wr. REV. APP. PSYCHOL. VOL. %,NO. 2

Career development theory JEAN PIERRE JORDAAN

Teachers College, Columbia Universip, Niw ‘York

For theoretical and empirical reasons the emphasis in vocational psychology has shifted in the last twenty-five years from vocational choice to vocational development, from occupations to careers, and from judged or test-assessed adult occupational status to developmental processes and outcomes. In short, a static matching approach to choice and adjustment has been replaced by a more dynamic developmental approach.

Given the large amounts of time and money needed for longitudinal research, cross- sectional studies will no doubt continue to be the mainstay of present and future research efforts in the field. But the kinds ofquestions which are being raised by vocational psychologists today can be answered, for the most part, only by longitudinal data which are expensive and time- consuming to collect and for that reason quite rare. This means, unfortunately, that such data are likely to be accepted uncritically without replication and without further inquiry.

A strategy for dealing with this problem has been suggested by Crites (1965). I t involves collecting data from different samples of subjects at different stages of development in order to identify developmental trends. These same samples are then followed up later, as time and money become available, in order to supplement earlier cross-sectional data with longitudinal data. Another solution is for researchers who find that even this is beyond their means to direct their efforts not toward breaking new ground but toward replicating, clarifying, and extending significant concepts and findings suggested by others’ longitudinal research.

Areas Requiring Further Study Only research findings and issues which are of particular theoretical or practical import, or which require replication with other samples in other settings, will be discussed in this necessarily brief paper.

Structure of Vocational Readiness or Maturity in Adolescence A problem faced by all theorists and researchers who seek to define and measure vocational maturity in adolescence is to demonstrate that their presumed measures of vocational maturity are indeed measures of vocational maturity.

In the absence of conceptually adequate yardsticks against which to assess the predictive validity of measures during the high school years, researchers have had to focus on construct rather than on criterion-related validity. They have generally taken the position that for their measures to be considered construct-valid two requirements must be met. First, since vocational maturity is a developmental construct, scores on measures purporting to assess it must be shown to increase with age, and second, measures of conceptually related traits, attitudes, and behaviours must be shown to cluster in the expected manner. Comparison of means indicates whether the first requirement has been met, correlation or factor analysis whether the second has been met.

Career Pattern Study data regarding the former have already been reported in a number of publications (Jordaan, in Herr, 1974; Jordaan and Heyde, in press). Factor analysis is one way of investigating whether measures cluster in the manner which theory, logic, and experience suggest. The results depend upon the kind offactor analysis performed. A principal components analysis with varimax rotation yields orthogonal or uncorrelated factors. Methods like those developed by Kaiser and Rice (1970) yield oblique or correlated factors. The former is the most appropriate method to use when the goal is to relate predictors to outcomes, the latter when the

I08 CAREER DEVELOPMENT THEORY

goal is better understanding of the structure of vocational maturity. O n both logical and conceptual grounds the various components of vocational maturity might be expected to be related rather than discrete, as shown by Super and Overstreet (1960), and an oblique analysis to yield a psychologically more meaningful picture of vocational maturity in the high school years. This has recently been tried in the Career Pattern Study fJordaan and Heyde, in press): both kinds of analysis were performed, and while the results are not very different, the results of the oblique analysis were indeed more meaningful.

When presumed measures of vocalional maturip in e a r b adolescence, at about age 15, are thus analysed the following factors are identified:

Crystallization of Expressed Interests -4greement between -Measured and Expressed Interests Specification of a Vocational Preference Information about the Psychological Requirements of the Preferred Occupation Information about the Educational and Training Requirements of the Preferred

Concern with Entry into the Preferred Occupation Implementation of a Vocational Preference Independence of Work Experience Planning L’ocnlional maturib in later adolescence, i.e. at about age 18, appears to consist of:

Cqstallization of Measured Interests Specification of a Vocational Preference Commitment to, and Acceptance of Responsibility for, Vocational Choices Weighing of Alternatives and Contingencies Planning for the Near Future Planning for the More Remote Future Implementation of Vocational Preference: Steps Taken to Secure a Job or Needed Training

Implernen tation of Vocational Preference Through Extra-curricular Activities Breadth and Depth of Occupational Information Crystallization of interests, specification of a vocational preference, planning and

implementation (steps taken to give substance or reality to one’s vocational preference) are important at age 18 as well as at age 15. Weighing of alternatives and commitment to and acceptance of responsibility for vocational choices appropriately emerge as factors only in 18- year-olds, since the high school senior is on the threshold ofthe adult world whereas the 15-year- old is only on the threshold of high school. Because of their novelty and importance for diagnosis and counselling, these findings, like those reported elsewhere in this paper, require further study. If replicated, we will have a clearer picture than we now have of the areas toward which counsellors and career educators might most profitably direct their efforts.

The foregoing represents a promising beginning in our attempt to understand and assess vocational maturity in earlv and late adolescence. It has become apparent, however, that a developmental as well as a structural model of adolescents’ vocational maturity is needed (Super, 1974, 1975). Being a set of developing traits and behaviourssome cognitive, others attitudinal, and still others instrumental-the structure ofvocational maturity may be expected to differ somewhat from one stage or sub-stage to another. Thus late maturing traits such as independence of work experience, and consistency, realism, and crystallization of vocational preference may be unrelated, or only slightly related, in early adolescence to vocational maturity and to adult outcomes. However, by age 18 they may play an important part both in defining vocational maturity and in determining adult outcomes. Intelligence, scholastic

Occupation

and Education

JE.\S PIERRE JORD.4.4N 109

achievement, and socio-economic status may be associated more closely in some stages of development than in others with vocational maturity and later success and satisfaction. Super’s attempt to devise a model ofvocational maturity which is developmental as well as structural is an important recent contribution to theory and suggests hitherto unconsidered directions for further theorizing and research.

Self-Concept Development The role of self-concepts in vocational choice and adjustment is reasonably well understood. Their role in vocational development, despite two important publications (Super, 1951, 1963) indicating both how and why they should be studied, has surprisingly not received the attention it deserves.

If individuals and the picture which they have of themselves change with time and experience and if, as has been hypothesized, individuals translate their self concepts into occupational terms, then self concepts can be expected to play an important part both in reflecting and directing a person’s career. Several findings from the Career Pattern Study (Jordaan and Heyde, in press) indicate that this is an area which merits further theorizing and research. First, the consistently vocationally mature adolescent, whose vocational maturity did not deteriorate during the high school years, was not only brighter, scholastically more able, and better off socio-econo&ally than his peers, but he also had a clearer, better-rounded picture of himself at age 18 and, in both the first and last years of high school, had a picture of himself which was organized around a number of regnant self concepts.

Even more interesting is the finding that it is the boy who shows awareness of his own characteristics, i.e. whose picture of himself is not only more extensive than that of his peers but also includes a larger number of regnant or dominant self concepts, who is most likely to have inquired into the psychological requirements of the occupation he hopes to enter.

Exploration Studies have shown that high school vocational preferences are unstable, uncertain, and unrealistic. Even as 18-year-olds no fewer than half of the Career Pattern Study subjects had preferences which were not in keeping with their socio-economic circumstances and their tested interests and abilities. Only about halfof Rothney’s subjects ( 1958) were found to have entered or to be preparing for the occupation which they were considering as high school seniors, six months after leaving high school. Project Talent’s (Flanagan et al., 1971) massive data confirm this in five-year follow-ups.

Adolescent vocational preferences, it must be concluded, provide a poor basis for choice and planning. Career education programmes and more frequent and effective counselling may improve matters. However, it is doubtful whether the goal of such efforts should be to replace uncertainty with certainty and multiple vocational preferences with a single preference. Rather than regarding tentative, inconsistent, and poorly conceived goals as natural enemies to be eradicated as expeditiously as possible, counsellors should try to capitalize on them. While they may be a poor basis for choice, they may be a good basis for exploration.

Exploration is important in every life stage but crucial during adolescence, the exploratory stage, and early adulthood, the establishment stage (Super, 1957). It is also crucial in the formation of self and occupational concepts Uordaan, in Super, 1963). A number of doctoral dissertations completed under Super and Jordaan’s direction have shown that exploratory behaviour can be increased even among inner city disadvantaged youth (Hamdani, 1974; Hammer, 1974), that counsellors can be taught to promote and facilitate it (Corbin, 1974) and that exploration in adolescence and early adulthood is indeed related to favourable occupational and career outcomes in adulthood (Walvoord, dissertation in process).

Objective and psychometrically adequate measures are now available (Jordaan, in Super, 1974) which make it easier for a counsellor to assess whether the individual should be

I10 C.4REER DE\’ELOPMENT THEORS

encouraged to engage in wide-ranging or more sharply focused exploration. It has been suggested Uordaan, in Super, 1963), that exploration involves search, trial, inquiry, experimentation and, in its most advanced form, hypothesis-generation and hypothesis-testing, and is more likely to be effective when it is purposeful and systematic rather than random or sporadic; ways of guiding, facilitating, and promoting it need to be explored. This is clearly another area in which further work is needed.

The Criterion Question Vocational maturity factors which appear to have construct validity have been listed earlier. But more important than construct validity is predictive validity: unless vocational maturity in adolescence can be shown to be related to adult status, attempts to assess it would be meaningless. The criteria which should be used to assess a person’s achievements and progress once he has left school are less clear.

Researchers can profit from the Career Pattern Study’s efforts in this poorly charted domain. Concerned not only with current adult status but also with the events and processes which preceded it , and with internal as well as external assessments of outcome, Super and Jordaan in their most recent analysis of the age 25 data (now being written up) subjected 17 criterion or outcome variables to factor analysis.

When these outcomes were factor analysed, five oblique or correlated factors emerged. These are described below in some detail, first because they provide a basis for further theorizing and research, and second, because they need to be replicated with other samples in other settings. The five factors are:

Career Satisfaction. Persons scoring high on this factor expect or want to continue in their present occupation, are satisfied with the direction their careers are taking, and feel that their assets are being used in their present job.

J o b Satisfaction. Persons scoring high on this factor indicate that if they had to do it over again they would choose the same or a similar job, feel that their job provides them with opportunities to use initiative, judgement, knowledge and previously acquired experience, and show evidence of stabilizing or settling down rather than floundering.

Attained Status. Persons scoring high on this factor have achieved a higher level of education than their peers and are employed in higher-level occupations.

Career Progress. Persons scoring high on this factor feel that their careers have turned out well, had good reasons for, and had gained by, the moves they made since leaving high school.

Socio-economic ddvancement. Persons scoring high on this factor are characterized by considerable upward mobility, and by age 25 have not only reached but surpassed their fathers’ occupational levels.

Of the foregoing three are caren and two are occupationuf variables, indicating that the assessment of adult status necessitates (Super, Kowalski, and Gotkin, 1967) career as well as occupational variables, subjective as well as objective measures, and developmental as well as static criteria.

Prediction of Adult Vocational Outcomes Of the questions currently occupying vocational theorists and researchers, the most important are the following: Is adolescent vocational maturity predictive of vocational outcomes in adulthood? To what extent are these outcomes a function of such factors as intelligence, socio- economic status, scholastic achievement and work experience rather than of vocational readiness or maturity? Does the inclusion of vocational maturity measures improve on predictions based on conventional or standard measures of the kind typically used by counsellors and researchers? If they do not make for improved predictions, their utility and, more important, their theoretical adequacy would be open to serious question. The findings of the Career Pattern Study are sufficiently promising to suggest that continued exploration of

JEAN PIERRE JORDAAN 1 1 1

these questions, perhaps with theoretically more adequate predictor and criterion measures, is warranted.

In the 9th grade such conventional variables as .grades, curriculum, and parental occupational level were found to be better predictors of vocational status and progress at age 25 than the vocational maturity variables. However, better predictions resulted when bolh types of data were used. In the 12th grade the vocational maturity measures were appropriately superior to the conventional measures in predicting career and job satisfaction and inferior to them in predicting attained status. Three of the criteria were better predicted by a combination of the two types of variables than by either type alone. The prediction of attained status and, surprisingly, career progress was not aided by the inclusion of the vocational maturity measures.

The extent to which age-25 adult outcomes can be predicted from antecedent data collected at age 18 are shown by the following multiple correlation coefficients: Attained Status, 0.80 (using conventional variables); Career Satisfaction, 0.68 (using both types of variables) ; Career Progress, 0.65 (using conventional measures) and 0.64 (using both types of measures); Job Satisfaction, 0.63 (using both types of measures); and Socio-economic Advancement or Upward Mobility, 0.54 (using both types of measures).

Given the number of years separating the predictors and the criteria, these results are promising. It should be borne in mind, however, that the statistical procedures used to arrive at these results capitalize on differences in the sample and assign weights to them which maximize their predictive validity. A different sample can be expected to yield different variables and different weights. It is therefore of both theoretical and practical importance that these promising findings should be replicated with other samples, in other settings and cultures.

Career Development of Women More than a third o! all workers in the US are women and nearly half (40 per cent) of women who are married are also empioyed. Whether through necessity or choice a steadily growing number of marrieds and singles in the CS and in other parts of the world expect to enter or re- enter the labour force and to combine marriage with work.

These developments and women’s liberation have led to a growing interest in the career development ofwomen. Our understanding of the role ofwork in women’s lives is unfortunately limited. Studies have generally been limited to women who aspire to or have actually entered professional occupations. Most, if not all, are based on remembered experiences or influences. Only one (Gribbons and Lohnes, 1968, 1969) qualifies as a longitudinal study. The sample, studied over an 1 1-year period, included 53 girls. In the 8th grade (approximately age 13) these girls were indistinguishable from the boys in ability, vocational readiness, and level of aspiration. Thereafter their aspirations deteriorated steadily. Sex, intelligence, and socio- economic status rather than vocational maturity were found to be the major determinants of adult vocational status. About halfofthe women in this sample intended or had managed at age 22 to combine work with mamage. It seems clear that theorists can no longer ignore the importance of work in the lives of women.

Orientations of Women Working women, whether married or single, can be divided into at least three groups: first, there. are those for whom work is an important source of personal fulfilment, who are more concerned with the intrinsic than the extrinsic rewards of work, and who are committed to an occupation and not, simply to working. Then there are those who derive sufficient satisfaction from work to want to continue or resume it, but whose satisfactions are exhimu rather than intrinsic. Their commitment may be as great as those of the former, but their commitment is to working rather than to an occupation. Finally, there are those who would, if circumstances permitted, not work at all, or willingly exchange work for marriage not just temporarily but

112 C’.\REER DE\~ELOPSIEST THEORY

permanently. They would rather seek fulfilment in home-making, in volunteer activities, and in com mu ni t y organizations.

The first of these groups can be described as career-oriented, the second as job-oriented, and the third as homemaking-oripnted. These different orientations, it has been argued, have their origins in, and can be understood in terms of, individual differences in interests, abilities, values, needs, self-concepts, family background, and perception of sex and work roles. It has also been argued that there are important differences between women who aspire to or enter traditional, sex- typical occupations such as nurse or librarian and those who enter non-traditional, male- dominated occupations like engineering and surgical medicine.

Current Theorizing Propositions advanced to account for these differences among women have included the following:

1 . From a very early age women are subject to sex-typing which encourages and reinforces ‘sex-appropriate’ interests, abilities, and aspirations. Sex-typing limits the kinds of aspirations which women develop, the occupational opportunities which are open to them, and the kind of vocational guidance which they receive.

2 . There are important differences between women who seek or have found fulfilment in work and those who seek or have found it in marriage and home-making. Among the former, for example, need achievement and need autonomy may be expected to be dominant, in the latter, needs for affiliation, succourance, deference, and abasement.

3. Whether a woman will prefer marriage to work, work to marriage, or a combination ofthe two will depend on the kinds of role models she has been exposed to and chosen. So will her decision to enter a traditionally feminine occupation or a typically male-dominated occupation. This logically and conceptually defensible proposition has, however, generated widely different and even conflicting hypotheses as will be seen below.

4. Career-oriented women identify with their working fathers, home-making-oriented women with their mothers.

5 . Career-oriented women are more likely to have had, and to have identified with, career- oriented, achieving mothers who do not conform to traditional role expectations.

6. The father’s influence is just as crucial in the case ofdaughters as it is in the case ofsons. If he believes that nurturant, affiliative, and supportive behaviour rather than independence and high levels of aspiration and achievement should be encouraged in girls, this will be reflected both in the kinds and levels of work to which his daughter will aspire. Because, so goes the argument, i t is as important for daughters as for sons to please their father, his conception of the role of women may carry more weight than the mothers’.

7 . Daughters are influenced by their mothers as well as by their fathers, but in different \&.a!rs. From the mother daughters learn how to be mothers and home-makers and, if their mothers are workers as well as home-makers, how to combine these two roles. From their fathers they learn about the kinds ofsatisfactions that can be derived from work and the kinds and levels of work it might be appropriate for them to consider.

These then, are some of the propositions which have been advanced to account for the occupational choices and orientations of women. When tested the findings have generally been inconclusive, conflicting, or unreplicated (Dickey, 1975; Pappo, 1972; Patrick, 1973; Richardson, 1972; Tenzer, 1977).

Some Tentative Conclusions TO date these conclusions seem to be warranted by the findings:

supported by high intelligence and superior academic performance. 1 . Entry into a high level or sex-atypical occupation is associated with the need to achieve,

2. Interest in marriage and child-rearing is not necessarily antithetical to an interest in

jE;\S PlERRE JORDX.\S 113

working. I t is more appropriate to conceive ofmarriage and work as points on a continuum than as mutually exclusive categories.

3. There may actually be two continua: a home-making continuum which reflects interest in marriage and child-rearing, and a work-salience continuum reflecting the importance attached to work.

Three points on such a continuum might be: First, a temporary or permanent job dictated by necessity or availability and involving a

minimum of commitment and personal investment. Relinquishing it or exchanging it for marriage or some other job would not involve the loss of any important satisfactions.

Second, a deliberately and thoughtfully chosen temporary or permanent occupation which does involve commitment and is an important source of satisfaction, but since the rewards sought and obtained are extrinsic rather than intrinsic, could be exchanged without regret for another perhaps quite different job providing more of these rewards.

Third, an occupation which is such amimportant source of satisfaction that the individual would not exchange i t for some other means of earning a livelihood, intends to stay single in order to remain in it, to continue in it though married, or to return to it when domestic commitments permit.

Need for a New Theory? The frequently heard argument that existing theories of vocational development are not very serviceable when it comes to understanding women’s careers warrants closer scrutiny than it has received. Super’s theory of vocational development published in a 1953 issue of the American Psychologzit and his description (1957) of the career patterns of women are not as outdated or as unserviceable as these arguments would seem to imply, as Mulvey (1963) and Vetter ( 1 973) have shown. The list of personal and social factors which are believed to influence vocational development may need to be expanded, and, if as Super has suggested, the concept of career is extended to encompass ‘the sequence of major positions occupied by a person throughout his pre-occupational, occupational and post-occupational life’ (1 976; p. 20), the present description of life-stages will also need some revision. It will, for example, need to take into account the fact that women whose careers are interrupted by marriage may have to revert to an earlier life stage and complete or repeat the process of exploration and establishment, especially if, as might be expected, their needs, values, interests, competencies, and self-concepts have changed in the intervening years.

It is for theory and research to identify the important points of similarity and difference between men and women and to relate them to vocational choices and outcomes.

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Press:

LA THEORIE DU DEVELOPPEMENT DE LA CARRIERE

Les themes lies au developpement de la carriere qui doivent &re mieux tttudits concement la structure de la maturitt professionnelle, le dttveloppement du self-concept, le comportement exploratoire, le validation des mesures de maturitt professionnelle, la prMiction du statut professionnel de l’adulte, et le developpement des carneres Eminines. Cette discussion est p1aci.e dans le contexte des recherches anttrieures, avec des exemples de‘travaux et de theories rkents.