Would Donald Super Agree with the Career Awareness Program in Ontario High Schools?

By Anne-Viviane Maus

The roots of Donald Super’s extensive writings on vocational development are in the Self Theory of Carl Rogers. According to Super, when an individual is making vocational choices, they act in relation to their understanding of themselves. Psychologically, career choices are “driven” by Self-Concepts. What would follow is that making satisfying vocational choices requires a good understanding of Self. Understanding self is then the key to making a successful vocational choice. But it is also necessary, however, to understand the requirements and work activities of different occupations. If knowledge of any occupation or its demand is wrong, that occupation is not going to be well evaluated in relation to one’s Self-Concept.

There are five stages in Donald Super’s theory of Vocational Development. The stage, which is of interest to us, is the exploration stage from the age 15 to 24. Here according to Super, the individual begins to develop an awareness of occupations. In the early or fantasy period of this phase, the individual’s choices are frequently unrealistic and related to play life. The tentative period comes next and choices are narrowed, but there is still incomplete knowledge of self and the world of work. In the final period of this stage, the individual further narrows the list of possible choices to more realistic goals given improved knowledge of self and the world.

During the adolescent exploration stage, teenagers will recognize and accept (somewhat) the need to make career decisions and obtain relevant information. They become aware of interests and abilities and how they relate to work opportunities. They also identify possible fields and levels of work consistent with these abilities and interests and they secure training to develop skills and advance occupational entry and/or enter occupations fulfilling their interests and abilities.

The approach to career development has been widely developed in the past decade in all Ontario schools. It is interesting to note that already in the fifties Donald Super believed that:

“The school is in a unique position to guide vocational development, bringing the resources of society to bear on the individuals, supplementing the more limited resources of the family to ensure an orientation to careers and a self-appraisal, which will make the fullest possible use of individual talents”1.

Donald Super also thought that a program must be planned and that:

”Schools and colleges therefore need to develop and carry out educational programs which have as their objectives: the development of adequate self-concepts in students, the orientation of students in the world of work, the translation of these self-concepts into occupational terms, and the testing of these vocational self-concepts against the realities of occupations”2.

In theory and practice, career awareness is a great idea and certainly needed, but how to go about it and when to start it is another question. The structures put in place by the Ministry of Education and Training and implemented by school boards are interesting but in my mind very rigorous and maybe not necessarily adaptable enough to meet the needs of the adolescent years. It also does not seem to be taking into consideration the career maturity and readiness of students particularly with the creation of a mandatory course in grade 10.

Career development within the school system seems to be following the line of thoughts of Donald Super on vocational development. The information below is part of a long list of policies that was developed in 1995 by the Ontario government. It shows the emergence of career awareness in those policies and how it was constructed to create a comprehensive career program.

“To make informed career choices, students need clearly defined courses of study leading to university, college or the workplace, more opportunity for work experience while they’re in school, and up-to-date information and guidance on current and emerging job markets. Working with an external advisory committee including parents, educators, business representatives and students, the Ministry of Education and Training has developed a new, four-year secondary school system with:

• High graduation standards for all students
• Clear course requirements for students planning to go to college or the workplace
• Improved guidance and career counselling policies and programs
• Expanded co-op education and work experience programs

The place of guidance and career education is very important in the school as students need and want access to professional guidance and career counselling to help them set career goals and plan their education program. To accomplish this, the roles and responsibilities of guidance counsellors will be examined to ensure students get the help they need (…) The new career education policy will help schools ensure classroom curriculum is meaningful and relevant to today’s needs. Emphasis will be placed on encouraging schools to incorporate local expertise in developing classroom curriculum”3.

According to the Ministry of Education and Training, the rationale behind Career Development in schools is the following:

“For their educational, social, and career success in the twenty-first century, students will require effective work habits and the ability to make sound decisions, solve problems, plan effectively, work independently, communicate well, research, evaluate themselves realistically, and explore new educational and career opportunities. A carefully planned guidance and career education program, beginning in the elementary grades and continuing through secondary school, will help students acquire these skills.”4

And also that:

“Students will learn how to make informed and appropriate choices to ensure their successful transition from elementary to secondary school and from secondary school to further education, training, and work. This involves the acquisition of the knowledge and skills required to make informed and responsible decisions at key transition points throughout elementary and secondary school and in preparation for leaving secondary school. Students will also assess their interests, competencies, and achievements; explore and evaluate education and career opportunities; make appropriate choices from among those opportunities; collect and interpret information; set goals; and create and evaluate plans for the future”5.

The following table is an overview of what should be accomplished throughout a student’s school life about career development from grade 9 to 12. (6)

This overview gives an idea about what students have to accomplish during their school years. This accomplishment will be over a period of 4 years, but a lot of it will be concentrated in one class the Grade 10 Career Studies course.

The overview seems to be very good in theory but how feasible is it? How much will students retain if they are not ready? Donald Super stresses the importance of career maturity. When he uses the term, he refers to “the readiness to cope with the developmental tasks appropriate to one’s life stage”. Wendy Patton in her article “Developmental Issues in Career Maturity and Career Decision Status” goes further than Donald Super in the analysis of career maturity and makes some very relevant points about to the importance of it and the research around it:

“Career maturity is central to a developmental approach to understanding career behavior and involves an assessment of an individual’s level of career progress in relation to his or her career-relevant development tasks. It refers, broadly, to the individual’s readiness to make informed, age-appropriate career decisions and cope with career development tasks. Definitions include the individual’s ability to make appropriate career choices, including awareness of what is required to make a career decision and the degree to which one’s choices are both realistic and consistent over time. Grites’s (1971) model of career maturity proposed that it consists of affective and cognitive dimensions. The cognitive dimension is composed of decision-making skills; the affective dimension includes attitudes toward the career decision-making process. Theoretically derived from Super’s (1990) career development theory, the construct of career maturity has undergone recent criticism”7.

Wendy Patton goes further to explain that:

“Vondracek and Reitzle (1998) have criticized the construct’s focus on the individual, its ties to developmental stage models, and its lack of inclusion of contexts of time and culture. These authors suggested that the assumption of identifiable age-related maturational regularities in career maturity might be affected by other variables (e.g., historical time, cultural and economic context) and the individualization of educational pathways. However, despite this theoretical critique and a more far-reaching theoretical debate, Vondracek and Reitzle emphasized the practical utility of career maturity data, particularly for work with adolescents”8.

This supports the relevance of assessing career maturity in preparation for developing and improving both counseling and education programs for adolescents.

“Research into career maturity has investigated various aspects of the construct. Work investigating the correlate of career maturity has focused on several variables, including age, gender, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and intelligence or grade average (…). The literature is far from united on the presence of differences on scores of career maturity based on age and gender. Regarding age, although theoretical assumptions suggest uniform development in career maturity, practical considerations such as the planning activities needed for immediate decisions at transition points imposed by the education system suggest uneven development. Research findings exploring the impact of gender on career maturity are also far from equivocal. Most studies conducted over two decades have found that females in several age groups have higher scores on career maturity measures than males”9.

So how stressful will the assessment be for both the counsellor/teacher and the student when students do not have the maturity level and are not psychologically ready for it? They know they need to pass that course or else they will have to repeat it in summer school or the following year or until they “get it”. I do not think D. Super had in mind punishment for not being ready to be fully engaged in one’s development. Curiosity is the base of the career development model proposed by Super. In “What We Know About Youth and Career Aspirations” Deb Hall from Penn States University explains that:

“Curiosity leads to exploratory behaviors such as question asking that often is observed in young children. If exploratory behavior is unrewarded either internally or by others or even punished, it leads to conflict and ultimately, to withdrawal. Withdrawal leads to “closing doors” or limiting the potential career possibilities to consider in the career development process. On the other hand, if exploratory behavior is rewarded, it leads to information gathering and further exploration. Part of the exploration phase is the identification of key figures, people who serve in some way as role models. As youth succeed in the exploration phase, they develop a sense of autonomy, of being somewhat in control of one’s present and even one’s future; exploration also leads to the development of interests. Taking control and the process of self discovery enhance self-esteem. At the same time, a notion of time is developed that enables one to plan for future events. The healthy self-concept and a perspective of time allow teens to plan. The role of career and occupational information for children and young adolescents is to arouse interest. It is not an end in itself, but it is a mean for developing attitudes and skills toward career readiness”10.

To mark or grade one’s readiness to engage in his or hers’ vocational development is quite subjective. For career development to be successful students have to be fully engaged in their career development and they often are not. The current program seeks to achieve awareness first, then exploration, and finally planning. However, what will happen to students who have not yet achieved awareness, how can they explore or plan? Are they only going through the motion because they need to pass? What are we fostering? Could the course be offered throughout high school when students feel ready to engage in vocational exploration and planning? We need to develop a more flexible approach to career development. We need to be taking into consideration not only the need for career exploration and decision making but also the readiness or maturity of students to reach that goal. I believe Donald Super would agree with most of what is happening in the high school environment as he recommended the implementation of such programs. However, he would disagree very strongly with a course on career development attaching a “pass” or “fail” and even a mark to it. Why do we need to “force feed” students? Why do we need to fail them if they are not ready for it?

I think it is a good idea to use a planned curriculum for career awareness, as everyone needs assistance in career planning. It is also the easiest and most cost effective way to target more students but not at the expense of a damage self-concept and self-esteem. Donald Super position would seem to lead to a conclusion that a “good vocational choice has the components of a well-defined self-concept and of a good conversion of that self-concept into appropriate vocational choices and by extension life-role choices” when one is ready to engage him or herself in that journey.

Notes

1. Super, Donald, The Psychology of Careers, p. 310.
2. Super, Donald, The Psychology of Careers, p. 310.
3. Ministry of Education and Training, Ideas in Action, Ontario, 1995-96.
4. Ministry of Education and Training, Ideas in Action, Ontario, 1995-96.
5. Ministry of Education and Training, Choices into Action: Guidance and Career Program Policy for Ontario Elementary and Secondary Schools, Ontario, 1999.
6. Ministry of Education and Training, Choices into Action: Guidance and Career Program Policy for Ontario Elementary and Secondary Schools, Ontario, 1999.
7. Patton, Wendy, Peter A. Creed Developmental Issues in Career Maturity and Career Decision Status, Career Development Quarterly, June, 2001.
8. Patton, Wendy, Peter A. Creed Developmental Issues in Career Maturity and Career Decision Status, Career Development Quarterly, June, 2001.
9. Patton, Wendy, Peter A. Creed Developmental Issues in Career Maturity and Career Decision Status, Career Development Quarterly, June, 2001.
10. Hall, Deb, “What we know about youth and career aspirations”, 4-H Youth Development Specialist, Iowa State University, Editor: Penn State University, Document Number: 285072297, 1997

Publications

Crites, J., The maturity of vocational attitudes in adolescence. Washington, DC: American Personnel and Guidance Association, 1971.

Hall, Deb, “What we know about youth and career aspirations”, 4-H Youth Development Specialist, Iowa State University, Editor: Penn State University, Document Number: 285072297, 1997.

Ministry of Education and Training, Ideas in Action, Ontario, 1995-96.

Ministry of Education and Training, Choices into Action: Guidance and Career Program Policy for Ontario Elementary and Secondary Schools, Ontario, 1999.

Oomen, Annemary, Career Work, Secondary Education, and school models, NATCON Papers, Toronto, 1999.

Patton, W., and Lokan, J. , Perspectives on Donald Super’s construct of career maturity. International Journal of Educational and Vocational Guidance, 1, 1-18, 2001.

Patton, W., and Peter A. Creed Developmental Issues in Career Maturity and Career Decision Status, Career Development Quarterly, June 2001.

Super, D. E., A life span, life-space approach to career development. In D. Brown & L. Brooks (Eds.), Career choice and development (2nd ed., pp. 197-26 1) San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990.

Super, Donald, The Psychology of Careers, Harper & Row: New York, 1957.

Vondracek, F. W., & Reitzle, M., The viability of career maturity: A developmental-contextual perspective. The Career Development Quarterly, 47, 6-15, 1998.

After completing her Masters Degree in French and pursuing Doctoral Studies, Anne-Viviane Maus had lectured at the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University. Her career path then focused on career counselling and secondary education. This venue was accessed by pursuing the Career Development Practitioner Program at Conestoga College and the B.Ed. program at the University of Western Ontario.