Mark L. Savickas
Career
construction theory provides a way of thinking about how individuals choose and
use work. The theory presents a
model for comprehending vocational behavior across the life-cycle as well as
methods and materials that career counselors use to help clients make
vocational choices and maintain successful and satisfying work lives. It seeks
to be comprehensive in its purview by taking three perspectives on vocational
behavior: the differential, developmental, and dynamic. From the perspective of
individual differences psychology, it examines the content of vocational
personality types and what different people prefer to do. From the perspective of developmental
psychology, it examines the process of psychosocial adaptation and how
individuals cope with vocational development tasks, occupational transitions,
and work traumas. From the
perspective of narrative psychology, it examines the dynamics by which life
themes impose meaning on vocational
behavior and why individuals fit work into their lives in distinct
ways. In coordination, the three
perspectives enable counselors and researchers to survey how individuals
construct their careers by using life themes to integrate the self-organization
of personality and the self-extension of career adaptability into a
self-defining whole that animates work, directs occupational choice, and shapes
vocational adjustment.
RATIONALE
Career
construction theory is one of many career theories that seek to explain occupational
choice and work adjustment, each interrogating a different aspect of vocational
behavior. Career theories that have
risen to prominence have done so because they effectively address important
questions. For example, the model of person-environment fit emerged early in
the 20th century to address the question of how to match workers to
work. The model of vocational
development emerged in the middle of the 20th century to address the
question of how to advance a career in one organization or profession. These theories of vocational personality
types and vocational development tasks remain useful today when considering how
to match workers to work and develop a career in an organization. However, the global economy of the 21st
century poses new questions about career, especially the question of how
individuals can negotiate a lifetime of job changes without losing their sense
of self and social identity.
Career
construction theory responds to the needs of todays mobile workers who may feel
fragmented and confused as they encounter a restructuring of occupations,
transformation of the labor force, and multicultural imperatives. This
fundamental reshaping of the work world is making it increasingly difficult to
comprehend careers with just person-environment and vocational development
models that emphasize commitment and stability rather than flexibility and
mobility. The new job market in our unsettled economy calls for viewing career
not as a lifetime commitment to one employer but as selling services and skills
to a series of employers who need projects completed. In negotiating each new project, the
prospective employee usually concentrates on salary yet also seeks to make the
work meaningful, control the work environment, balance work-family
responsibilities, and train for the next job.
While
the form of career changes from stability to mobility to reflect the labor
needs of post-industrial societies, career construction theory seeks to retain
and renovate the best concepts and research from the 20th century
career models for use in the 21st century. For example, instead of measuring
personality traits as realist concepts and trying to prove construct validity,
the theory concentrates on how individuals use what they have. In replacing scores with stories, career
construction theory focuses on how individuals use their vocational personality
to adapt to a sequence of job changes while remaining faithful to oneself and
recognizable by others. The theory
does this by focusing on the meaning that structures an individuals career as
it plays out across the ten or more different jobs that a worker today can
expect to occupy during her or his work life.
Career construction theory, simply stated, holds that individuals build their careers by imposing meaning on vocational behavior. Personality types and developmental transitions deal with what a person has done and how they have done it. However, they do not address the question of why they do what they do, nor do they focus on the spirit that animates nor the values that guide the manifold choices and adjustments that build a career. Thus, career construction theory emphasizes the interpretive and interpersonal processes through which individuals impose meaning and direction on their vocational behavior. It uses social constructionism as a meta-theory with which to reconceptualize vocational personality types and vocational development tasks as processes that have possibilities, not realities that predict the future. From a constructionist viewpoint, career, or more precisely subjective career, denotes a moving perspective that imposes personal meaning on past memories, present experiences, and future aspirations by weaving them into a pattern that portrays a life theme. Thus, the subjective career that guides, regulates, and sustains vocational behavior emerges from an active process of making meaning, not discovering preexisting facts.
The life
theme component of career construction theory addresses the subject matter of
work life and focuses on the why of vocational behavior. Career stories reveal the themes that
individuals use to make meaningful choices and adjust to work roles. By dealing with the why of life
themes along with the what of personality types and the how of
career adaptability, career construction seeks to be comprehensive in its
purview. Although the content of
personality and process of adaptation are both important, studying vocational
personality and career adaptability as separate variables misses the dynamics
that integrate personality and adaptability into a self-defined whole. The
essential meaning of a career, and the dynamics of its construction, are
revealed in self-defining stories about the vocational development tasks,
occupational transitions, and work traumas that an individual has faced. In chronicling the recursive interplay
between self and society, career stories explain why individuals make the
choices that they do and the private meaning that guides these choices. From
these prototypical stories about work life, counselors attempt to comprehend
the life themes that construct careers and understand the motives and meaning
that pattern work life.
The
life theme component of career construction theory emerged from Donald E. Super's
postulate that in expressing vocational preferences, individuals put into
occupational terminology their ideas of the kind of people they are; that in
entering an occupation, they seek to implement a concept of themselves; and
that after stabilizing in an occupation, they seek to realize their potential
and preserve self-esteem. This core
postulate leads to the conceptualization of occupational choice as implementing
a self-concept, work as a manifestation of selfhood, and vocational development
as a continuing process of improving the match between the self and situation. From this perspective on the self,
work provides a context for human development and an important location in each
individuals life, a place that matters.
The
life theme perspective highlights the view that careers are about mattering. Counseling for career construction aims
to help clients understand how their life project matters to themselves and to
other people. In career
construction theory, the theme is what matters in the life story. It consists of what is at stake in that
persons life. On the one hand, the
theme matters to individuals in that it gives meaning and purpose to their work. It makes them care about what they
do. On the other hand, what they do
and contribute to society matters to other people. The belief that what they do
matters to others sharpens identity and promotes a sense of social meaning and
relatedness. What individuals
choose to do is the subject matter of vocational personality.
Vocational personality refers to an individuals career-related abilities, needs, values, and interests. Individuals form personalities in their families of origin and develop these personalities in the neighborhood and school as they prepare to eventually enter the work world. Before these characteristics are expressed in occupations, they are rehearsed in activities such as household chores, games, hobbies, reading, and studying.
Career construction theory prefers to view interests and other career-related traits as strategies for adapting rather than as realist categories. Concepts such as interests should not be reified as factors or traits. They do not reside within an individual and they cannot be excavated from within by interest inventories. They should not be treated as objects by counselors; they are verbs not nouns. Career-related abilities, interests, and values are relational phenomena that reflect socially-constituted meanings. They are dynamic processes that present possibilities, not stable traits that predict the future. From this perspective, individuals can adopt or drop selected strategies as situations call for them. Of course, long-practiced strategies do coalesce into a tested style. This style can be compared to that of other people to form types or groups, but these socially-constructed categories should not be privileged as anything more than similarities.
Career
construction theory asserts that vocational personality types and occupational
interests are simply resemblances to socially-constructed clusters of
attitudes and skills. They have no reality or truth value outside themselves
because they depend on the social constructions of time, place and culture that
support them. Regulated
similarities in work environments produce vocational personality types and
occupational groups from among individuals with heterogeneous potentials. Thus,
career construction theory regards vocational personality types and
occupational interests as relational phenomena that reflect emergent and
socially-constituted meanings. For this reason, career construction theory
views vocational personality as an individuals reputation among a group
of people. Accordingly, the theory
concentrates on what individuals can become in doing work, not what they are
before they go to work. Work, as a context for human development, provides the
outer form of something intensely private; it is the bridge between public and
private. Crossing the bridge
between self and society is called adaptation.
In concert with life themes and vocational personality, the third central component in career construction theory is career adaptability. Life themes guide the expression of personality in work, while the expression itself is managed by the process of career adaptation. Viewing career construction as a series of attempts to implement a self-concept in social roles focuses attention on adaptation to a series of transitions from school to work, from job to job, and from occupation to occupation. Career construction theory views adaptation to these transitions as fostered by five principal types of behaviors: orientation, exploration, establishment, management, and disengagement. These constructive activities form a cycle of adaptation that is periodically repeated as new transitions appear on the horizon. As each transition approaches, individuals can adapt more effectively if they meet the change with growing awareness, information-seeking followed by informed decision making, trial behaviors leading to a stable commitment projected forward for a certain time period, active role management, and eventually forward-looking deceleration and disengagement. For example, an employee begins a new job with a period of growth in the new role, including exploration of the requirements, routines, and rewards of that role. Then she becomes established in the role, manages the role for a certain time period, and eventually disengages from it either voluntarily when further growth readies her to change jobs or involuntarily when organizational changes make her position redundant. In post-industrial economies people do not work at one job for thirty years. New technology, globalization, and job redesign require workers to more actively construct their careers. They change jobs often and make frequent transitions, each time repeating the cycle of orientation, exploration, stabilization, management, and disengagement. The ability to adapt to new circumstances is enhanced by certain coping resources for solving the unfamiliar, complex, and ill-defined problems presented by developmental tasks, occupational transitions, and work traumas.
In considering adaptability, career construction theory highlights a set of specific attitudes, beliefs, and competencies – the ABCs of career construction-- which shape the actual problem-solving strategies and coping behaviors that individuals use to synthesize their vocational self-concepts with work roles. The ABCs are grouped into four dimensions of adaptability: concern, control, curiosity, and confidence. Thus, the adaptive individual is conceptualized as (a) becoming concerned about the vocational future, (b) increasing personal control over one's vocational future, (c) displaying curiosity by exploring possible selves and future scenarios, and (d) strengthening the confidence to pursue ones aspirations. Increasing a clients career adaptablity is a central goal in the goal of career construction counseling.
COUNSELING FOR CAREER CONSTRUCTION
Counseling
for career construction begins with an interview that poses a uniform set of
questions to a client. The Career Style Interview elicits self-defining
stories that enable counselors to identify and appreciate the thematic unity in
a clients life. In addition to
revealing the life theme, data from a Career Style Interview also
manifest the clients vocational personality and career adaptability.
It
is critical that neither the counselor nor the client view the career stories
as determining the future; instead, they should view storying as an active
attempt at making meaning and shaping the future. The stories guide adaptation by
evaluating opportunities and constraints as well as by using vocational
personality traits to address tasks, transitions, and traumas. In telling their stories, clients are
re-membering the past in a way that constructs a possible future. Clients seem to tell counselors the
stories that they themselves need to hear; from all their available stories,
they narrate those stories that support current goals and inspire action. Rather than reporting historical facts,
individuals reconstruct the past so that prior events support current choices
and lay the groundwork for future moves.
This narrative truth often differs from historical truth because it
fictionalizes the past in order to preserve dispositional continuity and
coherence in the face of psychosocial change.
In attempting to discern the life theme while
listening to an individuals career stories, counselors and researchers can
become disoriented by the numerous particulars of a life. To prevent becoming confused by a
clients complexities and contradictions, they can listen not for the facts but
for the glue that holds the facts together as they try to hear the theme or
secret that makes a whole of the life. Arranging the seemingly random actions
and incidents reported in career stories into a plot can be done in many
ways. Career construction theory
proposes for this purpose that the listener try to hear the quintessence of the
stories a client tells. Counselors
and researchers approach this task by assuming that the archetypal theme of
career construction involves turning a personal preoccupation into a public
occupation. As they listen to a client narrate his or her stories, they
concentrate on identifying and understanding his or her personal paradigm for
turning essence into interest, tension into intention, and obsession into
profession. The progress narrative
in the 20th century career model that told about climbing the
occupational ladder is thus transformed into a progress narrative that tells
how individuals can use work to actively master what they have passively
suffered and thus move from a felt minus to a perceived plus. Thus, in its counseling application,
career construction theory assists clients to fully inhabit their lives and
become more complete as they sustain themselves and contribute to their
communities.
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READINGS
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