7.3: Career Development

See if you can remember a time in your childhood when you noticed somebody doing professional work. Maybe a nurse or doctor, dressed in a lab coat, was listening to your heartbeat. Maybe a worker at a construction site, decked in a hard hat, was operating noisy machinery. Maybe a cashier at the checkout line in a grocery store was busily scanning barcodes. Each day in your young life, you could have seen a hundred people doing various jobs. Surely some of the experiences drew your interest and appealed to your imagination.

If you can recall any such times, those are moments from the beginning stage of your career development.

What exactly is career development? It’s a lifelong process in which we become aware of, interested in, knowledgeable about, and skilled in a career. It’s a key part of human development as our identity forms and our life unfolds (Bruce Hill, 2020).

Stages of Career Development

Psychologist Donald Super theorized that self-concept changes over time and develops through experience. The more you clarify your self-concept and increase self-knowledge the more you increase vocational maturity. Super listed five main stages of career development. Each stage correlates with attitudes, behaviors, and relationships we all tend to have at that point and age called “maxi-cycle”. As we progress through each stage and reach the milestones identified, we prepare to move on to the next one. While there is a typical age identified with each of the main five stages, Super considered the ages of transition between stages as flexible and said people “recycle” through the stages at various times called “mini-cycles'' which is often caused by planned as well as unplanned events that trigger the need to change your job. As a result career development is a continuous circular process.

Table: Super's Stages of Career Development

Stage	Description
Growing	This time in the early years (4–13 years old) is when you begin to have a sense about the future. You begin to realize that your participation in the world is related to being able to do certain tasks and accomplish certain goals.
Exploring	This period begins when you are a teenager and extends into your mid-twenties. In this stage, you find that you have specific interests and aptitudes. You are aware of your inclinations to perform and learn about some subjects more than others. You may try out jobs in your community or at your school. You may begin to explore a specific career. At this stage, you have some detailed “data points” about careers, which will guide you in certain directions.
Establishing	This period covers your mid-twenties through mid-forties. By now you are selecting or entering a field you consider suitable, and you are exploring job opportunities that will be stable. You are also looking for upward growth, so you may be thinking about an advanced degree.
Maintaining	This stage is typical for people in their mid-forties to mid-sixties. You may be in an upward pattern of learning new skills and staying engaged, but you might also be merely “coasting and cruising” or even feeling stagnant. You may be taking stock of what you’ve accomplished and where you still want to go.
Reinventing	In your mid-sixties, you are likely transitioning into retirement. But retirement in our technologically-advanced world can be just the beginning of a new career or pursuit—a time when you can reinvent yourself. There are many new interests to pursue, including teaching others what you’ve learned, volunteering, starting online businesses, consulting, etc.

Keep in mind that your career development path is personal to you, and you may not fit neatly into the categories described above. Perhaps your socioeconomic background changes how you fit into the schema. Perhaps your physical and mental abilities affect how you define the idea of a “career.” And for everyone, too, there are factors of chance that can’t be predicted or anticipated. You are unique, and your career path can only be developed by you.

A career development theory reflecting the idea of factors of chance is the “planned happenstance” theory partially developed by psychologist John Krumboltz. This theory explains that while we may have a career plan and are pursuing certain goals, random or unforeseen events may impact our plan. Those random or unforeseen events may present additional opportunities to us that we were not expecting, and we need to open to those opportunities. We may choose to act on one of those unexpected opportunities and discover a whole new career that in fact might be more rewarding than our original plan.

Activity 7.2

Identify Your Career Development Stage

Review Super’s Five Stages of Career Development listed in the table above and answer the questions below:

1. Which stage of career development are you currently experiencing?
2. Provide the two descriptions you identify with the most from your career development.
3. What challenges are you facing now in your career development?
4. Where are you headed next in your career development path?