WEEK 6 - MODERN: LEARNING THEORY - KRUMBOLTZ

Week 6 - February 23^rd

Learning Theories

Crites (1969) identified three broad overlapping eras to describe the evolution of career and development theory building which are:  Observational, Empirical, and Theoretical.

Theoretical Era can be subdivided into two categories labeled modern and postmodern.  Modern theories began in the 1950s with postmodern emerging in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Name of Theory:  Learning Theory of Career Counseling (LTCC)

Dates:  Modern Theory--appeared in the 1950s - sometime in the 1980s

Theorist:  John Krumboltz

Main Concept/Ideas:

Krumboltz and his colleagues (Mitchell and Jones) developed a learning theory of career counseling comprising two distinct parts.  First part, focuses on explaining the origins of career choice and is labeled “social learning theory of career decision making” (SLTCDM).  Second part, focuses on career counseling and is labeled “learning theory of Career counseling “(LTCC).  SLTCDM identifies the factors influencing career decisions people make (subsumed under LTCC) and LTCC explains what career counselors can do to help clients make effective career decisions, lableled the entire theory LTCC.

LTCC is based on the application of Bandura’s social learning theory to career decision making.  Bandura’s theory emphasizes the influence of reinforcement theory, cognitive information processing, classical behaviorism on human behavior.  Social learning “assumes that people’s personalities and behavioral repertoires can be explained on the basis of their unique learning experiences and can still acknowledge the role played by innate and developmental processes.  Social learning also assumes that “humans are intelligent, problem-solving individuals who strive at all times to understand the reinforcement that surrounds them and who in turn control their environment to suit their own purposes and needs.  Bandura described the interaction of environment, self-referent thought and behavior at the “triadic reciprocal interaction system.”

SLTCDM describes the factors influencing individual’s career decisions.  LTCC describes what career counselors can do to help their clients make effective career choices.

SLTCDM identifies four factors that influence our career decision making:

1.  Genetic endowment and special abilities which are inherited qualities, such as sex, race, and physical appearance.  Special abilities such as intelligence, athletic ability, and musical and artistic talents result from the interaction of genetic factors and exposure to selected environmental events.
2. Environmental conditions and events are generally outside our control and involve a wide variety of cultural, social, political, and economic factors.  An example, government-sponsored job-training programs, such as the Comprehensive Employment Training Act and the Job Training Partnership Act, can provide opportunities for learning new skills and increasing employmentability.  Technological developments (computer technologies) create me job opportunities and make others obsolete.  Legislation related to welfare, labor laws, and union policies influences job availability and facilitates or restricts job entry.  Natural disasters can influence career opportunities and career paths.  Family traditions, as well as neighborhood and community resources, can affect individuals’ career decision making.  Job entry requirements can persuade or deter us from considering specific occupational opportunities.  Our geographic location can also play a prominent feature in influencing our career choices and the availability of job requirements (e.g. climatic differences between Maine and Florida result in differences in the availability of some job opportunities; availability of counseling jobs is greater in the US than in other countries in which counseling concerns are resolved by spiritual leaders.
3. Instrumental and associative learning experiences involve antecedents, behaviors, and consequences.  According to Mitchell and Krumboltz “Antecedents include the genetic endowments, special abilities, and environmental conditions and events previously discussed as well as the characteristics of a particular task or problem.  Behavioral responses include cognitive and emotional responses as well as overt behavior.  Consequences include immediate and delayed effects produced by the behavior as well as “self-talk”.
4. Instrumental and associative learning experiences involve antecedents, behaviors, and consequences.  According to Mitchell and Krumboltz “Antecedents include the genetic endowments, special abilities, and environmental conditions and events previously discussed as well as the characteristics of a particular task or problem.  Behavioral responses include cognitive and emotional responses as well as overt behavior.  Consequences include immediate and delayed effects produced by the behavior as well as “self-talk” about those consequences.

Associate learning experiences occur when a neutral stimulus is paired with a positive and/or negative stimulus or consequences.  Dramatic.

     5.  Task approach skills are genetic characteristics, special abilities, and environmental      influences (family support, training opportunities, financial resources, and occupational opportunities) which are used to make career choices.  These skills include the individual’s work habits, mental set, emotional responses, cognitive processes, and problem-solving skills.  Task approach skills influence outcomes and are themselves outcomes.

These four factors influence our beliefs about ourselves (what we are good at, what are interests are, what we value) and our beliefs about the world (“hard work always pays off,” “all accountants are stuffy,” “all counselors value altruism over economic rewards”).  These interactions of these four factors influence people differently, there are generally four ways in which they can influence our career decision making.


1.  Self-observation generalizations are overt or covert statements evaluating our actual or vicarious performance or self-assessments of our interests and values are defined as self-observation generalizations.  Learning experiences lead us to draw conclusions about ourselves and compare our performance with the performance of others and to our own performance expectations.  We use these comparisons to draw conclusions about our performance capabilities.  Conclusions about our interests and values result from learning experiences.  In SLTCDM, interest link learning experiences with specific actions.  Self-observations about values are statements about the desirability of specific outcomes, behaviors, or events. 

2.  Worldwide generalizations are about the nature and functioning of the world.  Are formed from learning experiences.  The accuracy of worldview generalizations is dependent on the learning experiences shaping each generalization.

3.  Task approach skills are outcomes as “cognitive and performance abilities and emotional predispositions for coping with the environment, interpreting it in relation to self-observation generalizations, and making covert and overt predictions about future events.  Task approach skills both influence career decision making and are outcomes of learning experiences that shape individuals’ career development.  Task approach skills critical to career development are those involved in the decision making, problem solving, goal setting, information gathering, and values clarifying.

4.  Actions is learning experiences eventually lead individuals to take actions related to entering a career which can include applying for a job, entering a training program, applying to college, changing jobs, or taking overt steps to make progress in one’s career.

SLTCDM suggests that career decision making is “influenced but complex environmental (economic) factors as many are beyond the control of any single individual.  The theory is “the interaction between innate predispositions and earning experiences within the intra-individual, family, social, educational, and cultural context.”  Also, people prefer an occupation if:

1.   Have succeed at tasks they believe are like tasks performed by members of that occupation.
2.   Have observed a valued model being reinforced for activities like those performed by members of that occupation.
3.  Valued friend or relative stressed its advantages to them and/or they observed positive words and images being associated with it.

Krumboltz noted that people will avoid an occupation if

1. They have failed at tasks they believe are similar to tasks performed by people in that occupation.
2. They have observed a valued model being punished or ignored for performing activities like those performed by members of that occupation.
3. A valued friend or relative stressed its disadvantages to them and/or they have observed negative words and images associated with it.

The strength of SLTCDM is that it provides a description of factors influencing career decision making and identifies outcomes resulting from those influential factors.  It is a useful theory for understanding career paths.  The understanding acquired form such a perspective is helpful in making current career decisions and in formulating future career goals.

When career concerns arise, they typically involved one or more of the following: a) the absence of a goal, or career indecision, b) expressed feeling of concern about high aspirations, or unrealism, and c) a conflict between equally appropriate alternatives or multipotentiality.  Krumboltz developed the learning theory of career counseling (LTCC) to guide counselors in constructing career development interventions to help clients cope more effectively with these career concerns.  Counselors using LTCC help clients:  a) acquire more accurate self-observation generalizations, b) acquire more accurate worldview generalizations, c) learn new task approach skills, and d) take appropriate career-related actions.  LTCC assumes that counselors must be prepared to help their clients cope with four current career-related trends.

1. People need to expand their capabilities and interests, not base decisions on existing characteristics only.  Interest inventories assess what we know and what we have experienced.  Counselors must encourage clients to explore new activities, develop new interests, and consider new options based on newly formed interested and capabilities.
2. People need to prepare for changing work tasks, and not assume that occupations will remain stable.  Change is constant; career counselors must help their clients identify new skills to learn and develop strategies for coping with the stress inherent in an ever-changing world of work.
3. People need to be empowered to take action, not merely to be given a diagnosis.  Implementing a career choice, for some clients, is more challenging than making the choice.  Clients need ongoing assistance from their career counselors as they attempt to adjust to the career choice made and implemented.
4. Career counselors need to play a major role in dealing with all career problems and not just career selection.  Career-related concerns exist beyond this concern of identifying a career choice.  Clients may struggle with the burnout, underemployment, relationships with coworkers, family members’ reactions to career choices, and low self-efficacy.

These four trends suggest the importance of providing clients with learning experiences to a) correct faulty assumptions, b) learn new skills and interests, c) identify effective strategies for addressing issues emanating from interactions between work and other life-role activities and concerns, and d) learn skills for coping with changing work tasks.  Career counselors can use assessments to help clients identify what characteristics (beliefs, skills, values, interests, personality) they have learned and to identify opportunities for learning new characteristics.  The task of the career counselor is to promote client learning and the goal of career counseling is to enhance the ability to clients to create satisfying lives for themselves.

Krumboltz divides career development interventions into two categories:  a) developmental/preventive and b) targeted/remedial.  The former includes career education programs, school-to-work initiatives, job club programs, study materials, and simulations.  These career development interventions facilitate the acquisition of accurate and occupational self-information and the use of this information in the career decision-making process.  Learning through active on-the-job participation (job shadowing, internships, and worksite observations) is emphasized.  It is important to note that many clients could certainly benefit from participating in many of these activities, but they must first receive more targeted and remedial career development interventions.

Targeted and remedial career development interventions include goal clarification, cognitive restructuring, cognitive rehearsal, narrative analysis, role playing, desensitization, paradoxical intention, and humor.  LTCC also emphasize the importance of teaching decision-making skills to clients.  Learning how to make career decisions helps clients resolve current career concerns and equips clients with an important task approach skill for coping with changing work and personal conditions in the future. 

To help counselors identify problematic client beliefs related to each of the career problem categories (indecision, unrealism, and multipotentiality) Krumboltz developed the Career Beliefs Inventory (CBI) which is based on the rationale that people make career decisions according to what they believe about themselves and the world-of- work.  The beliefs are accurate and constructive; they will act in ways that are likely to help them achieve their goals.  If their beliefs are inaccurate and self-defeating, they will act in a way that makes sense to them but not help them achieve their goals.

CBI helps counselors understand their clients’ beliefs and assumptions.  The instrument is most useful when administered at the beginning of career counseling.  It contains 25 scales organized into the following 5 categories:  My Current Career Situation, What Seems Necessary for My Happiness, Factors That Influence My Decisions, Changes I Am Willing to Make, and Efforts I Am Willing to Initiate.  These categories are related to mental barriers blocking clients form taking action.  Meaningful journeys, including our career journey, contains obstacles that must be confronted.  Clients allow discouragement and other problematic beliefs to dominate their thinking and efforts to take positive actions.  Self-defeating beliefs such as those measured by the CBI must be addressed if the client is to move forward.  Counseling strategies such as cognitive restructuring and reframing are useful in helping the client to address these issues.

Career beliefs is often, in career counseling, referred to significant events in ways that suggest the client had little to do with the experience.  Career counseling often involves helping clients understand and take advantage of the chance events they encounter in daily living.  Unplanned events are not only inevitable, they are desirable and referred to this phenomenon as “planned happenstance” which can be incorporated into career counseling by teaching clients to generate, recognize, and incorporate chance events into the process of theory career development.  Career counselors can ask their clients questions such as: “How have unplanned events influenced your career in the past?  How did you enable each event to influence your career development?  How do you feel about encountering unplanned events in your future?”  Counselors and client interactions that intentionally address the role chance on career development help to normalize such occurrences, help clients see the thematic influence upon theory career development, and help clients be increasingly open to noticing and acting upon unplanned events in the future.  An internal locus of control and increased sense of personal self-efficacy are fostered.

Focus on the skills clients need to develop to take advantage of unplanned events in their career development.  Developing a sense of curiosity, being persistent, being flexible, maintaining a sense of optimism, and being willing to take risks represent a set of skills that increase the individual’s ability to take advantage of unplanned events.

Counselors evaluate the success of career development interventions by standards determining whether clients experience a reduction in career indecision.  Krumboltz recommends that career counselors consider revising these criteria.  Counselors using LTCC view indecision as a desirable quality for motivating clients to engage in new learning activities and recommends reframing “indecision” to “open-mindedness.”

The goal of achieving congruence between individuals and their work environments is unnecessarily restricting because “birds of a feather” do not always flock together.  Two very different people can be successful in the same occupation.  Krumboltz argues that the congruence criterion is less useful today because it is based on stagnant definitions of occupational environments and overlooking changes in work environments: “Heterogeneity, not homogeneity, within occupations is now more highly valued.”

Krumboltz recommends focusing on measuring changes in client characteristics such as skills, values, beliefs, interests, and work habits.  Counselors can ask themselves whether their career development interventions have stimulated theory clients to engage in new learning activities.  Process measures can focus on assessing the degree to which clients have made efforts to create more satisfying lives.

LTCC is new and relatively untested by research.  There is extensive research supporting the general social learning theory.  Krumboltz cites several studies supporting SLTCDM hypotheses related to the development of educational and occupational preference, task approach skills, and action.

A strength of LTCC is that it addresses both environmental and intra-individual variables affecting career development.  LTCC is compatible with Super’s Archway model of career development and offers a bit more in terms of specific ways on which environmental and personal variables influence career decision making.  LTCC can also be used as a framework for understanding the development of interests leading to one’s personal modal orientation as described by Holland’s theory.  The development of the CBI and subsequent application of strategies such as cognitive restructuring and reframing provide useful and important applications of the theory to career development interventions.

Links to Articles or Videos: 

https://elearn.etsu.edu/d2l/le/content/6249282/viewContent/38591160/View

https://elearn.etsu.edu/d2l/le/content/6249282/viewContent/38399266/View

WEEK 4 - MODERN: MATCHING THEORIES - HOLLAND

Week 4 - February 2^nd

Holland (Matching Theories)

Crites (1969) identified three broad overlapping eras to describe the evolution of career and development theory building which are:  Observational, Empirical, and Theoretical.

Theoretical Era can be subdivided into two categories labeled modern and postmodern.  Modern theories began in the 1950s with postmodern emerging in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Name of Theory:  Holland (Theory of Vocational Personalities and Work Environments)

Dates:  Modern Theory--appeared in the 1950s - sometime in the 1980s

Theorist:  John Holland

Main Concept/Ideas:

Holland has a gift for making people think about theory in practical terms and opened his text by stating his theory with three common and fundamental questions:

1.      What personal and environmental characteristics lead to satisfying career decisions, involvement, and achievement, and what characteristics lead to indecision, dissatisfying decisions, or lack of accomplishment?

2.      What personal and environmental characteristics lead to stability or change in the kind and level of work a person performs over a lifetime?

3.      What are the most effective methods for providing assistance to people with career problems?

In Holland’s book, he emphasized the practical application of the theory in a few pages leaving the rest of the book for practical ways to apply the theory.  His theory is simple and suggests that people can be characterized in terms of their resemblance to six personality types:  Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional (RIASEC) model.  The more people resemble a type, the more they exhibit the traits and behaviors of that type, and environments can be characterized in terms of their resemblance to and support of the types.  Holland stated, “The pairing of persons and environments leads to outcomes what we can predict and understand from our knowledge of the personality types and the environmental models.”

Research supports Holland’s contention that there are six distinct personality types and that these types differ in terms of their interests, vocational and avocational preferences, goals, beliefs, values, and skills.  See Link 1 for the distinguishing features and comprehensive description of the personality types and an overview of the salient characteristics of the types which comes directly from Making Vocational Choices:  A Theory of Personalities and Work Environments which is an assessment instrument commonly to determine a person’s resemblance to the types. 
To help make appropriate use of the theory, one must know the relationship of one type to another (calculus) or understanding the hexagonal model that defines the psychological resemblances among personality types and environments and their interactions.  See link 1 for hexagonal model.  Understanding the hexagon, one must appreciate the consistency of the types as well as the environments, congruence of types with environments, differentiation of types, and vocational identity.

Calculus—Visualizing the Relationship Within and Between Types and Environments

To understand the calculus, or relationship, which is the most important, can be seen visually by placing each type at a particular point and order on a hexagon.  With Realistic, Investigate, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional (RIASEC) placed in order, you can visualize the resemblance of one to another.  The closer one type is to another, the more it resembles the other.  Example, R and I are close together and are close in terms of how they are described and how they can work together.  By finding a person’s resemblance types, predicts the ease or difficulty of finding environments that will support that person’s particular pattern of traits.

Consistency—Defining the Relatedness Between Types and Environments

By understanding this principle, one can begin to see how the theory predicts the ease or difficult of people making a career choice.  If people identify with types that are close to one another on the hexagon, Holland defined that as being consistent. 

Congruence—Defining the Fit Between Types and Environments

This theory will provide additional help in predicting how one will find satisfaction or dissatisfaction with a choice.  The principle is thinking about the agreement between a person’s personality type and the environment.

Differentiation—Defining How Well a Person or Environment Can Be Described

Differentiation helps one refine or modify predictions of vocational behaviors, and some bear much stronger resemblance to one type than to another.  Employing the principle of differentiation is another way to help make practical use of the theory.

 Identity—Describing the Clarity or Stability of One’s Goals, Interests, and Talents

Another idea emerged from Holland’s efforts at refining the theory which was vocational identity which is establishing how clear a picture one has of one’s current career plans or simply who or where one is in a vocational sense.  Holland developed the instrument My Vocational Situation to measure the state of one’s identity.  One can be assessed as having a clear or unclear picture of career goals and of the tasks needed to make the goal clear.  The vocational identity concept, and the instrument to measure it, has proven to be another way of making practical what is offered by the theory which makes the theory clear that career decisions are easy for some and difficult for others.  Offering help with decision making, career explorations, and the like can be easier if one had a sense of the vocational identity of those requesting help.  The concept has also been used to describe work environments; theory can be defined as clear or unclear in terms of goals, tasks, and rewards provided.

Vocational identity is one more way we can add to our ability to answer the three basic questions posed by Holland as we have some basis for talking about how and why people make the career decisions they do, why some are satisfied and others are not, why some persist with the career choices and others do not, and why some interventions are better than others at providing career assistance.

Implications of Holland’s Theory of Vocational Personalities and Work Environments for the Practice of Career Counseling

1.      Help client’s asses their personalities and work environments and help them see the relationships between the two.  Either the Vocational Preference Inventory or Self-Directed Search (SDS) at http://www.self-directed-search.com/ can help with the process.  The Party Exercise popularized in What Color is Your Parachute can prove effective.  The Career Interests Game, from the University of Missouri Career Center, provides a visual online representation at http://career.missouri.edu/career-interest-game.

2.      Consider using an occupational card sort with clients that classifies all occupational titles according to the Holland codes.  Use the Occupational Dreams Inventory (ODI) to stimulate discussion and then assign Holland codes.

3.      Work with clients to help them see how their traits, life goals, values, aptitudes and competencies, and involvements and achievements can be associated with the match personality with work environment.

4.      Use the My Vocational Situation (MVS) to establish client needs for help.  See http://saens.hi.is/sites/saens.hi.is/files/MyVocationalSituation.pdf.

5.      Consider using the Career Attitudes and Strategies Inventory (CASI) developed by Holland and Gottfredson to help employed people assess their current work environments http://www.creativeorgdesign.com/tests_page.htm?id=332 .

6.      Organize and reference career and occupational information according to the Holland codes.  Use the Gottfredson and Holland Dictionary of Holland Occupational Titles, which classifies all occupations according to the codes as a guide http://www.kimandrylpc.com/holland-codes.html .

7.      Learn to listen carefully to clients’ personal career theories (PCTs) or their career stories as this may be all that is needed.

Defining the Career Intervention and Change Approach

Holland offered three basic assumptions for this approach: a) Everyone has a theory about careers (i.e., everyone has a PCT); b) When that theory does not seem to work, a person seeks help of some sort and sometimes from professionals; and c) When asked, provide interventions that will help the person implement, revise, or refine that theory.  Holland offered that a diagnostic scheme be applied when listening to client and listen for evidence of how to describe the theory.  The PCT has three dimensions:  validity, complexity, and comprehensiveness.  When a client comes for help, define interventions based on what we have come to know what is most effective given the particulars of the theory.  It is important to listen for all the clues of how to describe the theory and to come to know what works best to help one implement, refine, or revise the theory.  The framework listed below for this approach using three continua.

Assessing One’s PCT

1.      invalid             valid
2.      primitive          complex
3.      incomplete       comprehensive

Holland suggestions for implementing a “four-level diagnostic and treatment plan”:

Level 1 for people with valid personal theories which is people who need little help and have a well-developed PCT.

Level 2 for people whose have an occupational knowledge section that requires extension, revision, or adaptation to an unusual work or unemployment situation.  This level describes people who need some help with at least some part of their theory—minor extension, revision, or adaptation.

Level 3 for people whose theories have a weak translation unit or lack a reliable formula for relating personal characteristics to occupations, special occupational roles, or specialization, or for managing job changes.  This level describes people who have difficulties seeing themselves in particular occupations or making changes in their jobs.  They need substantial help, probably one-on-one career counseling focused on resolving a particular weakness in their thinking.

Level 4 for people whose personal theory has pervasive weaknesses.  This level describes people who need extensive help as they have major flaws or weaknesses in their PCTs.
This four-level model helps us to think of clients in terms of what they bring to us.  Experience is important in helping to develop and provide appropriate career services. 

Implications of the Career Intervention and Change Approach for the Practice of Career Counseling

1.      Recognize that every person has a PCT that informs his or her life decisions.  The counselor’s role is to help that client articulate and refine that theory.

2.      Encourage clients to describe how they understand their PCT.  Think about the validity, complexity, and comprehensiveness.

3.      A PCT, developed by a client, that is valid, complex, and comprehensive, the client could possibly need the most is career information and reassurance that he/she is on the track.

4.      If parts of the PCT seem to lack validity or are overly simplified understandings or incomplete in important ways, help the client to flesh out the theory to help them better describe their life circumstances.

The theory of career intervention and change can be seen as reorganizing individual differences and how various career history can be applied to help clients describe their own unique career paths.  Encouraging clients to design their own PCTs, the client will capitalize on the wealth to their self-understanding which will help them to guide their own life pattern.

Links to Articles or Videos: 
https://elearn.etsu.edu/d2l/le/content/6249282/viewContent/38584712/View;

https://elearn.etsu.edu/d2l/le/content/6249282/viewContent/38584715/View

https://elearn.etsu.edu/d2l/le/content/6249282/viewContent/38584720/View

https://elearn.etsu.edu/d2l/le/content/6249282/viewContent/38584725/View

https://elearn.etsu.edu/d2l/le/content/6249282/viewContent/38584725/View


https://elearn.etsu.edu/d2l/le/content/6249282/viewContent/38399266/View

WEEK 3 - MODERN: DEVELOPMENTAL THEORIES - SUPER

Week 3 -  February 2nd
Super (Developmental Theories)

Crites (1969) identified three broad overlapping eras to describe the evolution of career and development theory building which are:  Observational, Empirical, and Theoretical.

Theoretical Era can be subdivided into two categories labeled modern and postmodern.  Modern theories began in the 1950s with postmodern emerging in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Name of Theory:  Super (Modern Theories of Career Development)
Super's Life-Span, Life-Space Theory of Career Development

Dates:  Appeared in the 1950s until sometime in the 1980s 

Theorist:  Donald Super

Main Concept/Ideas:

Super (1990) described his theory as “a segmental theory…a loosely unified set of theories dealing with specific aspects of career development, taken from developmental, differential, social, personality, and phenomenological psychology and held together by self-concept and learning theory.”  His initial ideas for his theories began forming in the 1930s.  According to Super, Savickas, and Super (1996), these ideas originated in his interest in work and occupations, the developmental studies of Buehler (1933), and the studies of occupational mobility by Davidson and Anderson (1937).  These beginning ideas were brought together in Super’s (1942) book, The Dynamics of Vocational Adjustment, in which he presented a development view of career choice.  Super’s single most important idea was that career choice was a process, not an event.

In the early 1950s, Super introduced the first outline of his theory in his presidential address to the Division of Counseling and Guidance (now the Division of Counseling Psychology) of the American Psychological Association, in part as a challenge by Ginzberg that vocational counselors lacked a theory to guide their work.  In his address, he identified the elements that he thought made up an adequate theory of vocational development.  These elements included individual differences; multipotentiality; occupational ability patterns, identification and the role of models; continuity of adjustment; life stages; career patterns; the idea that development can be guided; the idea that development is the result of interaction; the dynamics of career patterns; job satisfaction; individual differences; status, and role; and works as a way of life.  In 1953, he presented 10 propositions that organized these elements into what he called “a summary statement of a comprehensive theory.”  Later two propositions were included, and still later two more propositions were added, making a total of 14.

In developing these 14 propositions, he drew upon fours diverse domains—differential psychology, developmental psychology, occupational sociology, and personality theory.  Differential psychology provided a knowledge base about the various traits individuals possess and the variety of occupational requirements.  Developmental psychology provided a knowledge base about the various traits individuals possess and the variety of occupational requirements.  Developmental psychology contributed insights into how individuals develop abilities and interests and the concepts of life stages and development tasks.  Occupational sociology offered new ideas about occupational mobility and the impact of the environmental influences.  Personality theory contributed the concepts of self-concept and person-environment theory.

The first three propositions emphasize that people have different abilities, interests, and values, and may be qualified for various occupations because of this.  No person fits only one occupation; a variety of occupations are available and occupations accommodate a wide variety of individuals.  The next six propositions focus on self-concept and its implementation in career choices, on life stages with their mini- and maxi-cycles, and on the concepts of career patterns and career maturity.  The next four propositions deal with the synthesis and compromise between individuals and social factors and work and life satisfactions.  The last proposition looks at work and occupation as the focus for personality organization and the interplay of life roles as worker, student, leisurite, homemaker, and citizen.

In 1951, a major research program called the Career Pattern Study (CPS) in Middletown, NY, tested some of the hypotheses of Super and his colleagues.  The CPS began following 138 eighth-grade boys and 142 ninth-grade boys.  Super and his colleagues theorized that the movement of individuals through life stages was a typical process that could be loosely tracked according to an aged-referenced timeline.  The participants were followed briefly up until age 21, more intensively at age 25, and then again at age 36.  The findings have been made available periodically in a series of monographs (Jordaan & Heyde, 1979; Super & Overstreet, 1960), in article by Super (1985, and a dissertation by Fisher (1989).

Super’s life-span, life-space approach to career development organizes the concepts of life roles and life stages into an interactive system.  This system is represented by a Life-Career Rainbow model.  Five stages are shown in the relationship to age ranges appear on the upper outside rim.  The life stages are labeled growth, exploration, establishment, maintenance, and decline and are called maxicycles.  Although they maxicycles are not linear, not everyone goes through these stages in the same way or at the same age.  Transitions from one stage to the next often involves minicycles which is going back through various stages before moving on.  Within each of the stages, developmental task are to be mastered before movement to the next stages occurs.  Super said, “Success in adapting to each developmental task results in effective functioning as a student, worker, or retiree and lays the groundwork for mastering the next task along the developmental continuum.”

In addition to the life stages, the Life-Career Rainbow features life roles located in the space and time of life stages (life space).  Super identified six life roles in which individuals participate over the life span:  homemaker, worker, citizen, leisurite, student, and child.  See links for Power Point slides for complete Life-Career Rainbow beginning at slide 6 and link from Career Services.  Individuals often participate in multiple roles at the same time; the amount of time and effort varies by life stage and age.  Individuals’ participation in these life roles fluctuates depending on age and other circumstances across the life span.  Some roles are more important during certain ages than others.  Sverko (2006) stated “By combining the life space with the life-span or developmental perspective, the Rainbow model shows how the role constellation changes with life stages.  As Super noted, life roles wax and wane over time.”

An important concept in Super’s formulation of career development is career maturity.  The general agreement of this term denotes a readiness to engage in the developmental task appropriate to the age and level at which one finds oneself.  Maturity is never reached but instead the goal relative to where one is at any given time and helps to promote a life span notion rather than a static, irreversible pattern of career development.  Later Super refined his notion of career maturity and suggested that the term for adults should be career adaptability and included the constructs of planfulness (including autonomy, self-esteem, and reliance on a time perspective), exploration, information, decision making, and reality orientation were in his formulation of career maturity (adaptability).

Super’s work on theory building was substantial and continuous over a long period of time and saw the need to concentrate on the use of his theory in practice.  He was interested in applying his theoretical concepts to career counseling.  He and a number of his colleagues developed the career development assessment and counseling (C-DAC) model.

The C-DAC model begins with a session that focuses on the client’s concerns and a review of data about the client.  Then four phases of the assessment was undertaken, with the first phase being the assessment of the importance of the work role in relationship to other life roles.  The next phase, attention is given to determining the career stage and career concerns of the client, followed by identifying resources for making and implementing choices and assessing resources for adapting to the work world.  Interests, abilities, and values are assessed by the following trait and factor methodology are the next phase.  The last phase focuses on the assessment of the client’s self-concept and life themes by using qualitative assessment procedures.

The final step in the C-DAC is the assessment and interview data which integrates the interview material and the assessment data into a narrative which realistically and sensitively portrays the client’s vocational identity, occupational self-concept, and coping resources and the locates the individual in the multiple roles with the developmental tasks.  Comparing this narrative to the client’s career concerns begins the process of formulating, collaboration with the client, a counseling plan designed to fit the client’s career development.

Super (1990) summarized the status of his theory has been refined and extended over the last decade.  Differential psychology has made technical advances.  Operational definitions of career maturity have been modified, and the model has been modified with them.  Recycling through stages in a mini-cycle has been refined but it is the same as it was when first formulated.  Ideas about how to assess self-concepts have evolved as research has thrown light on their measurement, and knowledge of how applicable self-concept theory is to various subpopulations have extended but has not changed the model greatly.  Life-stage theory has been refined but mostly confirmed by several major studies during the past decade.  The role of learning theory has been highlighted by the work on social learning, but to the neglect of other kinds of interactive learning.  The career model is in the maintenance stage, but health maintenance does not mean stasis but rather updating and innovating so midcareer changes are better recognized and studied.

The concept of life stages has been modified from envisioning mainly a maxicycle to involving minicycles of growth, exploration, establishment, maintenance, and decline which is linked in a series with the maxicycle.  Reexploration and reestablishment have attracted a great deal of attention, and the term transition denotes these processes.  Greater emphasis is on the fact that the typical impetus for any specific transition is not necessarily age itself, but the timing of transition (stage) is a function of the individual’s personality and abilities as well as the situation.

Implications of Super’s Life-Span, Life-Space Theory for the Practice of Career Counseling

·         Because individuals’’ life career development involves more than the choice of occupation and the adaptation to it (work role), career counseling should focus attention on how work roles interact with other life roles.

·         Because occupational decisions are related to other life decisions and often continue to be made throughout the life span, career counseling needs to be provided to individuals of all ages and circumstances.

·         Because career development can be described as a stage process with developmental tasks at each stage, and because the nature if these stages is not linear but cyclical, counselors need to help clients understand that they are not venturing outside if normalcy if there cycle back to earlier developmental stages.

·         Because people who are at different stages of development may need to be counseled in different ways, and because people at similar stages but with different levels of career maturity (adaptability) also need to be counseled in different ways, it is important to learn how to use life stages and task to make diagnoses and select appropriate intervention strategies.

Links to Articles or Videos:  http://career.iresearchnet.com/career-development/life-career-rainbow/;

http://www.careers.govt.nz/assets/pages/docs/career-theory-model-super.pdf

https://elearn.etsu.edu/d2l/le/content/6249282/viewContent/38399272/View

https://elearn.etsu.edu/d2l/le/content/6249282/viewContent/38399268/View

https://elearn.etsu.edu/d2l/le/content/6249282/viewContent/38399266/View