling impacts of colonialism and the changing nature of work are all part of our present realities and our future.
As such, we propose it’s time for a linguistic evolution in the field – a movement from traditional, compliance-based service delivery, through a trauma-informed lens, to a healing systems framework.
From compliance to healing
Here is how we understand this evolution in language – and how it shifts our approach to client dynamics.
In a traditional compliance-based framework (CBF), there is an expert helper in the room and a client in need of help to change their fortunes. The client in this framework is lacking individual knowledge or expertise to successfully make changes in their career path without the help of an expert helper.
In an anti-pathology trauma informed framework (ATPIF), there are two individuals in the room working toward a collaboratively defined goal. Here, the individual who has come in for service is seen as a co-creator in the process of renegotiating their life.
In a healing system framework (HSF), the individuals in the room are joined by their respective life contexts and the systems they inhabit. The individuals acknowledge the systems and structures that affect decision making and action taking. They recognize healing for an individual happens at the interplay of individuals and systems. Advocating for systemic change and for caring in community can offer healing for the individual.
So, what does this look like? (See chart below – or view PDF.)
Exploring language evolution
| | Traditional compliance-based framework CBF |
Anti-pathology trauma informed framework (neuroscience based) APTIF |
Healing system framework HSF |
| Question | What’s wrong? | What’s happened to you? | What’s happening for you and the people around you? |
| Orientation | Multi-barriered clients
Deficits and consequences Problem solving |
Treat trauma effects/impacts.
Deficit-based mental health model |
Whole person, collective/community
Asset, strengths, lived-experience based |
| Resilience | Individual efforts to move forward. | Shifts from individual to building capacity and access to what’s needed |
Agents in the creation of their own well-being, restoration of identity, build community capacity and access |
| Focus on | Client / patient | Individual / Service participant | ALL human beings in the system (all my relations) |
Adapted from: Calderon de la Barca, Milligan & Kania (2024), Desautels (2023 & 2024), Hodas (2006)
These language evolutions show up in the questions we ask:
- In a CBF, the question is “What’s wrong?”
- In an APTIF, the question is “What happened to you?”
- In an HSF, the questions become “What is happening for you in your life right now? How is this impacting you and those around you?”
The above chart reflects how our orientation to career conversations has changed over time. We began in the traditional model looking at clients from a deficit framework. Calling them multi-barriered clients opened some doors to funding and shaped career conversations. We were operating as problem solvers.
As we shift our orientation to the APTIF lens, we start to look at the nervous system of the service participant and how we can co-regulate with them to effect change. While we are looking at trauma and its impacts and effects, we are still looking through a mental health deficit lens.
When we orient to healing systems, we ground in healing-centred engagement. We open up to possibilities that include advocacy and individual agency with the whole person. We start to look at assets and agency in the system of their lives. The work is grounded in strengths of both people in the room, of “relatives/relations,” of lived experiences and the assets in their collective system. In other words, strengths are viewed not just as capacities of the individual, but also as the collective capacities of their community.
Resilience looks different in this evolution. We start with the individual being responsible for their efforts to move forward. As we shift to an APTIF, we start to look at building capacity and finding resources in the lives of the people we serve. Evolving to a healing system framework lens, we can see resilience in the whole system. The work of change making belongs to the collective. Agency is returned to the individual within the context of reclaiming identity as well as building community capacity and access to resources and other services.
Our evolving language reflects a shift in focus from the individual as client to a service participant to the people and communities we serve. We focus on relational infrastructure and interdependence, just as the mycelium of the wood-wide-web communicates and shares resources among the trees of the forest. The role of career services becomes one of weaving a caring community, developing relational infrastructure and restoring identity.
Ongoing cycle
It is important to acknowledge language as fluid, ever evolving. Our undertaking here is not to advocate for a particular set of words; rather, it is to invite an ongoing exploration of and engagement with language that reflects the evolution of our field and the evolution we would like to see.
