CAREER CHOICE

Career Choice

Career Choice

Introduction

Career counseling is a multifaceted set of activities designed to help people (a) make or remake occupational choices, (b) find jobs, or (c) achieve satisfaction and success in the workplace. Career counseling had its beginnings in the vocational guidance movement, a progressive political reform movement that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century to improve living conditions and reduce poverty in major urban areas of the newly industrialized United States by helping young people find satisfying and sustaining work. Pioneered by Frank Parsons in the establishment of the Vocational Bureau in Boston's Civic Service House, vocational guidance activities initially were focused on helping the poor and marginalized in American society make more informed choices about work that would provide them with a living wage and a sense of satisfaction.

While career counseling activities today are still largely focused on helping people make more informed occupational choices, career counseling has expanded to include providing assistance with other important work-related tasks, including finding work and achieving more satisfactory adjustment (i.e., satisfaction and success) in the workplace. Thus, career counselors work not only with people who are having difficulties deciding (or redeciding) on the type of work that they want to pursue but also with people who are having problems finding work and those whose job performance or feelings of work satisfaction are less than satisfactory.

COUNSELING FOR CHOICE MAKING

One of the main focuses of career counseling remains on helping people decide on the type of work they want to pursue. People seeking help for choice-making difficulties include adolescents and young adults making first-time career choices and older adults contemplating career changes or returning to the paid workforce after a number of years of absence.

Most counseling interventions for choice-making difficulties that have been empirically tested are based on a model of vocational guidance originally proposed by Frank Parsons in his 1909 book Choosing a Vocation and by more recent theories of the choice-making and work adjustment process, most notably John L. Holland's theory of career choice and Lloyd Lofquist and Rene V. Dawis's theory of work adjustment. Parsons proposed that for vocational guidance (i.e., career counseling) to be effective, it needed to help people (a) gain greater self-understanding of their work personalities, (b) gather information on occupations, and (c) combine self- and occupational knowledge to arrive at a choice of occupation via “true reasoning.”

The subsequent theories of Holland and Lofquist and Dawis have helped flesh out Parsons' model by suggesting the types of self- and occupational information that are necessary to make an informed choice, a choice that will lead, in the long run, to occupational success and satisfaction. According to Holland, people and occupational environments can both be described in terms of their resemblance to six different personality types: Realistic (R), Investigative (I), Artistic (A), Social (S), Enterprising (E), and Conventional (C). Holland further proposed that the degree of congruence (i.e., match) between an individual's personality type (e.g., RIA) and the personality type of a work environment ...