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The National Career Development Association (NCDA) posits that career development is and should be a lifelong task, beginning at the preschool level and continuing through retirement. While the need for early career development exists, experts have found that a majority of students do not receive adequate career education from their families and/or schools for several reasons: family members’ lack of technical information and skills; high ratios between the number of counselors and students; counselors saddled with administrative vs. career development tasks; and high stakes testing being emphasized over high quality teaching and career development and education. Many experts suggest that these challenges are related to the larger challenge of improving student academic achievement and social competence and the challenge to connect school and classroom curricula to systematic career development and education. Career development experts assert that it is important to define some terms related to career development because education and related programming are shaped by how terms are used in creating, implementing, and evaluating career development interventions. Several terms relating to career education are defined here in greater specificity: (a) career : a lifestyle—more than just work or a set tasks, where it is broadly the course of events constituting a life or the total set of roles played over a lifetime; (b) career development: lifelong psychological and behavioral processes and contextual influences shaping one’s careers over the life span with career patterns, decision-making style, life-role self concepts, and life-role integration; (c) career development interventions: activities that empower people to cope effectively with career development tasks such as developing self-awareness, occupational awareness, decision-making skills, job-search skills, coping with job stress via individual and group career counseling, career development programs, career education, computer-assisted career development programs, computer information delivery systems, and other forms of client career information delivery systems; (d) career counseling or career guidance: a formal relationship in which a professional

counselor assists a client or group of clients with career concerns such as career goal setting, coping more effectively with career concerns, and evaluating clients’ career progress; (e) career development programs: systematic programs of counselor-coordinated information and experiences designed to assist clients with career goals, objectives, activities, and methods for evaluating the effectives if activities; and (f) career education: systematic teaching that seeks to influence the career development of persons through using various types of strategies (e.g., providing occupational information, infusing career-related concepts into the academic curriculum, providing career planning courses, and offering worksite-based experiences). Career development theory, research, and practice should be inclusive for diver