Chaos Theory

The Chaos Theory of career development views individuals as being complex dynamic systems. As individuals grow and develop they are subject to many different and continually life to change life challenges.

• Has emerged from the disciplines of economics, mathematics, biology, and physics. 
• Offers a different way of understanding the complexity and uncertainty of human development in general and career development specifically.

The concept of Attraction:

Pryor and Bright (2011) defined attraction as a process used by individuals to organize a coherent self and then maintain and sustain it when change occurs.

• Point Attractor: Pattern of behavior often is focused on choosing the best occupation based on a match between their personalities, abilities, and interests.
• An extreme may be seen as having tunnel vision, exclusive preoccupation, overconfidence in decision making, etc.

• Pendulum Attractor: Describes swings in behavior, this pattern of behavior engages in dichotomous either-or thinking and may hold a rigid belief. 
• Sometimes clients in this thinking will rarely be able to genertae win-win scebarios.

• Torus Attractor: Describes as routine, habitual, and predicatable thinking and behavior. 
• Individuals who use this pattern try to control theor lives by organizing and classifying people and things.

• Strange Attractor: (Open systems thinking) Recognizes the possibility of change being non-linear in the sense that a small difference may result in every major reconfiguration of the systen.
• Promotes the ability for individuals to adopt and grow.

• Chaos and Spirituality: Importance of integrating spirituality into conceptualizations of career development. There are 5 dimensions.
• Connection: How we interconnect with the human community, the world, and the universe.
• Purpose: Focuses on humans' sense of meaning, purpose, and significance.
• Transcendence: The idea that there is a greater power beyond our understanding.
• Harmony: Attention to how everything fits together into a whole.
• Calling: Idea that individuals often perceive that what they are doing with their lives is a result of being called.
• Chaos theorists have observed that change can occur in systems either gradually or very quickly. The effect of change is to reconfigure the system.
• When change occurs, it is called a phase shift because the system will have changed from its original configuration.
• Shiftwork describes the work of career counselors helping clients deal with these phase shifts or changes in life. There are ll phase shifts page 46.

Helpful Link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVGA1cQX4D4&t=91s

CONSTRUCTIVISM

Constructivism is defined as a type of learning theory that describes how individuals construct their own ideas about themselves, others, and their worlds as they try to make sense out of their real-life experiences.

• Is a postmodern approach concerning individuals career development.

Social Constructionism in contrast covers a range of views from acknowledging how social factors shape interpretations of how the social world is constructed by social processes and relational practices.

Career counseling that uses both constructivism and social constructionism approaches requires the counselor to enter into the psychosocial sphere of a person's career system.

Note: When counselors help clients tell their stories from their own perspectives, using their own language, it conveys to clients that what they have to say is important; it conveys to them that counselors care and that clients are being listened to and understood.

Implications:

Postmodern approaches to career development emphasize multicultural perspectives and focus on the belief that there is no fixed truth.

Constructivism has directed career practitioners towards the holistic experience of a person's career within the environmental context.

Helpful Link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp7iyLkNE7Q 

Ecological Theory

The Ecological Model states that human behavior results from the ongoing, dynamic interaction between the person and the environment.

Bronfenbrenner identified four major subsystems that influence human behavior.

1. The Microsystem: Interpersonal interactions within a given environment, such as home, school, or work setting.
2. The Mesosystem: Interaction between two or more microsystems, such as the relation between an individual's school and his or her work environment.
3. The Exosystem: Linkage between subsystems that indirectly influence the individual, such as one's neighborhood or the media.
4. The Macrosystem: Ideological components of a given society, including norms and values.

The Ecological Model recognizes that humans live interactionally in a social environment.

Career behavior is thought to be determined by the interrelationships between the subsystems in a larger ecosystem. 

• Clients bring their ecosystems into counseling primarily by conveying how they understand and react to their circumstances.

The careful assessment of the client's ecosystem determines how and where career counseling interventions can be most effectively implemented for an individual.

Helpful Link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4OQQYyA--E 

Transition Model

Schlossberg's Adult Career Developmental Transition Model:
Provides a systematic framework for mental health professionals/social workers/others as they listen to many stories. The transitions and individuals differ, but the structure for understanding transition remains the same.

The transition model has three major parts.

1. Approaching the transition; transition identification and process.
2. Identifying coping resources.
3. Emphasizing strategies that can be used to take charge of the transition.

Approaching Transition:

• Anticipated transition: caused by unexpected events that occur as part of one's life cycle.
• Unanticipated transition: caused by life events that are not predictable. (Not planned for)
• Nonevent transition: caused by events that were anticipated and planned but did not happen.

Transition Process: Wile in transitions, clients pass through a series of identifiable phases.

• Disbelief, sense of betrayal, confusion, anger, and resolution.

Factors that influence transitions.

• The situation
• The self
• Support
• Strategies

Clients involved in transitions usually need assistance moving on, it is important to help them develop problem-solving, decision-making, and coping skills.

Helpful link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqekfDI4j0U&list=PLXSwj3cW6NWg6rsdxn4SuQlBwGZkabvKA&index=2 

Learning Theory

Krumboltz developed the learning theory of career counseling (LTCC) to guide counselors in constructing career development interventions to help clients cope more effectively with career concerns.

• LTCC is based on the application of Bandura's social learning theory to career decision making.

Counselors use LTCC to help clients:

• Acquire more accurate self-observation generalizations,
• Auire more accurate worldview generalizations.
• Learn new task approach skills.
• Take appropriate career-related actions.

Four Fundamental Trends:

• People need to expand capabilities/interest, not base decisions on characteristics only.
• Need to prepare for changing work tasks, not assume occupations will remain stable.
• Need to be empowered to take action, not merely by diagnosis.
• Career counselors need to play a major role in dealing with all career problems, not just occupational selection.

Krumboltz divides career development interventions into two categories:

• Developmental and preventive:
• career education programs
• school to work initiatives
• job clubs
• study material
• simulations (ie. job shadowing, internships)
• Targeted and material:
• goal clarification
• cognitive restructuring
• cognitive rehearsal
• narrative analysis
• paradoxical intention

Krumboltz developed the Career Beliefs Inventory (CBI) to help counselors identify problematic client beliefs related to each of the career problem categories. It is based on the rationale that people make career decisions according to what they believe about themselves and the world of work. (most useful when administered at the beginning of career counseling)

• The 5 headings that describe categories of beliefs (designed to help identify self-limiting thought about career options0:
• My current career situation
• What seems necessary for my happiness
• Factors that influence my decisions
• Changes I am willing to make
• Effort I am willing to initiate

Planned Happenstance Theory (Mitchell, Levin, & Krumboltz): describes chance factors or unexpected life events.

• Contrasts with rational planning or matching strategies of career counseling.
• We can prepare for and even create opportunities for unexpected events.

• Career Counselors assist clients in developing 5 skills:
• Curiosity
• Persistence
• Flexibility
• Optimism
• Risk-taking

• Counselor and client interaction that intentionally addresses the role of chance in career development help to normalize such occurrences, help clients see their thematic influence upon their career development, and help clients be increasingly open to noticing and acting upon unplanned events in the future.

Krumboltz recommends reframing indecision to open-mindedness so that clients can view indecision as a desirable quality for motivation to engage in new learning activities.

Helpful Link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8C93zR1UJI 

Social Learning Theory

Social Learning Theory assumes that people's personalities and behavioral habits can be explained most usefully on the basis of their unique learning experiences while still acknowledging the role played by innate and developmental processes. (Mitchell & Krumboltz)

• It also assumes that humans are intelligent, problem-solving who strive at all times to understand the reinforcement that surrounds them and who in turn control their environments to suit their own purposes and needs. 

Social Learning Theory of Career Decision Making (SLTCDM) explains the origins of career choice.

• Identifies four factors that influence our career decision making.
• Genetic endowment and special abilities.
• Genetic endowments are inherited qualities. (physical traits)
• Special abilities are a result from interactions between genetic factors and exposure to environmental events.
• Environmental Conditions and events.
• Factors are outside of our control. (Cultural, geographical, social, political, and economic forces)
• Instrumental and associative learning experiences.
• Involve antecedents, behaviors, and consequences.
• Instrumental Learning Experiences: Involves reward and punishment.
• Associative Learning Experiences: Involves neutral experiences paired with a positive/negative stimulus or consequence.
• Task Approach Skills.
• Individuals work habits, mental set, emotional responses, cognitive processes, and problem-solving skills. (how individuals approach completing tasks.

In result of the interaction of the four factors people develop.

• Self-Observation Generalizations:
• Evaluation (covert/overt) of one's own performance or assessment of interests and values.
• Worldview Generalization:
• Observations about the environment (nature and functioning of the world).
• Task Approach Skills:
• Cognitive and performance abilities and emotional predispositions for coping with the environment, interpreting it in relation to self-observation generalizations, and making covert and overt predictions about future events.
• Actions:
• Learning experiences eventually lead individuals to take actions related to entering a career.

Self-Efficacy

• Efficacy expectancy: self-judgments.
• Outcome expectations: personal beliefs that behaviors will lead to certain outcomes.

Helpful Link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAzEJUFUHeA 

*Holland's Theory of Vocational Personalities and Work Environments*

Holland proposes three fundamental questions(pp28-34):
1. What personal and environmental characteristics lead to satisfying achievement, involvement, and career decisions and vice versa?
2. "" lead to stability or change in the kind and level of work a person performs over a lifetime?
3. What are the most effective methods for providing assistance to people with career problems?

• In simplest terms suggests that at first people can be characterized in terms of resemblance to each six personality types: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional (RIASC).
• These personalities differ in terms of their interests, vocational, and avocational preferences, goals, beliefs, values, and skills. 
• Making a Vocational Choices: A Theory of Vocational Personalities and Work Environments: assessment instrument commonly used to determines a person's resemblance to the types.

• The closer one type is to another type on the hexagon, the more resemblance there is.
• If people identify with types that are close to one another, then they are defined as consistent.
• Congruence is thinking about the agreement between a person's personality type and the environment.
• Differentiation helps one refine or modify predictions of vocational behaviors.
• Vocational Identity: Establishing how clear a picture one has of one's current career plans or simply who or where one is in a vocational sense.
• My Vocational Identity: an instrument that measures the state of one's identity. 

• Can help clients assess their personalities and work environments and then help them see the relationship between the two.
• Learn to listen to clients' personal career theory (PCT). 

• Holland's three basic assumptions:

1. Everyone has a theory about careers.
2. When a theory does not seem to work, a person seeks help of some sort.
3. When asked, we can provide interventions that will help revise/refine that theory.

• We think of PCT in terms of three dimensions:
• Its validity
• Its complexity
• Its comprehensiveness

• Holland's way of implementing ideas (four-level diagnostic and treatment plan):
• Level 1: for people with valid complex and comprehensive personal theories.
• Level 2: for people whose theories have an occupational knowledge section.
• Level 3: for people whose theories have a weak translation.
• Level 4: for people whose personal theory has pervasive weaknesses.

• We need to recognize that every person has a PCT.
• Encourage clients to describe their understanding of their PCT.
• Help revise/refine the theory to help clients better describe their life circumstances.

Helpful Link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI9tVEKXQdQ