Career Development
Core frameworks
Career items cluster into theory-matching and assessment interpretation.
Trait-and-factor (Parsons) matches person to occupation through self-analysis, occupational information, and true reasoning; it is the ancestor of modern person-environment models. Holland's RIASEC hexagon (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional) is scored on consistency (adjacency of types on the hexagon), differentiation (flat versus peaked profile), and congruence (fit with the work environment); the Self-Directed Search operationalizes it.
Super's life-span, life-space theory: stages (growth, exploration, establishment, maintenance, disengagement) and roles (child, student, leisurite, citizen, worker, homemaker) arranged in the life-career rainbow, with self-concept implementation and career adaptability as through-lines.
Gottfredson's circumscription and compromise: children progressively eliminate options by gender, then prestige, then field of interest, across orientation to sex roles (ages 3-6), orientation to social valuation (6-9), and orientation to the internal unique self (9-14).
Also know Krumboltz's social learning theory (genetic endowment, environmental conditions, learning experiences, task-approach skills); Lent, Brown, and Hackett's social cognitive career theory (self-efficacy, outcome expectations, goals); Dawis and Lofquist's work adjustment (satisfactoriness is the employer's view, satisfaction the worker's); and Savickas's career construction (adaptability, life themes).
Traps: reversing satisfactoriness and satisfaction; treating the MBTI as a validated selection device (it is not); calling the Strong Interest Inventory an ability test; misreading "consistency" as something other than hexagon adjacency.
Rule of thumb: with interest inventories, connect code letters to environments being explored, not just to traits the client "has."