Planning the development of a career in a rapidly changing society can be a complicated process, for numerous social factors affecting attitudes toward career development demand consideration. To understand vocational development and adjustment a counselor must consider social influences on the individual. The individual will certainly be influenced by the family, social class variables, the school, community, pressure groups, and role perceptions. The references at the conclusion of Part 2 focus on these specific factors; the articles selected cover broad social factors affecting career development.
S. David Hoffman and Stephen A. Rollin profile the factors of speed social change and the impact of future shock on the world of work. They examine the impact of rapid change on the worker's life style and draw implications for vocational counselors.
Leona Tyler asks questions regarding work and poverty populations that affect vocational psychology. She believes we must become more aware of the social limitations on vocational development and suggests that studies on poverty groups will enhance our knowledge. She proposes that the variables of "alternatives," "limits" "plans," and "concepts about time" can broaden our understanding of career development.
Edward Gross focuses on the socialization that occurs when an individual begins working in an organization. He considers the place of new skills, self-image, involvements, and values as an adult becomes socialized in a work environment.
Although the last article is titled "Aging and the Nature of Work," it concentrates on broad social variables that affect career choice and change. The article examines the attitudes and values of college-aged youth as they make educational and vocational plans.
Decision Stress
Novelty upsets the balance between programmed and non-programmed decisions. Programmed decisions are routine, easy decisions such as how to get to work, or school, where to have lunch, etc. Not much information is processed and decisions are of "low psychic cost." Non-programmed decisions are high in "psychic cost" and require more information processing. They are typified by such questions as, what do I want as an occupation? What am I as a person suited to do? Should I go to college? What skills do I have? These require non-routine answers and result in decision stress, which occurs when new, non-programmed decisions are required. Novelty tips the balance toward the most difficult and costly form of decision making. Acceleration of the life pace forces us to make these harder decisions faster, sometimes faster than we can process the new information required. This results in what Toffler calls cognitive overload and may be thought of as the ever increasing amounts of occupational information that need to be processed in order to make vocational choices.
Decision stress and cognitive overload lead to coping strategies, which Toffler notes are familiar to information scientists. These strategies may also be observed in counseling:
- Denial. Denying-blocking out un welcomed reality.
- Specialization. Specializing-not blocking out all novelty and information, but attempting to keep pace in a specific narrow sector.
- Reversion. Going backward to previously successful routines, now irrelevant and inappropriate.
- Super-simplification. Seeking a simple, neat equation to solve everything. This may explain dropping out or drugging out to substitute one big problem for all the overwhelming little ones.
Implications
Realizing that occupational choice is not an end point is saying that the process of living is as important as the product of life. If counseling effective, the client begins to act in more self-supporting, independent, realistic ways. Then the problems of ability, expectations of others, motivation to explore, and attitudes toward the world of work are seen in a different light by the client. The primary function of the counselor-to help the client by any means available to find himself -inherently includes vocational development. Counselors need to be aware of societal patterns and social forces which are shaping the lives of clients. Toffler's message is clear: Transience, discontinuity, and novelty are affecting the decision making processes now and will increasingly continue to do so in the future.
A rational choice process, as it is seen in vocational development theory, depends on continuity, order, and regularity in the environment. Toffler says this choice process is based "on some correlation between pace and complexity of change, and man's decision capacities". We can incorporate Toffler's thinking into practical application in counseling, if not directly into the body of theory. Transience needs to be reckoned with in any process of self-evaluation and decision making. Vocational counseling, as we see it, needs to be concerned with freeing the individual from personal limitations that interfere with the development/choice process. The direction this may take is toward teaching the process method. Toffler recommends teaching for adaptation, and counselors are now exploring methods of teaching vocational theory to their clients.
Ivey and Morrill see clients "not as individuals hunting for a place in a stable society, but as changing organisms engaging in a series of career related developmental tasks that enable them to adapt themselves to a changing society". Counselors can incorporate theories and notions of developmental process in their counseling practice. What is important about wrestling with self-knowledge, self-assessment, and life styles is both the process and the outcome- observing how one gets where he gets is a valuable learning experience. The old test-and-tell model of vocational counseling may not allow the client to learn appropriate decision behavior for the future. Toffler is saying that the rapid acceleration of our society makes it increasingly difficult for people to use developmental tasks for growth or survival.
The next step for vocational counselors may be to define developmental tasks appropriate to the conditions Toffler describes and predicts. An interesting suggestion from Toffler is situational groups. Situational groups, unlike human potential or encounter groups, are set up around particular issues such as people who are moving soon, or new arrivals in a community, or people who are about to lose their jobs (or already have). Why not set up situational groups for potential problems rather than after the fact? Why not develop preventive vocational and personal counseling? Such groups could meet to examine developmental strategies with the goal of deciding upon some developmental tasks to try out.
Simulation and gaming might be a good way to encourage people to look at what they do and to examine new strategies for growth. An example of this type of program is currently being tried at the Florida State University Counseling Center by means of "future groups." In these groups gestalt and fantasy exercises are used to aid the client in understanding his own fears, hopes, and expectations of what the future holds in store for him-especially as it relates to his vocational outlook. This awareness training helps the client to focus on the decision making processes and the self-in-time continuum.
