Content area
Full Text
Recently career construction theory has emerged as a complimentary tool to help conceptualize how people impose meaning on their vocational behavior. It compliments the traditional trait-and-factor approach and challenges that there are normative and predictable stages of career development. In this comprehensive theory, Savickas (2001) incorporated Super's (1957) innovative ideas with a constructivist perspective to help counselors comprehend clients' career problems. Career construction theory views the client from three perspectives: individual differences in traits, developmental tasks and coping strategies, and psychodynamic motivations. Using these three perspectives, counselors can examine what people prefer to do, how individuals cope with vocational developmental tasks,occupational transitions and work traumas, and why individuals choose to fit work into their lives in specific ways. These perspectives enable counselors to explore how individuals construct their careers to help them cope with feeling fragmented and confused, without losing their sense of self and social identity, as they encounter evolving economic and work life changes in an unsettled economy (Savickas, 2005). Career construction theory, therefore, postulates that regardless of one's socioeconomic status and reason for taking a job or position, work can become meaningful for most people. This paper presents an introduction to Savickas' career construction theory for the practitioner. It provides a summary of the rationale, concepts and processes of the theory and elaborates on how counselors can use the three vocational perspectives to help clients construct a meaningful career story. A brief review of a qualitative approach to career assessment and counseling will be followed by an introduction to assessing life themes, career adaptability, and vocational personality.
Toward a Subjective Construction of Career
Career construction theory helps counselors uncover clients' unique approaches to meaning making, purpose, and life direction. The theory is based in constructivism, which focuses on "meaning making and the constructing of the social and psychological worlds through individual, cognitive processes" (Young & Collin, 2004, p. 375). References to constructivism have grown in psychology over the last 25 years (e.g., Mahoney, 2003; Neimeyer & Stewart, 2000), and as early as 1989, constructivist counseling made inroads into vocational psychology. Due to the massive changes taking place in the world of work, it has become increasingly difficult for career counselors to explain a person's career with only person-environment and vocational development...