Mark L. Savickas

Career Counseling in the Postmodern Era

Hallmarks of the modern era such as logical positivism, objectivistic science, and industrialism are being questioned as we decenter from an “us versus them” singular perspective toward a multiple perspective discourse. All indicators suggest the move from seeking truth to participation in conversations; from objectivity to perspectivity. In tune with these societal changes, career counseling seems to be reforming itself into an interpretive discipline in which practitioners help individuals to relate their quest for meaning to the division of labor in their community. The postmodern era has already engendered six innovations in counseling for career development.

Personality and Medical Specialty Choice: A Literature Review and Integration.

This review examines the literature on personality and medical specialty choice. First, it describes studies categorized by medical specialties that to date have used the same measures: Adjective Check List, California Psychological Inventory, Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire, and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Then it integrates these results using the framework provided by the Five-Factor Model of personality. This model provides a method to organize the personality descriptors associated with medical specialties and to summarize information in an understandable and meaningful way. Conclusions drawn from the review suggest a loose association between a few personality factors and particular medical specialties. Recommendations for further research on personality and medical specialties encourage shifting from the “variable” to the “person” approach and studying how different personalities succeed in the same specialty.

New Questions for Vocational Psychology: Premises, Paradigms, and Practices:

The innovative responses of vocational psychology and career counseling to the important questions raised by people living in information societies will continue the disciplines’ tradition of helping individuals link their lives to the economic context. The questions pertaining to perspectives, paradigms, and practices arise mainly from the increasing dominance of ‘‘jobless work,’’ which moves people from project to project and from one culture to another culture. These recurring transitions mean that individuals cannot maintain their employment, so they must maintain their employability and actively manage their careers through adaptability, intentionality, life-long learning, and autobiographical reasoning. The emerging practice of career counseling seems to take the general form of constructing career through small stories, deconstructing and reconstructing the small stories into a large story, and co-constructing intention and action to begin the next episode in that large story.

Identity in vocational development.

Abstract J. L. Hollands (1985, Making vocational choices: A theory of vocational personalities and work environments , Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall) formulation of the new construct vocational identity did not deal with its relation to other developmental constructs in vocational psychology. The present study investigated the association of vocational identity with vocational development by administering the Vocational Identity Scale, the Medical Career Development Inventory, and the Ego Identity Scale to 143 first- and second-year college students with the same career aspiration. The results indicated that vocational identity related to both degree of vocational development and progress in egoidentity achievement. In particular, vocational identity associated most with the task of crystallizing tentative preferences and progressively less with the other tasks in the vocational development continuum. Interpretation of sex differences in the results led to recommendations for research on stability of vocational identity and the identity formation process.

Time perspective in vocational maturity and career decision making

Abstract This study investigated the hypothesis that time perspective is a component in vocational maturity and career decision making. Ninety-seven college freshmen responded to two measures of time perspective and seven measures selected to represent attitudinal vocational maturity, cognitive vocational maturity, and career decision making. The nine variables were intercorrelated and the resulting matrix was subjected to alpha factor analysis. Three factors were extracted and titled Attitudinal Vocational Maturity, Cognitive Vocational Maturity, and Career Decision Making. As predicted, time perspective was a component in the Attitudinal Vocational Maturity and Career Decision-Making factors. The results supported the hypothesis and specifically linked time perspective to planfulness and degree of indecision.

Revision of the Career Maturity Inventory

Since the last edition of the Career Maturity Inventory (CMI; Crites, 1978a) was published, it has become increasingly apparent that a revision is needed. Five considerations directed the preparation and construction of the 1995 CMI: (a) to reduce administration and testing time, (b) to extend the CMI to the postsecondary adult levels, (c) to eliminate subscales, (d) to construct a collateral Career Developer (CDR) for the interpretation of the CMI, and (e) to offer both hand- and machine-scoring options for individuals and aggregate data analysis. The 1995 CMI was derived from the 1978 edition, but it is also based on previously unpublished longitudinal data for item selection, which augment the original cross-sectional data. In addition, new Competence Test items were written, with Agree and Disagree response options, to replace the former 5-response-place items. The 1995 CMI now consists of 25 Attitude scale items and 25 Competence Test items, each yielding a score that measures degree of career maturity of conative and cognitive variables, respectively. In addition, there is an overall career maturity score that is a composite of attitudes and competencies.

A Developmental Perspective on Vocational Behaviour: Career Patterns, Salience, and Themes

Donald E. Supers signal contribution to the science of vocationalpsychology and the practice of career counselling arose from his takinga developmental perspective on occupational choice and work adjustment.He asserted that the individual differences view of occupations andworkers ignored the longitudinal vantage point from which one canobserve how individuals expand their vocational coping repertoires andmove into more congruent positions. From this seminal insight, heelaborated important hypotheses about career maturity, salience, stages,patterns, and themes. Supers models and measures of these constructsremain as valuable today as when he first introduced them in the1950s.

Revision of the Career Maturity Inventory: The Adaptability Form

Initially administered in 1961, the Career Maturity Inventory (CMI) was the first paper-and-pencil measure of vocational development. The present research revised the CMI to reestablish its usefulness as a succinct, reliable, and valid measure of career choice readiness, with a few theoretically relevant and practically useful content scales for diagnostic work with school populations up to and including Grade 12. The new Form C was produced by combining rational organization of item content with confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). In the end, CMI Form C provides a total score for career choice readiness, three scale scores reflecting career adaptability dimensions of concern, curiosity, and confidence, and a score reflecting relational style in forming occupational choices. Initial evidence supports the face, construct, and concurrent validity of the CMI scores as indicators of career choice readiness.

Examining the Personal Meaning of Inventoried Interests During Career Counseling

The present article seeks to renovate the career counseling use of interest inventories as personality indicators by making explicit the link between inventoried interests and their personal meaning to clients. Interest denotes a relationship between the individual and the environment, one to the advantage of the individual. The chief advantage of an interest to the individual is that it cultivates a solution to a personal problem. Viewing interests as a developmental pathway encourages the interpretation of interest inventory results from a psychology of use. A focus on how the client uses an interest prompts counselors to trace a measured interest both backward to its origin in private preoccupations and forward to its expression in public occupations. Using interest inventories as personality indicators helps clients to conceptualize the impetus of their movement (needs), the direction of that movement (values), and the style of that movement (interests). Counseling that includes a coherent narration of the why, what, and how of an individuals movement in the world can clarify the clients occupational choices and enhance that clients ability to make career decisions.

Helping People Choose Jobs: A History of the Guidance Profession

This chapter considers the history of the vocational and career guidance profession, in particular the origins and development of its four main methods for helping people make educational and occupational choices. These are youth mentoring for agricultural communities, vocational guidance for industrial cities, career counselling for corporate societies, and self-construction within an information society. The author suggests that social change generated by information technology and economic globalisation, requires the profession of vocational guidance to reconsider the relevance of its theoretical models and techniques. Its reinvention to concentrate on self-construction within an information society demonstrates its determination to remain relevant and useful in contemporary society.