Career Development
What this domain covers
Career Development tests theories of vocational choice and adjustment, career assessment tools, and the developmental and contextual factors that shape work decisions.
Core rules
- Trait-and-factor (Parsons; Williamson) matches measured traits to occupational requirements - the logic behind most interest inventories.
- Super's life-span, life-space theory: growth (0–14), exploration (15–24), establishment (25–44), maintenance (45–64), decline (65+), with life roles (child, student, worker, citizen, homemaker, parent, leisurite) on a career rainbow. Career maturity, later reframed as career adaptability (Savickas).
- Holland's RIASEC hexagon: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional. Consistency is adjacency of the first two letters; differentiation is how sharply the profile peaks; congruence is the person-environment match.
- Krumboltz: social learning theory and planned happenstance. Gottfredson: circumscription and compromise. Social Cognitive Career Theory (Lent, Brown, & Hackett): self-efficacy, outcome expectations, goals.
- Tools: Strong Interest Inventory and Self-Directed Search (Holland-based), O*NET (which replaced the Dictionary of Occupational Titles), work-values inventories.
Worked example
A client's profile is Social, Enterprising, Artistic with low Realistic. Reasoning: Social and Enterprising are adjacent on the hexagon, so consistency is high; the differentiation is clear because the low Realistic code stands apart; congruent environments include counseling, teaching, human resources, training and development, and sales management. The counselor uses the profile to generate hypotheses for exploration, not to declare one correct job, since values, finances, and family constraints carry equal weight.
Traps
Confusing consistency, differentiation, and congruence; treating interest scores as ability or as a mandate; citing the DOT when O*NET is the current database; ignoring cultural, family, and economic context in favor of pure trait matching.