Introduction
A review of theories prominent in the psychology of career development points to their profound preoccupation with the idea that adults must work. The average adult spends more time working than performing any other waking activity. Satisfaction in one’s career has been found empirically to have the potential for fulfilling such needs as productivity, competition, altruism, functioning as a team member, and independence. It is the most important avenue for fulfilling one’s dreams. These studies also reveal that both personality traits and career interest change over time.
The definitions of career, career choice, and career development emphasize the idea that careers unfold throughout the life span and therefore require that individuals have the skills to adapt to these changes. According to Carl McDaniels in Rich Feller and Garry Walz’s Career Transitions in Turbulent Times (1997), a career is defined as the totality of work and leisure experiences over a life span. Career choice refers to the decisions that individuals make at any point in their careers. Career development encompasses the total constellation of psychological, sociological, educational, physical, economic, and chance factors that combine to shape the career of any given individual over the life span. Thus, individuals are constantly in a state of career development that often results in career change.
Career Choice and Change
The reasons individuals select certain occupations are varied. Frank Parsons’s trait factor model of the early 1900s matched personal traits to job characteristics. Its assumptions included the idea that people possess stable and persistent traits, among them interests, talents, and intelligence. A related assumption was that jobs could be differentiated in terms of their needs for differing skills and levels of ability. The person with certain traits could therefore be matched with certain job needs, and the individual would be satisfied forever. Psychological testing became prominently used to measure traits and to classify occupations.
Parsons’s basic tenets were expanded by John L. Holland in 1959. Numerous studies have supported his contention that individuals in similar jobs have similar interests and abilities. His highly respected and useful research resulted in the development of six categories of persons and jobs: realistic (R), investigative (I), artistic (A), social (S), enterprising (E), and conventional (C). Holland assumes that most people have a dominant type and one or two other types of some, but lesser, importance. To reflect this belief, he arranged the typology in a clockwise order around a hexagon, as R, I, A, S, E, C. He argues empirically that some types are more compatible and some are less compatible. The closer they are on the hexagon, the more compatible. For instance, RI, AS, and EC are examples of consistent types and have higher job achievement and satisfaction and more stable choices and personalities. RS, AC, and IE would be examples of those, therefore, who would have lower job achievement and satisfaction and less stable choices and personalities.
Holland leaves room, however, for change to occur. His basic belief is that personality type stabilizes between ages eighteen and thirty and is thereafter rather difficult to change. The more consistent a person’s type is, the more he or she will find a satisfactory job environment. Consistent types, he says, will more often deal with job dissatisfaction by altering the work environment rather than by changing their own personalities. The need for a new repertoire of skills, new training, and new credentialing when making drastic career changes tends to reduce the amount of personality change people must make. In other words, changing careers, even when this requires reeducation, may be preferred over major changes in personality.
Development and Transition
McDaniels has converged the works of Parsons, Holland, and Donald Edwin Super into an approach called developmental trait factor. From this point of view, career development consists of a continuous interaction of work and leisure across the life span in a series of transitional situations. Career choices are made that reflect the individual’s interests and abilities at a certain point in time, but the choices will need to be reevaluated periodically as the individual grows and the surrounding world changes.
Nancy Schlossberg states that individuals are more likely than not to experience a career transition at some point in their lives. She defines a transition as any event or nonevent that results in a change in relationships, routines, assumptions, or role within self, work, family, health, or economics. A unique aspect of transitions as defined by Schlossberg is that nonevents can result in life changes. Examples of nonevents are anticipated promotions that did not occur and unexpected job layoffs. Thus, transitions, whether anticipated or not, involve a process of continuing and changing reactions over time that are linked to the individual’s continuous and changing appraisal of self in the situation.
An important contributor to the psychology of careers is Donald Super, who states that career choice develops in five stages: growth (birth through age fourteen), exploration (ages fourteen through twenty-five), establishment (ages twenty-five through forty-five), maintenance (ages forty-five through sixty-five), and decline or disengagement (age sixty-six and older). He refers to this long-term developmental process as the “maxicycle.” He emphasizes, however, that as a person matures and becomes more realistic, the possibility of career change may direct the individual into a new job or even an entirely new career. The maxicycle may then be repeated from the beginning in a very brief time frame, in “minicycle” form. In changing to the new position, the person experiences growth, exploration, establishment, and maintenance, but they are focused into days, weeks, or months rather than years.
Career Satisfaction
Major psychological theories of career development recognize the possibility, and even probability, of change. The change may be in job choices within a particular career, a process of redirecting one’s energies with a minimum of reschooling. The change may, however, involve more than redirection and move into major recareering. The reasons for this shift are especially important to psychologists who believe that career satisfaction invades all facets of psychological wholeness. They believe that adults work for more than a livelihood. Otherwise, the rich would cease working and those who could perform high-paying jobs would not choose work that pays much less than their earnable income.
Super studied numerous lists of human motives, of reasons for working and of reasons people like or dislike jobs. These lists emanated from the research of a variety of students of human nature. His comparison and reduction of these lists pointed to three major needs for which satisfaction is sought: human relations, the work itself, and livelihood. Human relations involve the recognition of the person, independence, fair treatment, and status. Work means that the activity is interesting, is an opportunity for self-expression, and has a satisfying physical work situation and conditions. Livelihood refers to adequate earnings and security. Although Super’s work is a product of the 1950s, it is regularly updated. He added self-realization to his motives for working, a common term used in humanistic psychology to emphasize the integration or wholeness that Carl R. Rogers believed achievable by the “fully functioning individual.” Work has the potential for satisfying personal determinants that are psychological and biological, as well as satisfying situational determinants that are historical and socioeconomic.
From Super’s lengthy and impressive research, the implications for change in careers are noteworthy. The frustration of any one or a combination of the three basic satisfactions sought in work (human relations, interesting work, and livelihood) that hinders one from achieving self-realization is sufficient motivation for change. To say it negatively, one may feel frustration in human relations because of lack of recognition, in work because tasks fail to maintain interest, or in livelihood because of insufficient earnings and security.
Super’s work dealing with change based on changing interests and circumstances includes the idea that new careers emerge with changing times. The worker of the early twenty-first century has literally hundreds of new careers to consider. Scores of occupations are disappearing from the American scene and scores of new jobs are being added that did not exist twenty-five years ago. The shift from industrial jobs to high-tech jobs necessitates different job skills.
Recareering
The idea of changing careers, or recareering, is a contemporary phenomenon. Since the 1980s, hundreds of books have centered on the topic. A valuable asset to the reader of such books is a strong statistical message: People change jobs or careers several times during their tenure of work. One example of such a change might be a bank employee who moves to another bank but fills an entirely new position, with new requirements and job description (redirection). The job has actually changed. Redirection does not refer to the person who works in a bank and then moves to another bank in an identical position but at a higher salary. Career change includes both redirection and recareering. Another, more drastic example is of a social worker with a master’s degree in social work. After nine years of listening to people’s problems, she is burned out; she also finds the pay increments to be insufficient for her needs. She begins exploring the possibility of combining her interest in helping people with her developing interest in investment counseling (recareering).
Career change requires methodology. Self-help books on career change provide valuable advice as to the methods of recareering. They provide practical ideas on reassessing one’s assets and liabilities, narrowing one’s choices, determining one’s career preferences, packaging or repackaging oneself, writing a resumé, and negotiating the career change. Such changes are often more easily executed within the same career. The individual, for example, who is in business marketing may, as he or she matures, decide that management rather than marketing would provide a greater challenge and better financial security. Such a career may not require reschooling as much as it does repackaging oneself as to interests, strengths, and desired goals. An actor who tires of acting may find new excitement in the areas of directing and producing.
One example of career change involves a man who began as a high school science teacher. He later became a high school principal. Still later, he changed to become a consultant for the Ohio State Board of Education. Finally, he took an administrative position at a liberal arts college. In his case, recareering involved additional graduate work and the meeting of certain requirements. He took all the suggested steps of reassessment, determining preferences, repackaging himself, interviewing, and negotiating the change. The necessary further education and meeting of certification requirements along the way seemed to be well worth the effort to him. The result is a professional educator with an obviously renewed zest for life because of the challenges of attaining desired goals. He was excited about his original job as high school science teacher, but as he changed, so did his interests and goals.
The literature, whether in the form of vocational guidance and career development, in the psychology of career counseling, or in the practical paperbacks that teach concrete steps to be taken, all carries the same theme: Career change is a skill that can be learned and applied with considerable success. Individuals are told in various ways, whether by noted theorists such as Super and Holland, or by practitioners such as McDaniels, Feingold, and others, to identify and communicate transferable skills or to acquire new job-related skills.
Ronald L. Krannich states that recareering is a process that means repeatedly acquiring marketable skills and then changing careers in response to one’s own interests, needs, and goals, as well as in response to the changing needs and opportunities of a technological society. The standard careering process must be modified with three new careering emphases: acquiring new marketable skills through retraining on a regular basis, changing careers several times during a lifetime, and utilizing more efficient communication networks for finding employment. Sigmund Freud said very little about adulthood except that it is the time “to love and to work.” A large segment of life’s satisfaction derives from satisfaction in one’s work and will, no doubt, carry over to enhance the chances of one’s ability to love.
Career Testing and Resources
Several tests have been developed to assist in the process of matching individual traits to comparable work environment traits. One example is Holland’s Self-Directed Search (SDS). As a result of completing the SDS, users are assigned a two- or three-letter code (such as RI, AS, ECR) that will lead them to a list of occupations that should reflect their interests and abilities. Some tests have been developed that integrate matching traits with a developmental approach. An example is the Career Exploration Inventory (CEI) developed by John Liptak, which contains an interest inventory and also includes a career-planning component. The results of such career testing should not be the only factor in a person's decision to pursue a particular career, but aptitude tests and similar evaluations can provide valuable insights to those seeking direction.
Several career information resources have been developed to provide individuals with information on the world of work. One of the first of these resources was the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT). The DOT was developed in 1972 by the US Employment Service and was regularly updated. It was a compendium of more than twelve thousand occupations, each one described and classified. The DOT was later superseded by the Occupational Information Network (O*NET), an online database of occupational requirements and worker attributes. The Occupational Outlook Handbook, managed by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, is also available online and contains information on work environments, earnings, and job outlooks for specified occupations.
This theoretical emphasis on the complexity of human change had to be coupled with the societal phenomenon of dynamic technological change. More and greater changes are to come, as attested by the suggestions of researchers that future workers should be equipped with skills, flexibility, and the keen notion that their options should remain open throughout life.
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