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CHAPTER 8
ADOLESCENT CAREER DEVELOPMENT
Educational commitments to career choices are made during adolescence.
This chapter describes how cognitive and emotional factors bear on career decisions of adolescents.
FACTORS INFLUENCING ADOLESCENT CAREER DEVELOPMENT
Piaget’s stages of cognitive development
Formal thought, the ability to think abstractly, ability to use logic (apt to be quite idealistic,
SUPER’S LATE GROWTH STAGE OF ADOLESCENT CAREER DEVELOPMENT
Development of Capacities:
• Ages 11 – 14 (middle school)
• More likely to assess their own abilities
Development of Values:
Ages 15 – 16
• Different values may emerge in different times in the life span.
• Adolescents able to take their goals and values into consideration when making
career decisions.
Transition to the Crystallizing Sub stage:
Ages 17 – 18 (last year of high school)
• Decisions about college and majors
MODIFICATION OF SUPER’S LATE GROWTH STAGE OF ADOLESCENT CAREER
DEVELOPMENT
Howard and Walsh (2010, 2011) describe 3 adolescent levels of vocational reasoning
• Level 4 Internal Processes and Capacities- Starting around the age of 11, children become
aware of their difficulty with some tasks and their ability to succeed at others. They also
become aware of skills required by tasks
Differences between Super’s theory and Howard and Walsh’s modifications: Howard and Walsh
focus more on cognitive reasoning and include Gottfredson’s ideas
CAREER MATURITY
Five major components (Super)
1. Orientation to vocational choice, using occupational information
2. Information and planning about an occupation
Super’s Conception of Career Maturity
Career Development Inventory, five Subscales:
Career Planning
• This scale measures how much thought people have given to a variety of
information-seeking activities and how much they feel they know about various
aspects of work.
Career Exploration
• Willingness to explore and look for information.
• How much information the student has acquired from the source.
World-of-Work Information
• Knowledge of important developmental tasks.
Realism (not tested)
• Mixed affective and cognitive entity best assessed by combining personal, self-
report, and objective data as in comparing the aptitudes of the individual with
the aptitudes typical of the people in the occupation.
• Is the career choice realistic?
IDENTITY AND CONTEXT
Based on Erikson’s work on identity and developed by Marcia and Vondracek
Vocational Identity, 4 developmental statuses:
• _Diffusion – having few clear ideas of what one wants and not being concerned about
the future.
• _Moratorium – a time, often more than several months, in which one explores options
while wanting a direction, but not having one.
Vondracek combines identity with attention to the context of the development in
his developmental contextual theory.
THE ROLE OF OCCUPATIONAL INFORMATION
• Psychtalk - statements used to describe aptitudes, interests, and other characteristics of
one’s self.
• Occtalk - statements about occupations.
THE ROLE OF ASSESSMENT
For Super’s theory, the Career Development Assessment and Counseling Model (CDAC)
CAREER DEVELOPMENT OF ADOLESCENTS FORM DIVERSE CULTURAL
BACKGROUNDS
• Applicability of career maturity studied for adolescents of different cultural
backgrounds.
GENDER ISSUES IN ADOLESCENCE
• Females more interested in traditionally male careers than males were in female careers.
COUNSELOR ISSUES
• Dealing with adolescents’ egocentricity.
