Chapter 1

Understanding and Facilitating Career Development in the 21st Century

Robert W. Lent and Steven D. Brown

Why Do People Work? What role does it play in our lives? Why should counselors and psychologists focus on work behavior? What do they have to offer people who are in the process of preparing to enter the world of work, adjusting to the workplace, experiencing problems or major changes in their work lives, or preparing to leave the work role? How does work relate to other life roles? Should work be seen as an impediment or as a complement to involvement in family and other life domains? Is counseling for work issues any different than counseling for other issues?

These are all questions that captivate and challenge those who study work behavior from a psychological perspective or who seek to assist students, workers, and retirees in the process of preparing for, entering, surviving or thriving within, or exiting from the work world. Not surprisingly, such questions form the foundation of this book, which is aimed at introducing students (and reacquainting professionals) in the helping professions with the literature on career development and counseling. This literature includes foundational and evolving theories of work and career behavior, research on a host of work-related constructs, and efforts to translate theory and research into practical efforts to help people experience optimally satisfying and successful work lives.

This chapter is designed to set the stage for the rest of the book by briefly considering the role of work in people's lives, sketching the conceptual and professional boundaries of career development and counseling, discussing some of the myths and realities that surround the field, and describing its historical context and contemporary challenges. Our primary goal is to convince the reader that work and career is one of the most important domains of life that counselors and psychologists can study—and that it is also one of the most meaningful targets of intervention in our roles as counselors, therapists, educators, and advocates. Freud was said to have equated mental health with the capacity to love and to work. Although these capacities may not truly be sufficient to define mental health, it is clear that work has a central location in many people's lives—one that frequently intersects with other life roles and that can have an immense impact on one's overall quality of life.

Why Do People Work?

It seems fitting to begin by considering the reasons that people work and the various roles that work can play in their lives. At first glance, the question of why people work may seem silly or moot—the sort that only academics perched up in their ivory towers might ask. People work because they have to, don't they? They need the money that work provides to put food on the table and a roof over their heads. This may be true for most adults, but work as a means of survival does not tell the whole story, at least not for everyone. As the old saying goes, people do not live by bread alone.

Working to Live or Living to Work? The Differing Roles of Work in People's Lives

In this section, we briefly consider various sources of work motivation.

Work as need fulfillment

One way to view the question of why people work is through the lens of Abraham Maslow's (1943) famous hierarchy, where human needs range from those that focus on basic survival (e.g., the need for food) all the way to self-actualization (e.g., the need to realize one's inner potential). Maslow's hierarchy is often pictured as a pyramid, with more basic needs (e.g., food, safety, security) at the bottom. In this view, the satisfaction of basic needs provides a foundation for meeting higher-order social and psychological needs, such as friendship, intimacy, self-esteem, and personal growth.

One of the problems in applying such a needs hierarchy to work motivation is that it may be used to imply that some reasons to work are somehow nobler or loftier than others or that poor people work only because they have to (i.e., to survive) while those better-off work because they want to (i.e., to satisfy higher-order needs). To avoid such a bind, one can simply view Maslow's needs as reflecting a range or list of reasons why people work, without the added assumption that they are necessarily hierarchical in nature. Thus, in addition to meeting basic survival needs, work can provide the context for fulfilling (at least a portion of) one's needs for security (e.g., enhancing the material comfort of one's family), social belonging and intimacy, personal esteem (e.g., providing a sense of personal worth and accomplishment), purpose, and self-actualization. People may be motivated to work for any combination of these reasons; they are not mutually exclusive or necessarily hierarchical, except to the extent that basic survival is obviously a prerequisite for fulfilling other needs. Rounds and Jin (Chapter 15, this volume) provide a more complete consideration of work needs and values, including their role in the selection of particular forms of work.

Work as an individual's public identity

Beyond Maslow's hierarchy and the issue of need fulfillment per se, work may also serve other, perhaps less obvious roles in people's lives, particularly if we expand the question to “what do people get from working?” and if we highlight the role of culture in work. For example, tied to the esteem and self-actualization bases of work is the issue of identity, which can have both public and private significance. Perhaps particularly in individualistic or Western societies, work can be seen as an expression of one's public image. Note how often people in the United States ask each other, “What do you do?” (i.e., what form of work do you do?) when they meet someone new. One's occupation can be a shorthand way of announcing one's social address (e.g., education, social class, prestige). Fair or not, what one does for a living is often viewed as an essential part of who one is as a person.

Work as personal identity or self-construction

Work-as-identity can also be an expression of self-image, a means through which people “implement a self-concept,” in the words of Donald Super (Super, Savickas, & Super, 1996, p. 139). This may be most obvious in artistic forms of work. For example, we typically think of artists as expressing themselves through the things they create. But self-expression or, more expansively, using work to become the sort of person one imagines—to construct a self—can be a potent source of motivation in any form of work. Taking Super's thoughts about work motivation a step further, Edward Bordin, another influential career writer, emphasized people's capacity to seek work that they find intrinsically interesting or from which they can derive pleasure. To illustrate his point, Bordin (1994, p. 54) asked, “Is a professional athlete working or playing?”

Such views of work motivation are sometimes criticized with the argument that many people are not free to choose work that expresses anything more than the need for a paycheck or that not everyone is lucky enough to be able to do work that is pleasurable. One may ask whether those who work for a minimum wage, in unskilled jobs, in fast-food restaurants, on assembly lines, or in coal mines have the luxury of “playing” at, or implementing their self-concepts through, work. There is little question that lack of economic resources can limit one's choice of work or that jobs may differ in their obvious outlets for self-expression.

However, it is not hard to think of less affluent persons who find meaning, dignity, and enjoyment in their work. The notions of work as a calling (e.g., as a way to help others or to serve a higher power) or as an opportunity to construct and tell one's life story (Savickas, Chapter 6, this volume) capture the sense that work can play extremely valuable, self-defining roles in people's lives, regardless of social class and even when performed under difficult or harsh conditions. One can easily, from an external perspective, see someone else's life story as mundane, boring, or marked only by exploitation. However, that same story may be far more intriguing and meaningful to the person who is living it.

Work as normative expectation, group identity, and social contribution

In more collectivist cultures, work may be seen as an expression of group as well as personal identity. For example, choice of work may be made less on a personal basis and more in collaboration with members of one's family, tribe, or community. Consideration may be given to the needs of the collective and to selecting work that serves (and reflects positively on) the group and preserves relational harmony. Such functions of work may be seen, perhaps, as extensions of Maslow's (1943) focus on security, social, esteem, and actualization needs—but with the focus on benefits for the group rather than for the self alone.

Of course, prevailing social norms in most societies maintain that one must work if one is able to do so. It is a strong expectation conveyed by social agents in the family, school, and other social institutions. This norm is well-captured by the early rock-and-roll hit “Get a Job,” in which the singer comically bemoans the social pressure to find work. Indeed, those who fail to find work are often derided with labels such as bum, shirker, lazy, good-for-nothing, or couch potato—especially if their failure to find work is attributed to their character or to a lack of effort. The power of this social norm can be seen in the internalized anger, frustration, and other adverse reactions unemployed persons often experience. This normative aspect of work may be seen as a special instance of Maslow's social belongingness need.

Work as existential response and aid to mental health

From an existential point of view, work may be seen as a way to structure one's time and construct personal meaning in an otherwise meaningless universe. Kierkegaard, the famous philosopher, spoke of work as a means by which people may find distraction from their self-consciousness, especially from thoughts of their own mortality. Although perhaps not the most upbeat idea, such a view of work may nevertheless help to explain why some people become so heavily invested in their work, sometimes to the point of work addiction, and why many become depressed when the loss of the work role, either through involuntary layoff or retirement, erodes their sense of life structure or meaning. Several social problems, like delinquency, may also stem partly from, or be exacerbated by, lack of access to suitable work. The old adage “an idle mind is the devil's workshop” captures the value of work as a way to structure time, maintain mental health, and promote prosocial behavior. The concept of psychological “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) demonstrates how pleasurable it can be to become so absorbed in one's work activities that one becomes oblivious to the passage of time or to one's own sense of self-awareness.

In sum, people work for a variety of reasons, especially to earn a living, honor and contribute to their families and communities, achieve self-growth, establish a public identity, and structure their lives. Many of the ideas we have presented on why people work or what they derive from working can really be reduced to two venerable philosophical positions. In the hedonic view, people are motivated to survive and to experience as much personal pleasure (and to avoid as much pain) as possible. This position subsumes Maslow's survival, security, and esteem (and, perhaps, love and belongingness) needs. In the eudaimonic view, people are motivated to “live the good life,” not merely the “happy life.” Doing good is elevated above feeling good. A premium is placed on approaching work as an opportunity to achieve growth, purpose, meaning, and social contribution. The eudaimonic position subsumes Maslow's focus on aesthetic and cognitive needs (e.g., knowledge, goodness, justice) and self-actualization (or developing one's inner potential).

Work Vis-à-Vis Other Life Domains and Roles

Paid work is but one of life's domains, though it is the focal point of many people's waking lives—if not in terms of psychological investment, then at least in terms of hours spent. Assuming an 8-hour workday, many full-time workers spend at least a third of most weekdays at work—as much or more time as they spend sleeping or engaged in just about any other activity. And this estimate does not include the many additional hours or days that some people put into their work, above and beyond the traditional workweek. If work accounts for a third of a typical workday and sleep accounts for another third, that means all other activities (e.g., leisure, parenting, volunteering) are compressed into the remaining third or are put off until the weekend—assuming that one is not doing paid work then, too. Many people also think about their work when they are not at work. It is no wonder, then, that work can be seen as having the potential to conflict with or overshadow other life roles, like family members. Yet psychological research increasingly acknowledges that work and other life roles also have the potential to enrich one another (see Heppner, Chapter 7, this volume.)

Super was perhaps the first vocational theorist to view career development in the context of other life domains or roles and note that, in addition to their roles as workers, people can be invested in student, family, romantic, leisure, volunteer, and other life roles. Because work can interface with these other roles, it makes sense to reframe career planning as life-career planning or “life design” (Savickas, Chapter 6, this volume). Such a broadened view suggests that people consider how central or peripheral a role paid work will play in their lives. It also opens the door to extending interventions, for example, to those who perform unpaid work or who wish to enrich their leisure or civic lives. (In a literal sense, occupations can be seen as any activities that occupy people's time and energy—or as roles that people occupy—regardless of whether such activities or roles involve paid compensation.)

Super also emphasized the notion of role salience, which implies that work, or any other life role, can vary in its centrality or importance for any given individual and at different stages of life. This insight reminds us that work is not the most valued role for everyone. (See Hartung, Chapter 4, for coverage of Super's ideas regarding life-career development.) Such a perspective is extremely liberating, allowing for a less work-centric view of people's lives, freeing career counselors to view their clients as whole people with interests and commitments outside of work, and providing a valuable link to the study of women's career development (Richardson, 1993). Historically, men have often been socialized to focus primarily on their work trajectories, giving less thought to other life domains, whereas women have been more likely to view their work lives in the context of other central life roles, such as romantic partner or parent. Life-career planning and the allowance for differential role salience simultaneously challenges the traditional, male career pattern as the way to define career development, normalizes alternative ways to pursue work, honors the feminist commitment to equality, and offers the possibility of more flexible choices for women and men alike.

The What, When, Where, and How of Work

To this point, we have mainly focused on the why of work—the reasons why people work—and how work relates to other life domains or roles. In so doing, we have been discussing the general forces that impel, or motivate, people to work. And we have so far sidestepped the crucial what, when, where, and how questions: what specific form of work people either choose or feel compelled to do, the how of choice making (the process through which the individual and/or important others make work choices), the when of work decisions (points at which key work choices are made), and the where of work (the impact of the environment on choice and subsequent work outcomes).

Much of this book is devoted to addressing these very questions. The major theories of career development, contained in the first section of the book, all grapple with these questions to varying degrees. For example, the theories of person–environment fit (see Swanson & Schneider, Chapter 2, and Nauta, Chapter 3) tend to emphasize the what and where questions (i.e., the content of work that people do and the role of the environment in attracting them to or repelling them from certain forms of work). The developmental theories (see Hartung, Chapter 4), meanwhile, highlight the how and when questions (e.g., the ages or stages at which work-related decisions are made and the processes by which these decisions are aided or stifled). The chapters in the second section of the book emphasize key person and social factors (e.g., gender, social class) that often play into work “choices” and affect how people lead their work lives. The chapters in the third section focus on psychological and social attributes that career counselors often assess when assisting people to select or adjust to work. And the chapters in the final section involve interventions that extend theory and research to practice—the how of facilitating life-career development.

Parenthetically, we placed the word choices in quotation marks in the last paragraph to highlight the point that work decisions are not always—in fact, are often not—a matter of purely free choice. Some people in certain cultural and economic contexts may assert greater personal agency in selecting their work than do others. In some contexts, “choice” is severely limited by financial or other constraints. In other contexts, choices may be made primarily by important others (e.g., family members). And in all cases, the environment has something to say about what work people will be allowed to do and for how long. Vroom (1964) observed that “people not only select occupations, they are selected for occupations” (p. 56). Thus, employers, admissions committees, and others serve as gatekeepers that help to determine initial and continued access to particular work and educational paths.

What Is a Career? What Is Career Development?

To this point, we have been using the term work as the most inclusive way to refer to the subject matter at the center of this book. Work may also be less laden with excess conceptual and cultural baggage than are other terms used to describe the same essential area of human functioning. Some writers have, in fact, suggested that the field of vocational psychology be recast as “work psychology” or the “psychology of working” (Blustein, 2006). We appreciate this argument, but we also find the older terms—vocational psychology, career counseling, and so forth—still serviceable, if occasionally problematic. We decided to retain “career development and counseling” in the title of this book to maintain continuity with a large body of literature that has accumulated on the study and promotion of work behavior. But it is appropriate at this stage to define our terms more carefully.

Work, Job, Occupation, Vocation, Career—What's the Difference?

Work refers to the domain of life in which people provide services or create goods, typically (though not always) on a paid basis. It can also refer to the specific activities that one performs for pay or on a volunteer basis (i.e., volunteer work). In most societies, work is associated with the period of life after formal schooling (although some students engage in work as well as academic roles) and before retirement, or disengagement from work. Job is a specific work position held over a defined period of time (e.g., being a quality inspector at one factory for 10 years). Although job and career are sometimes used synonymously in popular discourse, vocational psychologists often use the term career to refer to a sequence or collection of jobs one has held over the course of one's work life. In this sense, people may hold different types of jobs over the course of a single career. However, it is also common to use career in a more limited sense to refer to one's involvement in a particular job family (e.g., engineering), which may include multiple jobs (e.g., being an engineer at company A for 10 years and at company B for another 10 years). It is in this sense that one can speak of a career change, a shift from one job family to another (e.g., from engineer to teacher).

Other terms commonly used to refer to work behavior include occupation and vocation. Both of these terms are often used interchangeably with career. For example, many writers speak of occupational choice, vocational choice, or career choice as meaning the same thing. But each of these terms, particularly vocation and career, also come with some excess baggage, at least in the view of some writers. Vocation is sometimes viewed as an antiquated term. It originated from the Latin verb vocare, “to call,” and historically has been used in some religious circles to refer to a divine calling to pursue a religious path. Vocation was later used to refer to secular forms of work as well, and leaders of the vocational guidance movement (e.g., Parsons, 1909) sought to assist people in locating jobs that would best match their personal qualities and be satisfying. In more recent times, the term vocation has been associated with vocational/technical (as opposed to “academic track”) education and is sometimes used to refer to jobs that do not require higher education. As a result, clients may sometimes be a bit confused about how someone identified as a vocational counselor or psychologist can help them select or adjust to a career path. Still, vocation has had staying power as a generic term.

Career may have a more contemporary feel than vocation and is more commonly used in popular discourse. Potential clients may be more likely to understand why they might see someone called a career counselor as opposed to a vocational counselor, and many professionals in our field prefer to refer to themselves as career counselors or psychologists. However, some writers find the term career objectionable on political or socioeconomic grounds and argue that it implies choice and privilege and that not everyone who works has a subjective sense of career. According to this line of reasoning, careers imply higher-status work. Thus, engineering is a career, but housepainter is not because the former requires more education and tends to command greater prestige and more favorable work conditions and pay.

Although we are sensitive to this argument, we are not sure that the term career necessarily implies all these things (or that housepainters would agree that they do not have careers). Moreover, it is hard to dismiss the term without also dismissing the extensive literature with which it is associated. In short, career is a compromise that most professionals in the field have been willing to make in the absence of an alternative term that meets with universal acceptance. Yet it is well for readers to be aware of the controversy that sometimes surrounds it.

What Is Career Choice and Development?

Career development can be seen as a process that encompasses much of the life span—one that begins in childhood (and includes the formal and informal experiences that give rise to talents, interests, values, and knowledge of the world of work), continues into adulthood via the progression of one's career behavior (e.g., entry into and adjustment to work over time), and culminates with the transition into, and adjustment to, retirement. It is a concept designed to capture the dynamic, changing nature of career or work behavior and is sometimes used as incorporating career choice and at other times as distinct from it. Career choice may be seen as the process of selecting and entering a particular career path, whereas career development refers to one's experience before, during, and (especially) after career choice. The period before initial career choice may overlap with one's educational life. Some writers conceive of this period of academic or educational preparation as a part of the larger career development process; others treat it as distinct from, but conceptually related to, career development. Of course, career choice is not necessarily a static or one-time process. Many people revise their career choices over time for various reasons (e.g., to pursue work that better fits their interests and talents, to shift paths after involuntary job loss, or to reenter the workforce after raising children). Career choice, in turn, often has at least two phases: setting a choice goal and then taking steps to implement this goal, for instance, through additional training or a job search process.

Career development is sometimes used synonymously with career advancement or management. We see these terms as somewhat distinctive, however. Career advancement implies a linear process or one in which the individual progressively improves his or her career standing over time, as in the metaphor of climbing a career ladder. Career management connotes a situation in which the individual is actively engaged in directing the course of his or her own career development; that is, it implies a view of the person as active agent, anticipating and adjusting to new opportunities and behaving proactively to cope with negative situations. Career development, by contrast, connotes a continuous stream of career-relevant events that are not necessarily linear or positive in impact and that may or may not be subject to personal agency (e.g., being born into poverty, losing a job due to the bankruptcy of one's company). Although development ordinarily implies forward movement, it also holds the potential for devolvement or regression as well as progress.

Super, the dean of the developmental career theorists, described a number of life stages through which careers were assumed to evolve (growth, exploration, establishment, maintenance, disengagement; see Hartung, Chapter 4), and other developmental theorists also point to distinct stages or life periods that are crucial to career choice and development (e.g., Gottfredson, 2005). The current book is organized with three larger developmental periods in mind, namely, the periods prior to work entry (e.g., see Turner & Lapan, Chapter 19, and Whiston & James, Chapter 20), during work entry (e.g., Jome & Phillips, Chapter 21), and after work entry (e.g., Lent & Brown, Chapter 22; Bobek, Hanson, & Robbins, Chapter 23), which may well involve a recycling through periods of retraining/preparation and entry into new career paths.

What Is Career Counseling and How Is It Distinctive?

We use the term career counseling in this book, as will most of the chapter authors, to refer to services offered to ameliorate or prevent problems with work behavior, regardless of the prestige or level of education associated with a given work option. In this section, we describe the purview of career counseling, other services that may augment or overlap with it, and the relation of career and personal counseling.

Formats and Foci of Career Counseling

Career counseling typically takes place between an individual client and counselor, though many career counselors also employ group counseling or workshops, particularly in educational settings in which a number of clients are dealing with common developmental challenges (e.g., academic or career-related choices). Career counseling can be directed at a fairly wide range of client presenting problems, but these may largely be captured within three larger categories:

Help in making and implementing career-related decisions

Helping clients make career choices is probably the most popular image of career counseling. It entails assisting clients in deciding among various career paths as well as educational or training options (e.g., academic majors) that may have career relevance. Some clients enter counseling needing assistance to identify viable career options, with few if any firm ideas about which direction they might like to pursue. In some cases, clients have prematurely eliminated options that may, in fact, suit them well. Other clients enter with a dizzying array of options in mind and hope for help in narrowing their list. Yet other clients may have already made at least a preliminary decision about their educational or career direction and would like the counselor's assistance either in confirming the wisdom of this choice or in putting their choice into action, for example, by helping them locate and obtain employment in their chosen field. Whiston and James, Chapter 20, and Jome and Phillips, Chapter 21, focus, respectively, on counseling for making and implementing career choices.