Understanding and Applying Emerging Theories of Career Development

1. Understanding and Applying Emerging Theories of Career Development

2. Characteristics of Emerging Theories • Draw upon a solid foundation of research support • Attempt to address the career development needs of diverse client populations • Reflect two major trends • emphasis on cognitive approaches • clients’ active role in career construction

3. Values-Based Model of Career Choice (Brown) • Values with high priority are the most important determinants of choice from among alternatives. • Values included in one’s value system are acquired from society; each person adopts a small number of these. • Culture, sex, and socioeconomic status influence opportunities and social interaction, resulting in a wide variation of values in subgroups of society.

4. Propositions of Values-Based Model (Brown)continued • Making choices that coincide with values is essential to satisfaction. • Life satisfaction is the result of role interaction. • High-functioning people have well- developed and prioritized values. • Success in any role depends on the abilities required to perform the role’s functions.

5. Applying the Values-Based Approach • This approach classifies clients into two categories: • those making planned decisions • those making unplanned decisions • For all clients, counselors must assess whether • there are important intrapersonal value conflicts. • mood problems exist. • values have been crystallized and prioritized. • client can use values-based information. • client understands how career choices affect other life roles.

6. Clients Making Planned Career Changes • Counselors need to assess • how issues related to intrarole and interrole conflict may be contributing to client career dissatisfaction. • degree of client flexibility related to geographical location, training opportunities, and qualifications.

7. Clients Making Unplanned Career Changes • Counselors must assess whether • there are mood problems. • there are financial concerns. • existing career opportunities can satisfy values. • clients can make changes to increase the satisfaction they derive from other life roles.

8. Hansen’s Integrative Life Planning (ILP) • ILP is a worldview for addressing career development rather than a theory that can be translated into individual counseling. • The integrative aspect of ILP relates to the emphasis on integrating the mind, body, and spirit. • The life planning concept acknowledges that multiple aspects of life are interrelated.

9. Assumptions of ILP • Changes in the nature of knowledge support new ways of knowing related to career development. • Broader kinds of self-knowledge and societal knowledge are critical to an expanded view of career. • Career counseling needs to focus on career professionals as change agents.

10. Six Career Development Tasks Confronting Adults • Finding work that needs doing in changing global contexts • Weaving their lives into a meaningful whole • Connecting family and work • Valuing pluralism and inclusivity • Managing personal transitions and organizational change • Exploring spirituality and life purpose

11. Applying ILP • Career counselors should help their clients • understand these six tasks. • see the interrelatedness of the tasks. • help clients prioritize the tasks according to their needs.

12. Postmodern Approaches • These are theories and interventions that depart from • the positivistic scientific tradition that has dominated social and behavioral science research and • most of the normative career development research (Vondracek & Kawaski).

13. Creating Narratives • Career counseling from the narrative approach emphasizes understanding and articulating the main character to be lived out in a specific career plot. • This articulation uses the process of composing a narrative as the primary vehicle for defining character and plot. • Howard (1989) noted that people tell stories that infuse parts of their lives with great meaning and de-emphasize other parts.

14. Ways in Which Narratives Help Clients (Cochran) • A narrative is a temporal organization with a beginning, middle, and end. • A story is a synthetic structure that organizes many pieces into a whole. • The plot of a narrative specifies what has been accomplished. • The structure of a narrative communicates a problem, attempts at resolving it, and a resolution.

15. Ways to Use a Narrative Approach in Career Counseling • Elaborate a career problem. • Compose a life history. • Build a future narrative. • Construct reality. • Change a life structure. • Enact a role. • Crystallize a decision.

16. Contextualizing Career Development • Acts are viewed as purposive and as being directed toward specific goals. • Acts are embedded in their context. • Change plays a dominant role in career development. • Contextualism rejects a theory of truth based on the correspondence between mental representations and objective reality.

17. Constructivist Career Counseling • How can I form a cooperative alliance with this client? (Relationship factor) • How can I encourage the self-helpfulness of this client? (Agency factor) • How can I help this client to elaborate and evaluate his/her constructions germane to this decision? (Meaning-making factor) • How can I help this client to reconstruct and negotiate personally meaningful and socially supportable realities? (Negotiation factor)