Alex is entering his senior year of high school, and he is worried about the answer he should give to a familiar question: “What do you want to do for a career?”
His honest answer is, “I don’t know.” But Alex is beginning to feel that’s not the answer other people—including you, his parents—want to hear. But experts say it just might be the best answer he has.
“In our culture, a lot of students are expected to make some pretty specific decisions by their twelfth year. But that is not fair. Many kids aren’t ready for those type of decisions yet,” says Diana Gibb, a career counselor in Fairfax, Va., and a professor of career counseling at George Mason University.
Gibb and other experts remind counselors that there are developmental stages in career exploration, and students, such as Alex, need time to go through them. Otherwise, they choose careers simply because of the pressure on them to decide. And when the pressure is on, they may choose poorly.
“I work with a lot of 30- and 40-year-olds who still talk about what happened to them in their senior year of high school,” Gibb says. “Often, people who are unhappy with their career choice look back and see they had a spurious reason for choosing what they did.”
Mary Somers, a career-counseling instructor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, says that counselors should help parents see that there are stages of development. “Parents try to steer kids into one career or another, saying things like ‘you’d be good at,’ or ‘you can’t.’ That doesn’t give kids enough chance to decide for themselves,” Somers says.
Experts on child development note that career exploration and decision making comes in stages.
One of the best-known theories, based on the work of a group led by Eli Ginzberg, suggests that children go through three stages: fantasy (up to about age 12), a tentative stage and then, around age 17, a realistic stage.
As children move from the fantasy stage, they enter the tentative stage, characterized by development of interest, capacities and values. Then a transition period, Ginzberg theorizes, that occurs when students are aware of the decisions they must make but still may not be prepared to make any. At the realistic stage, students “crystallize” their occupational choices.
Another well-known expert, Donald Super, established similar stages and was concerned about the readiness of students to make choices.
Super believes children begin their development earlier in childhood, but was less rigid about the ages at which stages occurred and were ordered. Other new theories suggest alternate approaches, but generally establish stages of career development.
Gibb says that, regardless of theory, counselors and parents should be aware of the steps a student must complete.
“It just needs to be normalized. Students who don’t know what they want to do feel like there is something wrong. They just may not be ready,” says Gibb.
Super and others have developed inventories that can help you determine your student’s career maturity by looking at certain characteristics.
Here are some of the things those inventories consider:
Career planning
How much thought has an individual given to careers and the world of work? How much does the student know about what leads up to choosing a career?
Career exploration
Is there a willingness to look for information from a variety of resources? Do students show initiative to carry out plans and do something to educate themselves about possible careers?
Decision making
Has the student begun to understand the importance of decision making? Students might be asked which decision would be best in hypothetical situations.
World of work information
There are two basic components here: knowledge of important developmental tasks (such as how a student explores interests, learns about and changes jobs) and knowledge of job duties in a few occupations.
Knowledge of preferred occupational groups
Students should have a general idea about areas where their interests lie. Is the student making a decision with a realistic view of his or her capabilities and the job’s requirements?
Gibb notes that there are other new ways of looking at career development that allow students to examine all their influences.
“Are they trying to please Mom and Dad, or maybe not please Mom and Dad? Well, they should know that,” she says. “What is their unique story? What motivates them?”
Other theories, Gibb says, suggest that counselors prepare their students to be open to opportunities that will provide options that help make decisions.
One school counselor suggests that students offer questioning adults a career in which they’re interested, but understand they can change their minds. It provides them something to talk about when asked, but also gives them freedom to explore.
Gibb disagrees: “I think it would be healthier if they could just say, ‘I haven’t made up my mind yet.’ There should not be anything wrong with that. We should all recognize that this is something that develops and can’t be forced. There are steps along the way, and it is important that students take them.”
