CAREER CONSTRUCTION THEORY: A Practitioner's Primer

Abstract

Recently career construction theory has emerged as a complimentary tool to help conceptualize how people impose 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 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 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 models (Savickas, 2005). For example, measuring a client's indecision with inventories, alone, objectifies and decontextualizes indecision and thereby omits an individual's subjective experience of indecision (Savickas, 1995). Thus, a central question that has emerged from constructivist career counseling is: how can individuals negotiate a lifetime of job changes and transitions without losing their sense of self and social identity? Such a change in central tenets prompted a reexamination and transformation of vocational psychology's core concepts, leading to two distinct camps: objectivism and constructivism. In the constructivist camp, Cochran (1997) and Savickas (1995) are among the authors who have reflected on story and narrative in relation to career. Although a trait-factor approach is, and will remain, useful from a theoretical, research, and applied point of view, Savickas (2005) contended that integrating a constructivist approach with objective career assessment and counseling methods fosters a more holistic and processoriented approach to working with clients. To move individuals toward making, career construction helps clients reflect on their own experiences and subjective views instead of responding to objective assessment results and conclusions. …

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