I’ve been reading about various career development theories over the past few days and it has been a thought-provoking exercise, that’s for sure. I’ve been advising college students, for the better part of the last 15 years, on various topics in higher education but primarily focused on their academic success and helping them define what the next few years of their lives are going to look like. I’ve developed my career services praxis partly through professional-development based research and partly through empirically observed phenomena. It has been really interesting to begin researching it from a different perspective—to be embracing a literature review, albeit a brief one. I thought I’d dedicate this installment to a few of the statements I’ve stumbled upon most recently.
“In the past, many believed that young people in high school would make one career choice that they would pursue throughout their working life. …This concept of a one-time vocational choice is no longer relevant in the US. Our world was permanently changed with the ever-widening expansion of technology.”
I wonder how long ago they mean by “in the past” and how they are contextualizing the “world was permanently changed by the ever-widening expansion of technology” phrase. Are they referring to the expansion of technology as the development of the Word Wide Web, the invention of the personal computer, the television? Seriously, what technological development are they pointing to as the beginning of the end for “one-time career choice?” How long ago was that a reality?
If D.E. Super’s “rough” age ranges for stages of career development were ever accurate, oh boy are they really not anymore. And while the current author I’m reading gives “Super, et al.” credit for identifying that these stages don’t happen solely in a linear fashion, how interesting is it that they thought so in the first place. I know, I know, I’m, beating these poor people up for work they did in the 1960s by applying 21st-century standards, but the enlightened historian in me bristles at the thought of ever suggesting that there are hard and fast timelines on which any phenomenon develops. It’s as though they are saying, “it’s absolutely the case that the day after J.S. Bach died, composers started writing classical music.”
I guess to sum it up, I’d have to say that I’m a little underwhelmed by the older theories. They seem to have reached the end of their shelf-life. It is certainly good to have read them and to understand their general theses, but only insofar as this allows current researchers to move beyond the work of their earlier colleagues—to use the historic scholarship as a jumping-off point.
What can I say? I’ve always been one to light out for new territory…
Major Discoveries 