Trauma-Informed Career Development: Foundations and Everyday Practices

Career development practitioners regularly meet clients navigating uncertainty, identity disruption, workplace harm, migration stressors, and major life transitions. These career-related experiences can co-occur with trauma responses, even if it goes unnamed. This webinar offers accessible, practice‑ready ideas of trauma‑informed career development for practitioners who want to support clients, without stepping into therapy or trauma treatment.

We will clarify what trauma‑informed career development is and is not. Participants will learn how trauma‑informed approaches differ to trauma work, and why these distinctions matter for ethical, scope‑aligned practice. The focus is on foundations: understanding how trauma responses may show up in career conversations, and identifying meaningful shifts that make practice safer and more effective, while leveraging your career development expertise.

Practitioners will be invited to consider how trauma‑informed principles can enhance everyday career work, from conceptualising client concerns to offering psychoeducation, tailoring the pace of career development work, checking in about client responses, and helping clients integrate supportive techniques commonly used in personal counselling. You do not need to be a therapist to use these skills; you can use this framework for recognising what is happening and adjusting your approach within your career development expertise.

The webinar introduces a basic trauma‑informed model using the Baranowsky and Gentry approach, grounded in the tri‑phasic model. Participants will explore the three phases (Stabilization, Trauma Work, and Reconnection) and learn how career development needs and capacities may shift as clients move through these phases in their personal counselling work. The goal is not to adopt a clinical model, but to understand where your work fits and how you can collaborate effectively.

Finally, participants will learn concrete, immediately usable skills including grounding strategies to teach clients, ways to regulate yourself during and after challenging sessions, and practical considerations for pacing, office setup, communication, and session structure. We close with guidance on when career development practitioners can support clients directly, when referral is helpful, and how to collaborate with mental health professionals without handing over career development expertise.

Key Learning Outcomes

• Understand what trauma informed career development is and how it differs from trauma therapy or clinical trauma work.

• Recognise how trauma responses may show up in career conversations, decision making and life transitions.

• Apply practical strategies for pacing, grounding, communication and session structure within professional scope.

• Identify when to support clients directly, when to refer, and how to collaborate with mental health professionals.

CICA Competencies

• Communication and interpersonal skills

• Ethical practice

• Diversity and inclusion

• Professional practice application