8.2: Career Development as a Lifelong Process

There are entire books and even graduate-level courses devoted to understanding the different theories of career development. Most modern theories indicate that career development is a life-long, nonlinear process. Many students begin by thinking of it as a straightforward path starting with some research, moving toward a single career decision, and then continuing through education, employment, and professional growth within that one field. The traditional idea that we pick a career and stay in it for the rest of our professional lives, however, is no longer accurate. In reality, career development is an ongoing process that requires openness, flexibility, and continual reflection and decision-making.

Throughout our lives, we encounter many influences that shape how we think about careers. As children, we often learn about different occupations from the adults around us. During our primary and secondary education, we gain exposure to new fields through classes, activities, and part-time jobs or volunteer experiences. Each of these experiences adds to our understanding of ourselves and the world of work, guiding us as we revisit and refine our career goals over time.

If we continue on for post-secondary education, we learn more about careers from our instructors and perhaps required internships or other experiential learning activities. Some may enter the military and learn about careers in our armed forces. Others may move into full-time employment rather than post-secondary education. On all of those paths, we are exposed to events and opportunities. How we react to those events and opportunities plays a large part in our career development process. We learn about the work world and ourselves in all of our experiences, and that learning influences career choices. If you’d like to explore specific career development theories, please see the references and recommendations for further reading at the end of this chapter.

Another way that career development continues throughout our lives is that we build skills as we continue on our career paths. Employers look for two main types of skills: hard skills and soft skills.

• Hard skills are concrete or objective abilities that you learn and perhaps have mastered. They are skills you can easily quantify, like using a computer, speaking a foreign language, or operating a machine. You might earn a certificate, a college degree, or other credentials that attest to your hard-skill competencies. Obviously, because of changes in technology, the hard skills required by industries today are vastly different from those required centuries ago (Bruce Hill, 2020).
• Soft skills, on the other hand, are subjective skills that have changed very little over time. Such skills might pertain to the way you relate to people, or the way you think, or the ways in which you behave—for example, listening attentively, working well in groups, and speaking clearly. Soft skills are sometimes also called “transferable skills” because you can easily transfer them from job to job or profession to profession without much training. Indeed, if you had a time machine, you could probably transfer your soft skills from one time period to another (Bruce Hill, 2020).

Employers want individuals who have the necessary hard and soft skills to do the job well and adapt to changes in the workplace. Soft skills especially are in demand today because employers often expect to train new employees in a hard skill—by teaching new computer software, for instance—but teaching soft skills such as developing rapport with coworkers or knowing how to manage conflict is much more difficult. An employer would prefer to hire an inexperienced worker who can pay close attention to details than hire an experienced worker who might cause problems on a work team. We learn hard and soft skills in both academic and professional settings. This chapter includes information about building professional skills using resources from Career Services and academic skills through academic planning.