IOP3703 STUDY
GUIDE SUMMARY
NOTES (2022)
,Career development needs of men and women
Societal changes over the last 50 years have led to work being a critically important part of women's lives, as opposed to
unimportant and only a short period of life.
Although women now constitute a significant portion of the labour force, their work continues to be focused on traditionally
female occupations and they are less well paid than men.
The process of career development is the same for men and women, but they face different challenges as they advance
through their careers. Men tend to follow this course:
• 20's: Work is the major way for them to differentiate themselves and gain independence.
• 30's: Seek career success. Belief that work will somehow protect them from misfortune or maladies.
• 40's: Realise that work success does not make them happy. Become more in tune with their inner selves, more likely to
engage in mentoring. Either feel rejuvenated or change careers.
Women may fear success because they believe it will cause isolation.
Some forego having children until later, when they feel the pressure of their biological clock.
Others are unable to fully commit to a career because they feel they should have children.
Those who do have children and work will need assistance to raise a child, like day care and/or a nanny. In their 30's they
tend to change the focus from career to family or vice versa.
They seek balance between career progress and the demands of motherhood. Women's careers can be divided into three
quite long phases:
• Idealistic achievement (20's and early 30's): emphasis on personal control, career satisfaction and achievement, as well
as positive impact on others.
• Pragmatic endurance (mid-30's to late 40's): emphasis on doing what has to be done, whilst managing multiple
relationships and responsibilities. Characterised by less personal control and more dissatisfaction, especially with
organisations and managers. Around the age of 40 women tend to re-evaluate the career-family balance.
• Re-inventive contribution (around 50 on): emphasis on organisations, families and communities without losing sight of
self. Careers are viewed as learning opportunities and a chance to make a difference to others.
Women are more likely than men to make career transitions for family reasons and to achieve a more satisfying balance
between work and family.
Therefore women tend to have more frequent employment breaks or interruptions.
Savicka's Career Construction Theory
This theory asserts that individuals construct their careers by imposing meaning on their vocational behaviour and
occupational experiences.
Career denotes a subjective construction that imposes personal meaning on past memories; present experiences and future
aspirations by weaving them into a life theme that patterns the individual's work life.
The subjective career guides, regulates and sustains vocational behaviour by the patterning of work experiences into a
cohesive whole that produces a meaningful story.
In telling career stories about their work experiences, individuals highlight particular experiences to produce a narrative
truth by which they live.
Counsellors who use career construction theory listen to clients' narratives for the storylines of
• life structure issues (work and other roles that constitute a person's life),
• vocational personality style (personality traits such as abilities, needs, values, interests and other traits that are typical
of a person's self-concept),
• career adaptability (the coping mechanisms used by individuals to negotiate developmental tasks and environmental
changes that accumulate in the course of a lifetime) and
• thematic life stories or life themes (the motivations and driving forces that pattern lives)
Life structure
• Work is situated within a web of social roles that individuals enact and that form the basis of the human life structure.
• Individuals seek career counselling at times of role change and when they want to reconfigure their life structures into a
different pattern of life roles.
• Career construction theory attends to the relative importance that individuals ascribe to roles in family, play, leisure, school,
work, community and other domains over the life-span, rather than the work role.
• The growing changes of the world not only in work, but diversity, global economy and occupations etc influence individual's
levels of role salience and role viability.
• Role commitment and role participation is influenced by personal, cultural and structural factors, such as gender
expectations, social class, discrimination etc.
Career adaptability
• Career construction builds on Super's view of the career as a series of attempts to implement a self concept.
• It incorporates Super's development career stages using the rubrics of growth, exploration, establishment, management and
disengagement.
• Each career stage entails a primary adaptive goal.
, • Completing all tasks associated with each stage builds a foundation for success and future adaptability, and reduces the
likelihood of difficulties in later stages.
• Career adaptability shows how an individual can deal with current developmental tasks and job crises.
• It entails distinct attitudes, beliefs, and competencies that influence strategies used to solve problems and behaviours
aligned to one's vocational self-concept with work roles over the life course. These include:
o Career concern: orienting oneself to the future and feeling optimistic about it.
o Career control: Increasing self-regulation though career decision-making and taking responsibility for ownership of
the future
o Career curiosity: engaging in productive career exploration and approaching the future realistically
Career confidence: acquiring problem-solving ability and self-efficacy beliefs
Career adaptability helps individuals implement their self-concept as they deal with current work and other demands
In dealing with career adaptability there are several developmental tasks that individuals must face during the various stages:
• During the growth phase (<15) children's stories reflect their growth in relationship to issues that concern dealing with
teachers, peers, parents and siblings.
• In the exploration phase (15-25) young people's stories are made up with talk about their first full-time job, and the type of
encounters they have with superiors and co-workers.
• In the establishment phase (25-45) stories reflect promotion and pay increases.
• Stories in the management/maintenance phase (45-65) include holding onto one's job, learning more about what is required
in the job and dealing with technological advancements.
• In the disengagement phase (+/- 65), thoughts of planning retirement and actually retiring are tasks that individuals may
discuss with a counsellor.
Personality style
• Personality traits and interests are viewed as dynamic, fluid and subjectively experienced possibilities for adaptation to the
social world, rather than stable, static and objectively tangible entities.
• Empirically-derived trait categories are perceived as socially constructed by people living within a distinct and particular
temporal, situational and cultural context that sustains their use and meaning.
• Vocational personality types and occupational interests constitute resemblances to socially constructed clusters of attitudes
and skills appropriate only to the extent that they indicate similarities among types of people.
• Individuals can retain or discontinue using particular adaptive coping strategies depending on situational demands.
Life theme stories
• This component emerged from Super's view that people, in entering an occupation, seek to implement a concept of them;
and after stabilizing in an occupation, they seek to realise their potential and preserve self-esteem.
• Thus work provides the context for human development and constitutes an important location in each individual's life.
• Individuals engage in an ongoing process of adaptation to enhance the match between self and situation and better realise
their self-concept in work
Career counselling emphasizes identifying the client's life themes.
• This component deals with the reasons people move in the particular direction that they do; it represents the private
meaning people attach to their particular career life stories.
• Life themes explain an individual's life structure, vocational personality style and career adaptability strategies.
• Personality styles indicate what a person has achieved and career adaptability strategies reflect how the person has achieved
it.
• Counselling for career construction encourages individuals to use work and other life roles to become who they are and live
the lives they have imagined.
• The counsellor's main aim is to help clients narrate and listen to their own stories.
• The counsellor tries to help clients give meaning and purpose to what they do in life by guiding them to reflect on their
dominant life themes or life style.
• The concept of mattering (turning the client's thoughts or preoccupations into a life interest or an occupation that they will
participate in, within society) is an important concept of an individual's life story and a core focus of career counselling.
Career success in the new world of work
The objective and subjective sense of achievement individuals experience regarding their careers.
People's sense of job satisfaction and career satisfaction are significantly related to their sense of career well-being.
The most frequently cited positive career experiences are career transitions, interpersonal relations, having autonomy and
power, work performance, sense of purpose, learning and development opportunities and work-life balance.
Negative career experiences include interpersonal relations, lack of feedback or recognition from others, organisational
change, inequitable treatment, dislike of ethics or morals displayed by the company, career transitions, work adjustment,
lack of promotional opportunities, lack of learning and development opportunities and having no sense of purpose.
Career success is also linked to an individual's goal orientation which is centred in a particular cultural value system.
In the Afrocentric value system, psychological feelings of career success are based on a preference for quality of life and
rewarding common vision for communal effort.
