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:
- Everyone has a theory about careers.
- When a theory does not seem to work, a person seeks help of some sort.
- 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.
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