Developmental Career Counseling

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A confluence of several streams of conceptualization in career counseling has contributed the theoretical foundation upon which the developmental approach to assisting clients engaged in decision-making has been built. Foremost among the architects of this frame of reference, and its recognized progenitor is Donald E. Super, who has articulated the precepts and principles of developmental career counseling since the early 1940's. At that time, when the trait-and-factor orientation was predominant, he adapted Buehler's (1933) life stage schema to the analysis of career behavior in his book, The Dynamics of Vocational Adjustment (Super, 1942). However, he did not neglect the demonstrated value of the "actuarial method," as he referred to it later (Super, 1954), which he considered to be the "cornerstone of vocational guidance." Indeed his monumental volume on Appraising Vocational Fitness (Super, 1949) represents the traditional approach at its best, but throughout his treatment of vocational appraisal by means of psychological tests there is interwoven his long-standing commitment to developmental psychology and his nascent self-concept theory, as evidenced particularly in his summary of "The Nature of Interests" (Super, 1949). His synthesis of these diverse, and often manifestly contradictory, substantive areas evolved through a series of landmark papers (Super, 1951, 1954, 1955, 1957a, 1960), a book on the Psychology of Careers (Super, 1957), and a Career Pattern Study monograph (Super and Overstreet, 1960) during the 1950s and early 1960s. Implicit in these writings is a model of developmental career counseling based upon distinctive concepts of diagnosis, process and outcomes:

1.    Diagnosis. Super (1957) uses the term appraisal instead of diagnosis but considers them to be essentially synonymous, although it is apparent from his discussion of appraisal that this concept is not only broader in scope than diagnosis but that it has a more positive connotation and portent. He delineates three kinds of appraisal, which focus upon the client's potentialities as well as problems (cf., Witryol and Boly, 1954):

a.    Problem appraisal: the client's experienced difficulty and expectations of career counseling are assessed, much as in the psychodynamic approach, presumably using some classification system such as Bordin's (1946), although Super (1957) does not discuss the diagnostic constructs he would use.



b.    Personal appraisal: a psychological "picture" of the client is obtained from a variety of demographic, psychometric and social data, the analogue being the clinical case study (Darley, 1940); both vocational assets and liabilities are assessed and expressed in normative terms (for example, "The client is above average in fine finger dexterity but below average in clerical speed and accuracy.").

c.    Prognostic appraisal: based largely upon the personal appraisal, predictions of the client's probable success and satisfaction-the two principal components of career adjustment (Crites, 1969)-are made.

This outline can be used for both cross-sectional and developmental appraisals, although Super (1942; 1954) clearly opts for the latter if the appropriate data are available. What he terms the "thematic-expolative" method of appraisal, as contrasted with a more narrowly conceived actuarial model, strives to provide an impression of the client's behavior within a developmental context. "The assumption underlying this approach is that one way to understand what an individual will do in the future is to understand what he did in the past. It postulates that one way to understand what he did in the past is to analyze the sequence of events and the development of characteristics in order to ascertain the recurring themes and underlying trends" (Super, 1954). From data on the patterning of the client's educational and vocational experiences, from knowledge of the subsequent careers of others like the client at the same life stage, and from assessment of the client's personal resources and competence to use them (Super, 1957), the counselor derives what Pepinsky and Pepinsky (1954) have called a "hypothetical client" which serves as a basis for making predictions about future career development. That is, from this personal appraisal, and with cognizance of the problem appraisal, extrapolations are made as to the client's future career behavior and the effect which interventive career counseling may have upon it.

Throughout this process of accumulating data and making appraisals, the client is an active participant in extrapolating theme concerning his/her career choice and development. Super (1957) states that "the best appraisals are made collectively" and that the counselor's "sharing the results of his appraisal with the client" constitutes a safeguard against faulty inferences (Super, 1957). He has further stated that "The client's reactions to the data and to the counselor's tentative interpretations (often put in the form of a question beginning with 'could that mean...') 'provide a healthy corrective for the counselor's own possible biases'" (Super, 1959). By including the client in the appraisal process, Super largely resolves the dilemma, posed by the opposition of client-centered theory to the counselor's assuming an evaluative attitude, of whether to diagnose or not. No longer is the counselor solely responsible for the appraisal process. Endorsing and elaborating upon a similar viewpoint proposed by Tyler (1953), Super (1957) observes that: "It will be instead a course of action for which the client is completely willing to take the consequences, leading to a goal which is based on a cooperative realistic appraisal of the factors involved" (italics are Super's addendum to Tyler). Thus, in developmental career counseling, as formulated primarily by Super but widely received and refined by others, appraisal (or diagnosis) plays a central role in "getting to know" the client, both hypothetically from life history data and personally from his/her active engagement in the appraisal process.

2.    Process. The course of developmental career counseling follows closely the broader spectrum of career development. What takes place in the contacts between client and counselor depends upon the point the client has reached on the continuum of career development. The counselor must first determine the career life stage of the client and assess his/her degree of career maturity (Super, 1955). If the client is relatively immature in career behavior, as compared with his/her age or peers (Super and Overstreet, 1960), then developmental career counseling concentrates upon orientation and exploration, which precede decision making and reality testing in the macrocosm of career development. With the career immature client, Super and Overstreet (1960) observe that: "It is not so much counseling concerning choice, as counseling to develop readiness for choice, to develop planfulness. It involves helping [the client] to understand the personal, social, and other factors which have a bearing on the making of educational and vocational decisions, and how they may operate in his own vocational development". In contrast, if the client is more career mature, that is, has a more fully developed awareness of the need to choose a career, then the counselor proceeds differently: "Working with a client who is vocationally mature is essentially the familiar process of vocational counseling. It involves helping him to assemble, review, and assimilate relevant information about himself and about his situation, which will enable him to draw immediately called-for conclusions as to the implications of these choices for future decisions" (Super and Overstreet, 1960). In sum, the overall process of career development progresses from orientation and readiness for career choice to decision making and reality testing, and the developmental career counselor initiates counseling at that point in the process which the client has reached.

3.    Outcomes. The immediate, and more circumscribed, objective of developmental career counseling is to facilitate and enhance the client's career development, whether this means fostering increased awareness of the world of work or mastering the career developmental tasks of choosing and implementing a career goal. The maturation of the client toward these desiderata of career development can be charted on a career maturity profile, which encompasses several dimensions of career behavior (Super, 1955; Crites, 1973). The latter include Consistency of Career Choice, Realism of Career Choice, Career Choice Competencies and Career Choice Attitudes (Crites, in press). The more a client develops ("gains") along these dimensions, the more efficacious the career counseling is. But, there is a broader, more inclusive goal of developmental career counseling which Super (1955) would propose:

One underlying hypothesis has been that, by relieving tensions, clarifying feelings, giving insight, helping attain success, and developing a feeling of competence in one important area of adjustment, it is possible to release the individual's ability to cope more adequately with other aspects of living, thus bringing about improvements in his general adjustment. A second hypothesis underlying the approach used is that this is best done by building on the individual's assets, by working with his strengths rather than with his weaknesses.

That these hypotheses are viable ones is evidenced not only by the demonstrated empirical relationship (moderate positive) between general and career adjustment (Super, 1957; Crites, 1969), but also by the studies of Williams (1962) and Williams and Hills (1962), in which it was found that self-ideal congruence, as an index of personal adjustment status, significantly increases as a by-product of career counseling without direct treatment of the client's personality functioning. In short, career counseling can further both career and personal development.
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