Career Development Theory

       Super (1990) said his theory is neither integrated, comprehensive, nor testable, but “segmented, formed from a loosely unified set of theories dealing with specific aspects of career development, taken from developmental, differential, social, personality, and phenomenological psychology and held together by self-concept and learning theory” (p. 199). Super credited Buehler and Lazarsfeld’s longitudinal studies of the work and related lives of men and women plus Davidson and Anderson’s work on occupational histories of a representative sample of American men leading him to want to better understand how career development unfolds and why careers develop as they do (Super, 1983).

           A second area of influence, self-concept theory, came from writings of Rogers and Bordin, who suggested an individual’s behavior is a reflection of that individual’s self-descriptive and self-evaluative thoughts (Osipow, 1983) or, as Super (1963) expressed this, “an individual’s self concept is his concept of himself, not inferences made by outside others” (p. 5). Super (1957; 1963) and Super, Crites, Hummel, Moser, Overstreet, and Warnath (1957) identified the elements, or processes, of self-concept as formation, translation, and implementation of the self-concept.

          Self-concept formation (Super, 1963) is composed of several phases with the first being exploration which is an ongoing, essential process. Infants look at their fingers; adolescents admire the poem written or the birdhouse built with their own hands; and older workers adapt methods of performing work tasks in view of physical or psychological changes the person may have undergone. Super (1990) stated that the self and its environment are objects of exploration as they develop and change throughout the life span.

          Self differentiation (Super et al., 1957) is the second phase of self-concept formation as individuals begin to see themselves as separate and different from those surrounding them. Babies recognize their hands as parts of their own bodies rather than those of their mothers; adolescents become aware that they do not talk as much as their friends or that they dress differently from their friends; and first-time job holders see differences in their approach to clients from that of fellow employees.

          Identification (Super, 1963) takes place at much the same time as differentiation. Tyler (1951; 1956) pointed out the disparity between women’s work roles and those of men in the formation of children’s interests and aptitudes. Douvan (1976), Douvan and Adelson (1966), and Patterson (1973) agree with Tyler in stating the prominence that occupation achieves in men’s lives and the variety of male roles visible not only in work, but also in sports and recreation, tend to channel boys’ identification along occupational lines while girls’ identity development focuses on the feminine role of which jobs are only partial expressions of self.

          Role playing (Super et al., 1957) accompanies or follows identification. Role-playing may be imaginative or participatory, but does allow one the opportunity to try a role on for size and to see the validity of the developing self-concept. This role playing may take the form of a small child walking like the father, batting left-handed because an idolized ball player bats left-handed, or stating aspirations of becoming a doctor because a doctor aided the child when ill. Reality testing normally follows role-playing. Our everyday life offers many opportunities for this to take place, such as child’s play, i.e., Can I hit enough home runs to be on the school team?; school courses, i.e., How can I be a nurse or doctor if I cannot stand the sight of blood?; extracurricular activities, i.e., Just how hard is it to make it on the stage in New York?; or part-time employment, i.e., Do I want to deliver pizzas or sell cosmetics forever? Reality testing can strengthen or contradict developing self-concepts as these concepts have now been tried out in the real occupational world (Super, 1963).

            The second process of self-concept development is that of translation. Translation (Super et al., 1957) take place in three ways: (a) identification with an adult may lead to a desire to portray this occupational role, but the role may be discarded when subjected to reality testing; (b) role playing or reality testing can lead to the discovery that one’s self-concept and the role concepts are congenial; or (c) attributes of the individual are thought to be important in a certain field of work, leading to conformation that one might do well and enjoy this field of endeavor.

          The third phase of self-concept development is implementation, or actualizing, as education is completed and the person enters the actual workplace or professional training is entered (Super, 1963). The potential lawyer is accepted by a prestigious law school. The premed student enters medical college, proud of a developing professional identity. Engineering graduates get their first jobs and see their nameplates on their own doors. Or the high school dropout who never did well academically is fired from yet another entry-level job, reinforcing an already poor occupational self-concept.

        Super (1990) enunciated fourteen propositions concerning the role of abilities and interests, self-concepts, life stages, and person-situation interactions in his theory. These include:

        Proposition 1. People differ in their abilities, interests, and personalities.

        Proposition 2. By virtue of these differing characteristics, they are qualified for a number of occupations.

        Proposition 3. Occupations require a characteristic pattern of abilities, interests, and personality traits, with tolerances sufficient to allow a variety of occupations for each individual and variety within each occupation.

        Proposition 4. Vocational preferences and competencies along with environments in which people live and work, and therefore self-concepts, change over time and with experiences, making choice and adjustment a continuous process.

        Proposition 5. This process of change may be called a maxicycle, a series of life stages, i.e., growth, exploration, establishment, maintenance, and decline, and may be subdivided into (a) the fantasy, tentative, and realistic phases of the exploratory stage, and (b) trial and stable phases of the establishment stage. A minicycle of new growth, exploration, and establishment takes place in the transition from one stage to the next.

         Proposition 6. Parental socio-economic level, mental ability, personality characteristics, and opportunities to which one is exposed determines the nature of the career pattern, e.g., occupational level attained, sequence, frequency, and length of trial and stable jobs.

         Proposition 7. Facilitation of the process of maturation of abilities and interests, aid in reality testing, and development of self-concepts can by guided.

         Proposition 8. Career maturity is a hypothetical construct with a brief history and does not increase monotonically.

         Proposition 9. Facilitating the maturing of abilities and interests through reality testing can guide one through the life stages.

         Proposition 10. The process of career development is that of developing and implementing self-concepts by a synthesizing and compromising process in which the self-concept is a product consisting of the interaction of inherited aptitudes, neural and endocrine makeup, opportunity to play various roles, and evaluations of these roles by superiors and peers.

         Proposition 11. The process of synthesis and compromise between individual and social factors, self-concept and reality is that of role playing whether in fantasy, counseling, or real life activities such as school, extracurricular activities, or part-time jobs.

         Proposition 12. Life and work satisfactions depend on the extent the individual finds outlets for abilities, needs, interest, personality traits, and self-concepts within a work situation and way of life that promotes growth and exploratory experiences.

         Proposition 13. People’s degree of satisfaction with work is proportionate to the degree to which they have been able to implement self-concepts.

         Proposition 14. Work and occupation provide a focus for personality organization for most men and some women, although this focus may be peripheral, incidental, or even nonexistent with focus instead on leisure activities or homemaking .

         Super (1981) proposed individuals enter occupations they see as most likely to permit self-expression based on this individually developed self-concept. Super (1983) additionally suggested that vocational behaviors engaged in while developing and implementing self-concept are a result of the person’s stage of life development and external environmental conditions; i.e., vocational decisions arrived at during adolescence are based on different happenings and ideas than those decisions made during middle age.

         From Buehler, Super (1957) also obtained the idea of life stages, or more specifically, growth, from birth to roughly age 14; exploration, from ages 15 to 25; maintenance, covering approximately 40 years from age 25 to age 65, and decline, till death. From Davidson and Anderson’s research and later work by Miller and Form (1951), Super added the idea of career patterns with career behavior of individuals following general patterns recognizable as predictable after study of the individual. Career patterns may be stable, in which a career is entered relatively early and permanently; conventional, in which several jobs may be tried before settling on a stable job; unstable, several trial jobs leading to what might be considered temporary stability but soon disrupted; and multiple trial, a series of stable jobs, but jobs that remain entry-level (Osipow, 1983).

          Super (1957) maintained the proposition that each of his two major life stages, i.e., the exploratory and the establishment, have several substages. The exploratory stage is composed of the tentative substage, the transition substage, and the uncommitted trial substage. As these names suggest, a gradual vocational concern is awakened starting in late childhood. The tentative, exploratory questions of childhood become stronger as in early adolescence, youngsters begin to realize the importance of preliminary vocational decisions. Further evaluation, modification, and/or crystallization of decisions then lead to the next stage of development.

           Two additional concepts within Super’s theory are developmental tasks which occur within the life stages and career maturity. Developmental tasks are those with which “society confronts individuals when they reach certain levels of biological, educational, and vocational attainment” (Super, 1990, p. 210). The five developmental tasks occurring within Super's (1990) exploratory stage are that:

           1. Students begin to demonstrate concern with vocational choice. Students of middle school age are entering the early stages of adolescence with opportunities to make certain choices, such as course selection. Super (1957) rather succinctly described choice as a “process, rather than an event” (p. 184) with unlimited small choices gradually narrowing an individual's possibilities to a few promising options and, potentially, limiting the individual's future undertakings (Kuder, 1977).

            2. Students will begin to seek out increased vocational information, and exhibit comprehensive and detailed planning. The student will begin gathering specific information necessary to make decisions when faced with the need to make them. Faced with additional opportunities to make choices, adolescents will practice making decisions in order to better learn the decision-making process (Super, 1990).

            3. Students will begin to seek out increased vocational information, and exhibit comprehensive and detailed planning. The student will begin gathering specific information necessary to make decisions when faced with the need to make them. Faced with additional opportunities to make choices, adolescents will practice making decisions in order to better learn the decision-making process (Super, 1990). 

            4. Students will begin to demonstrate the crystallization of traits relevant to vocational choice. During this time of stabilization of traits, students need support as they stabilize interests, exhibit patterning of interests, maximize their career maturity, begin to make independent vocational decisions, develop realistic attitudes, and gain an appreciation for work (Super, 1990).

            5. Students will also begin to demonstrate increasing wisdom of vocational preferences. An important achievement is the alignment of preferences with abilities when childhood fantasies of what work ‘might be’ begin to disappear and reality comes to the forefront. During this time, students will make an effort to participate in activities complementary with interests and preferences.

          The second concept, career maturity, is the individual's “readiness to cope with the developmental tasks appropriate to the age and level one finds oneself” (McDaniels & Gysbers, 1992, p. 48). Super stated (1983) that we may expect vocationally mature behavior to appear differently based on the context provided by the individual’s life stage, e.g., “ a vocationally mature fourteen-year-old will be concerned with assessing personal interests and abilities to reach the goal of deciding on an educational plan while the vocationally mature forty-five-year-old person is concerned with ways to maintain career status in the face of competition from younger workers” (Osipow, 1983, p. 157).

          An instrument, the Career Questionnaire, with the primary focus of measuring vocational or career maturity, was developed by Super, Bohn, Forrest, Jordaan, Lindeman, and Thompston (1971). This then evolved into the Career Development Inventory (CDI) in 1972 with updates in 1979 and 1981 (Westbrook, 1983). The CDI was further updated by Thompson, Lindeman, Super, Jordaan, and Myers (1984) to measure two affective variables: career planning and career exploration, and two cognitive characteristics: information about work and occupations and knowledge of the principles for career decision making. Super was influential in Crites’ development of the Vocational Developmental Inventory (1961; 1965) which later became the Career Maturity Inventory (1978) for use with young people and the Career Adjustment and Development Inventory (1979) for use with the adult population. Westbrook and Parry-Hill developed the Cognitive Vocational Maturity Inventory (1973) emphasizing cognitive rather than attitudinal aspects of vocational maturity. Super (1983) was also influential in Bowlsbey’s development of DISCOVER, a computerized counseling system. In addition, Nevill and Super (1986) developed the Salience Inventory (SI) to assess work-role importance while the Adult Career Concerns Inventory (ACCI) developed by Super, Thompson, and Lindeman (1988) measures concern with the tasks of Exploration, Establishment, Maintenance, and Disengagement.

         Numerous studies in addition to Super's own prolific work have been conducted over the ensuing years with most “supporting the idea that occupational choice represents the implementation of self-concept” with results “providing an impressive amount of empirical support for the general aspects of Super's theory” (Osipow, 1973, p. 163). Salomone and Slaney (1978) and Kidd (1984) examined the role of self-concept with regard to socio-economic conditions. Their findings indicated that along with intelligence, interests, and social status, socio-economic condition was an important determinant of career development. Self-concept research was also done by Healy (1968) and Morrison (1962) with middle-class students in secondary schools and universities.

          Much additional research has been done with regard to Super’s vocational maturity concept. Fitzgerald and Crites (1980), Harmon (1974), Lunneborg (1978), and Richardson (1974) conducted studies with both female and male high school and college students. Gribbons (1964) and Gribbons and Lohnes’ (1966; 1968; 1969) longitudinal research tested the hypothesis that occupational choice is indeed a sequential, developmental process. Results indicated that during the time period of eighth to tenth grades, overall awareness of interests and values in relation to the educational-vocational decisions increased, but many educational-vocational decisions were still made based on irrelevant information.

          Super’s life-span, life-space theory “has the virtue of building upon aspects of the mainstream of developmental psychology and personality theory with considerable utility for both practice and research in vocational psychology” (Osipow & Fitzgerald, 1996, p. 143). Borgen (1986) called Super “a superordinate thinker whose theory reflects an encyclopedic approach to scholarship” concluding that “Super’s comprehensive conceptual work has splendidly stood the test of time [in that] new ideas and trends are immediately comparable with his work” (p. 278). But specific suggestions for theoretical and empirical concerns regarding racial/ethnic minorities are assessed by Fouad and Arbona (1994), Leong (1995), and Fouad and Bingham (1995).

           Super (1983) espoused; “early vocational guidance and counseling for exploratory purposes and progress through a series of learning experiences so that choices would emerge from experience”; (p. 31). Additionally, because Super envisioned life as linked stages with minicycles of growth, exploration, establishment, maintenance, and decline (McDaniels & Gysbers, 1992; Super, 1990), “career development should focus on decision making over the life span . . . (and) not be restricted to occupational choice only” (McDaniels & Gysbers, p. 50).