APCDA Glossary

The Asia Pacific Career Development Association includes several countries in which English is spoken as one of the official languages, such as Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, and USA, among others.  These countries use different terms and expressions in career development.  In addition, many of our members use other languages, where some of our commonly used terms may be translated with additional meanings.  For this reason, it is important for us to agree on the meaning of common career development terms so that we can clearly understand each other when we speak and write.

This project was begun in 2014 at the urging of the European Lifelong Guidance Policy Network (ELGPN).  Familiar with the confusion caused by dealing with a variety of countries that understand English words slightly differently, they advised us that this should be one of our early projects.  In 2017, the project was revived by a group or active members willing to put their time into the project. In 2022 we completed another expansion, adding many terms that are used in our workshops and webinars.

The current list contains 180 terms and phrases which we agreed are used very commonly. This list was created by volunteers from a wide variety of countries.  It began with selections from the ELGPN glossary, but now includes many newer common terms.  

APCDA is excited to have translations in some of our member languages.  It is our hope that our member countries, especially those that do not speak English officially, will translate the English glossary into local languages.  In this process, we believe other terms will be identified that need to be added. Having glossaries in local languages is one of many services that we wish to provide for our members.

In the process of building the English Version of the Glossary, we found many terms that had different meanings for English speakers.  For example, “Career.”  Based on the normal translation of “Career” in Chinese, we learned that our colleagues with a Chinese cultural background strongly disagreed with those with other backgrounds on the correct definition of “Career.”  We learned that the person called a “Guidance Counselor” in India is called a “School Counselor” in the USA.  A “Dropout” in the USA is an “Early School Leaver” in several countries and the age which is considered “early” varies.  Even a simple phrase like “Work Experience” raised controversy.  Creating this glossary was a fascinating experience which required compromise and careful use of words to assure that our definitions were not ambiguous.

We hope to keep this glossary up-to-date. Please submit terms you would like to see added to the Glossary to Glossary@AsiaPacificCDA.org