CAREER DEVELOPMENT

Career Development



Career Development

Introduction

For more than a century, career development learning, in its various curricular forms, has been a feature of the educational landscape in the UK (Watts, 2001), Europe (Guichard, 2001), North America (Hoyt, 2005) and Australia (Morgan & Hart, 1977). There are a number of career development learning frameworks that may usefully inform the conceptualization and the delivery of work integrated learning in higher education. The career development learning framework that clearly and simply captured student-related issues pertaining to the world of work, transferability and self reflection of skills across learning and employment settings was the DOTS (decision-making learning (D), opportunity awareness (O), transition learning (T) and self-awareness (S) model of career development (Watts, 2006). Self-awareness refers to an individual's understanding of his or her career identity. Opportunity awareness refers to an individual's knowledge of opportunities within the world of work. Decision-making learning refers to the skills of making choices with regard to securing opportunities in the world-of-work. Transitional learning refers to the knowledge and skills considered necessary for entry into the workforce. This paper aims at exploring the perceived relationship between career development and coursework learning.

Career Development

For most people, career development is a lifelong process of getting ready to choose and, usually, continuing to make choices from among available occupations in our society. Each individual undertaking this process is influenced by economic, educational, cultural, sociological, physical, geographical, psychological (e.g., interests, skills), and chance factors. Despite the apparent complexity of the career development process and the centrality of work in the majority of people's lives, a survey by the National Career Development Association indicated that only about a third of American adults were in their current jobs as a result of conscious planning. Hence, the majority of people chose a particular job because of chance circumstances. In ...