IPS13A3: Personnel Psychology and

Career Management
Ms. Tasneem Ebrahim
Career Choice and Counselling
Chapter 4
 LEARNING OUTCOMES
• Discuss the trait-and-factor/person-environment-fit approaches;
• Describe the categories of types and relationships between types in Holland’s
theory;
• Describe the psychological processes that constitute types in Jung’s theory and
indicate their relevance to occupational choice;
• Explain Super’s views on self-concepts, career maturity, career adjustment and
life stages;
• Discuss the person-in-environment perspective of Cook, Heppner and O’Brien;
• Describe the contribution of Savickas’s career constitution theory and
logotherapy to career development counselling in the modern workplace;
 Career Choice vs Career Counselling
• Career Choice
• The decisions people need to make or remake about their careers and work

• Career Counselling
• One to one interaction between practitioner (or counsellor) and client, usually
ongoing, involving the application of psychological theory and a recognised set
of communication skills.
• The primary focus is on helping the client making career related decisions and
deal with career related issues.
 Career Development Theories
• Set of concepts, propositions, and ideas that provides us with insights
into what is believed to be true about the process of career
development

• Presents some clues about what is most important to study, how it

should be studied, and how results will address counselling concerns

• Not a step-by-step, how-to-do career counselling but does provide the

guidelines for counselling procedures and interventions

• Presents different views of what is most important in the career

development process and provide the basis for future research.
 Career Development Theories
Trait-and-factor or
Person-
environment-fit
theory
Lifespan
Postmodern
development
perspectives
theory

Person-in-
Cognitive/Learning
environment
theories
perspective

Relational
Psychodynamic
approaches to
approaches
career development
Career Development Theories
 Matching individual traits with requirements of a
specific occupation and solving the career-search
problem

Tra
it-a
Fac nd- Developed closely with the psychometric movement

The tor
ory Individuals have unique patterns of ability or traits
that can be objectively measured and correlated
with the requirements of various types of jobs

Takes into consideration individual values in career

decision-making
 Trait-and-Factor Theory – Parson (1909)
• Study the individual – survey occupations – match individual with the
occupation by means of “true reasoning”

Self-knowledge
Step 1:
Gaining self-understanding

Match Individual and

Job/Occupation/Environment
Step 3:
Job/Occupation/Environment Integrating information about one’s
knowledge self and the world of work
Step 2:
Obtaining knowledge about
the world of work
 John Holland’s Typology (1992)
• Individuals are attracted to a given career due to their personalities and
factors constituting their backgrounds

• Career choice is an expression of personality into the world of work and

the stereotypes associated with a specific occupation

• Modal personal style

• Congruence of one’s self-view with an occupational preference
• Development process established through heredity and one’s life history of
environmental influences

• You choose a career to satisfy your preferred modal personal style

 John Holland’s Typology
• Individuals are attracted to a particular role demand of an occupational
environment that meets their personal needs and provides them with
satisfaction

• Self-knowledge is important in the search for vocational satisfaction and

stability

• 6 modal occupational environments with modal-personal-orientations

• Realistic (R), Investigative (I), Artistic (A), Social (S), Enterprising (E),
Conventional (C) (RIASEC)
• Personality types can be arranged according to dominant combinations
• Represented in a hexagonal model that provides a visual representation of the
inner relationship of personality styles and occupational environment
coefficients of correlation
John Holland’s Typology
(pg. 139)
 John Holland’s Typology
• Theoretical constructs to use when examining your typology

Consistency • Personality and environment

Differentiation • How well an individual fits one modal occupation

• Individuals having a clear and stable picture of their

Identity goals, interests and talents

• Match between the individual’s personality and the

Congruence environment

• Theoretical relationships between types of

Calculus occupational environments that lend themselves to
empirical research techniques
 John Holland’s Typology
• Assumptions of the theory
• Most individuals can be categorised as one of six types
• There are six kinds of environments: [Realistic (R), Investigative (I), Artistic (A),
Social (S), Enterprising (E), Conventional (C) (RIASEC)]
• Individuals search for environments that will let them exercise their skills and
abilities, express their attitudes and values, and take on agreeable problems
and roles
• Individual’s behaviour is determined by an interaction between his/ her
personality and the characteristics of his/ her environment
 Jung’s Theory of Personality Types
• Psychological Type
• AKA Personality Type (MBTI personality assessment)
• Personality pattern which involves certain psychological
processes that determine individuals’ life orientation Ps
yc
fu h ol
n c og
tio ica
ns l

Extraversion Sensing Thinking

Introversion Intuition Feeling

Atti
tu
de
s
 Jung’s Theory of Personality Types
ISTJ ISFJ INFJ INTJ
• Management • Education • Religion • Scientific or
• Administration • Healthcare • Counselling technical fields
• Computers

ISTP ISFP INFP INTP

• Skilled trades • Healthcare • Writing • Scientific or
• Agriculture • Business • Arts technical fields

ESTP ESFP ENFP ENTP

• Marketing • Teaching • Counselling • Science
• Applied • Coaching • Teaching • Management
technology

ESTJ ESFJ ENFJ ENTJ

• Management • Religion • Arts • Management
• Administration • Education • Teaching • Leadership
 Life-span, Life-space Approach

• Developed by Donald Super

• Work is very pervasive and that one life role may affect others

• States that other career development theories do not address adult

concerns and focus too much on the initial career choice

• Career development is a process that unfolds gradually over the life

span

• Career development is a continuous process that involves multiple life

roles
 Life-span, Life-space Approach
• Self-concept is the centrepiece of this approach
• Individuals implement their self-concepts into careers as a means
of self-expression
• Built on Super’s initial development stages and tasks
• Stages of vocational development provide a framework for observing
vocational behaviour and attitudes, known as vocational developmental
tasks
• Growth (12-14) develop self concept
• Exploration (14-25) tentative career decisions
• Establishment (25-45) trail in 20s and stabilisation in 30s and 40s
• Maintenance (45-65) continuation in lines of work
• Decline (65+) decelerate work activities
• Individuals can cycle and recycle through developmental tasks
• Age and career transitions are flexible and do not occur in a well-ordered
sequence
 Life-span, Life-space Approach
• Career maturity
• Completion of appropriate career developmental tasks
• More related to intelligence than age
• Provide points of reference from which the desired attitudes and
competencies related to effective career growth can be identified and
assessed
 Life-span, Life-space Approach
• Life-stage model (2-dimensional)
• Longitudinal dimension of life span (maxi-cycle) and corresponding major
life stages (mini-cycles)
• Roles played by individuals as they progress through developmental stages
• Roles are experienced in the theatres of home, community, school and
workplace
• Success in one role facilitates success in another
• All roles affect one another in various theatres
Life-stage model (2-dimensional)
 Life-span, Life-space Approach

• Archway model
• Created to delineate the changing diversity of life roles experienced by
individuals over the life span
• Clarify how biographical, psychological and socioeconomic determinants
influence career development
• Highlights the interaction of influences in career development
Archway model
 Person-in-Environment Perspective
• Focuses on the contextual interaction over the life span (reciprocal
environment)

• Individuals are seen as products of the environment

• Career development is influenced and constructed within several

environmental systems

• Environment consists of 4 systems (Bronfenbrenner, 1979)

• Microsystem – the individual
• Mesosystem – family, peer group, friends
• Exosystem – friends of family, extended family, neighbours,
workplaces, media
• Macrosystem – sum of broad ideologies expressed and modelled by
the sociocultural group
Person-in-Environment
Perspective
 Person-in-Environment Perspective
• People develop in changing historical contexts and in sociocultural
interactions and relationships

• Human development is both continuous and discontinuous and

individuals are involved in ongoing systems of change

• Counsellor can view all aspects of the client as a whole

• How the client fits into the work role and how the work role fits into the
person’s lifestyle

• Constructivism
• Emerged from the philosophical position of postmodernism that suggested
there is no fixed truth
• Individuals define themselves as they participate in events and
relationships in their environment
• Individuals develop personal constructs in which their worldviews differ
from those of others
 Career Construction: Developmental
Theory
• Developed by Savickas (2002)

• Individuals construct their own reality

• Careers should be viewed from a developmental contextual perspective

that focuses on one’s adaptation to an environment through the
development of inner structure

• 16 propositions of career construction that include:

• Developmental contextualism – core life roles
• Development of vocational self-concepts – self-concepts, individual
differences
• Vocational development tasks – vocational maturity and career adaptability

• Increased sense of personal awareness and integration of constructs

 Career Construction: Developmental
Tasks
• Successful passage from one stage to another is considered as
individual progress over the life span

• Degree to which individuals successfully adapt to each task and meshes

this progress with career concerns indicates their level of career
maturity

• Important to recognise the relevance of completing the goals of the

development stages of:
• Growth
• Exploration
• Establishment
• Maintenance
• Disengagement
 Contextual Explanation of Career
• Based on constructivism
• Individuals construct their own way of organising information
• Truth and reality is a matter of perception

• Ever changing, ongoing interplay of roles

• Main focus is on the relationship between the individual and the

environment as these two are inseparable

• Career counselling can be done through action theory

• Actions are cognitively and socially directed to reflect everyday

experiences and an individual’s social and cultural world

• Actions are viewed from 3 perspectives:

• Manifest behaviour, internal processes, social meaning
 Contextual Explanation of Career
• Joint actions
• Career values, interests, identity and behaviours are constructed through
conversations with others
• Each person involved in the career counselling process influences the other
which can lead to others’ thought processes being modified

• Focus on defining actions

• Evaluating and interpreting actions and the context in which they happen

• Person-in-the-environment (Sigelman & Rider, 2003)

• Human are inherently good or bad
• Nature and nurture, interacting continually, make us who we are
• Individuals are active in their own development
• Development involves stage-like changes and gradual ones
• Some aspects of development are universal but development can also vary
from one individual to another and can change direction, depending on the
individual’s experience