In my past practice as a career coach and educator in a post-secondary, and as a mother of a
recent graduate of a bachelor’s degree, I have become increasingly interested in the concept of
career resilience and the relationship between career resilience and employability in new
graduates in an ever changing and at times unfavourable labour market. Through my journey as a
student in the Masters of Education program at the Thompson Rivers University I completed the
Introduction to Counselling course which introduced me to logotherapy, an approach mainly
known in clinical counseling, which asserts that humans are driven by a desire to find their
meaning in life, and that people can tap into their spirituality to accept suffering as part of life
and even turn it into accomplishments. In this paper I argue that universities are responsible for
preparing students for the realities of a stressed labour market by teaching them resilience and
flexibility along job searching techniques. Employability is more than academic performance and
job searching techniques. My application chapter will demonstrate how a logotherapeutic
approach in career education enhances students’ career resilience and teaches them how to
emotionally deal with job search stress, failures, and rejections, thus increasing their
employability for life. The implications are that if we want to produce graduates with high career
resilience in a complex labour market, we must advocate for a new student services structure,
where clinical counselors work together with career counselors to create educational programs
and opportunities for students to engage in purpose and meaning searching within their own
cultural set of values and expectations.
