Strength‐Based Narrative Résumé Counseling: Constructing Positive Career Identities From Difficult Employment Histories

Individuals who face employment challenges have myriad stories. A strengthbased counseling process that helps individuals use their stories as evidence of positive assets can shift a deficit-saturated narrative to one of power and potential. Stories are accounts related to one's past experiences and reflect societal, community, and personal narratives. For individuals with difficult employment histories complicated by homelessness, incarceration, intimate partner violence, and other challenges, counseling that helps them create a resume presents an opportunity for them to tell stories of strength and difficulty. It also gives clients the chance to rewrite future narratives, which can lead to the development of a more positive career identity. In this study, we describe a strength-based narrative approach for resume writing and illustrate the application of the model using a case example.The Power of Narratives: Personal, Cultural, and Societal InfluencesMultiple narrative layers exist within individuals that influence personal identity construction and self-perceived scope of career potential. Personal narratives, or the stories that one constructs to explain one's background, experiences, and future potential, are strongly influenced by ingrained cultural and societal narratives. Although narratives form and exist on these different levels, they are not distinct, because they interact in complicated ways (Loseke, 2007). Societal narratives are pervasive and include widespread expectations, biases, and traits that society places on a specific population. For example, Loseke (2007) described numerous studies in which societal narratives that define individuals from particular marginalized identities (e.g., ethnic minorities, women receiving public assistance, women who have experienced rape or intimate partner violence, individuals who eat at soup kitchens) influence the personal identity narratives of those group members. Loseke further asserted that these societal narratives influence institutional and organizational narratives that shape policies and practices, thereby concretely shaping the environment, opportunities, and experiences encountered by individuals who are the subject of negative societal perceptions.Individual or personal narratives include one's perception of the self, often in relation to one's environment or experiences. Kelly's (1955) personal construct theory suggested that individuals create templates or schemas based on their understanding and interpretations of experiences to prepare for and predict events and consequences of behavior. Schemas are a complex interaction of environment, lived experience, learning, and experiment. According to Kelly, individuals are like scientists, constantly shaping and reshaping these schemas and their behavior in response to stimuli and experience. We postulate that, in the case of individuals with difficult employment histories or other traumatic experiences, schemas are influenced by the environment and hold messages from the past about an individual's potential. Communal and societal narratives contribute to these schemas and can reflect positive or negative messages, thus influencing personal narrative and behavior. Personal narrative is intertwined with an individual's career identity. As described by Brown and Bimrose (2015), career identity results from the relationship between personal and social realms and the valence of that identity can influence career development outcomes. When these societal messages contribute to a deficit-saturated personal narrative, they can affect behavior and one's sense of self-efficacy (Betz, 2000). Bandura's (1977) construct of self-efficacy shows that an individual's beliefs in his or her ability to successfully carry out actions can support or hinder subsequent behaviors and resulting consequences. According to Bandura and Wood (1989), without a strong sense of self-efficacy, people tend to "dwell on their personal deficiencies and envision failure scenarios that beget adverse consequences" (p. …