Jeff and I have been focusing on vocational identity, and more specifically on the factors that influence its development. We maintain that vocational identity is a necessary pre-requisite for implementing a vocational choice, a position that most counsellors would support. In this blog we want to change the focus and examine a number of issues that emerge with the implementation of a vocational choice. One such issue is known as “reality shock.”

Reality shock is a phenomenon that influences new workers during the first few years of being on the job and results in many people leaving the chosen vocation. For example, recent figures from the United States suggest that within the first two years, about 30% of beginning teachers leave the profession and within seven years the number increases to 40% to 50%. Furthermore, it is often the most competent of teachers who leave. Given that pre-service teachers have high academic achievement, and motivation for and knowledge of the teaching profession, what is it that results in such a high number of people leave the teaching profession? While we have not examined other professions, we suspect that there are a significant number that leave their chosen professions due to reality shock as well.

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I have a number of friends whose children are just now making the transition from high school to university.  My own oldest child made this transition just last year. With this transition came the requisite decision making regarding “what am I going to do for a career?”  I have come to believe that this is a very difficult decision for generation Y, in contrast to the decision making processes of my own generation (somewhere between the Baby Boomers and Generation X).  Generation Y is also sometimes referred to as the Peter Pan Generation, because of the perception that some of the traditional rites of passage into adulthood are often delayed with this group, most significantly the trend toward members remaining dependent on their parents for longer periods than previous generations.  Christian Smith (2011) has identified some additional contributors to this delay in adult identity development including the growth in higher education, delay in marriage by young adults, and a less than stable economy.

What appears to be consistent regardless of generation is that the development of adult identity is an active process.  As is the case with all active processes, someone or something is in control of the process.  In many instances for Generation Y, parents retain a substantial part of the control by taking care of development inducing tasks, fostering dependence, and monitoring and making decisions on behalf of their youth.  In one sense parents in control can be compared to a chess game between a master chess player and a novice.  Because of their life experience, parents are able to see the whole board (their progeny’s life), albeit from their own perspective, and are quite adept at managing the pieces to get the outcome that they desire. The young person, the novice in this analogy, is likely to, given the opportunity, make poor strategic decisions which can result in the loss of games.  To prevent the loss of esteem (another issue for another blog) the master may suggest moves and control both sides of the board in an effort to teach the novice good strategy.  This can’t really be viewed as a selfish action on a parent’s part as the end goal is almost always the happiness and success of their child rather than the desire for something completely aimed at their own self-gratification. It does, however, represent a desire to maintain control over various aspects of the development process.  This desire can also be conceptualized as a need on the part of parents to have things their own way (because they know best what is right for their own child?).  In a culture where anxiety has grown to epidemic proportions, the prospect of things happening outside of their control can be problematic both for an anxious generation of parents and for their increasingly anxious next generation.  This raises the question, when working with Generation Y clients, of who has ownership (control) of your identity.  

BY: Jeff Landine & John Stewart

References:

Smith, C., Christoffersen, K., Davidson, H., & Snell Herzog, P. (2011). Lost in translation: The dark side of emerging adulthood. New York: Oxford University Press.

I (Jeff) just finished reading Mark Savickas’ new book Career Counseling and in it, among other things, he makes a case for a change in how we as career practitioners see the development and implementation of vocational identity.  Traditionally (and this has been the approach John and I have used to expand on the idea of vocational identity in this blog) vocational identity has been presented as something that is present, or pre-existing, but is hidden and thus needs to be discovered.  As I see it, this is akin to having a lost brother, that one knows exists, and with some searching can be found and become a part of one’s everyday functioning. Savickas proposes, however, that vocational identity is, in fact, one’s vocational “thesis”, imposed over time on our experiences as we bring them to bear on the construction of the identity.  He explains it as the pattern we impose on our everyday realities to guide us in various social contexts.  Instead of a lost brother who becomes part of our functioning, this conceptualization of vocational identity resembles a brother created, rather than found, to fulfill one’s ongoing needs.  This created entity would change with growth and experience to better match functioning.

In thinking about this conceptualization of identity, I have arrived at the conclusion that there are likely two important components to developing a vocational identity:

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Many clients express concerns about their inability to crystalize a vocational choice.  In the last two blogs we have described two processes, identification and differentiation, that help prepare developing adolescents to make choices about their occupational pursuits.   The process of crystallization enables individuals to form tentative ideas about where they fit into the occupational world.  During this process, previous information and attitudes about self and the occupational world are synthesized and narrowed to form of tentative ideas about occupational choices.  Super saw this expression of tentative choices as an implementation of the self-concept system in the occupational world.  

However, not everyone reaches this phase in their vocational development with all their previous information about self and the work world neither clearly understood nor integrated.  Consequently, due to this individual variability, individual decision-makers may experience difficulties in this crystallization process.  These decisional difficulties may include unrealism, indifference, indecisiveness and indecision (Savickas, 2002).  In this blog we want to focus on indecision.

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In our last blog, we focused on providing some suggestions career practitioners can do to make the most of the TOKW initiative. We think this initiative represents an episode that could be significant in contributing to adolescents’ vocational identity. Without a vocational identity, individuals experience difficulty conceptualizing career related information and making vocational choices. There are two processes that help the developing adolescent to further elaborate and enhance their emerging vocational identity. These processes are integration and differentiation. In this blog we will focus on integration.

Vocational integration is the process whereby individuals perceive the similarity that exists between their personal attributes in their self-system and the requirements necessary to enter and perform an occupational role.  This integration can take place when adolescents meet a person with whom they identify and who performs an occupational role of interest to them, and/or when they learn of the traits needed to perform the occupational role of interest. We see the results of these two experiences as being stored in either episodic memory (meeting the significant person) or semantic (reading about the occupational role traits) memory.   Both these types of memory contribute to the development of the self-system and to making connections between the self-system and the world of work. It is the connections between these two domains of knowledge that contribute to developing a vocational identity. We think that this aspect of identification is one of several components that aid the process of developing a vocational identity.  Furthermore, we think it plays a significant part during adolescent psychosocial identify formation as postulated by Erikson.

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This week we saw Grade Nine students across the country accompanying a parent, relative, neighbor or family friend to their workplace as part of a national initiative organized by the Learning Partnership.  The first Take Our Kids to Work (TOKW) day in 1995 represented the first time that parent’s were actively encouraged to be involved in the career exploration activities of their children by bringing them to their workplace.  Since the initial event, held solely in the Toronto area, the initiative has evolved into a research-supported activity that involves 200,000 14 year olds across the country.  TOKW day provides many students with knowledge about occupations, both specific to the job and about the world of work generally, and the day’s experiences help them with their future decision making as they define their path through high school and post-secondary education. If TOKW is to be an effective exploratory activity, we think that the information gained must be linked with the concepts, attitudes and skills learned during the growth stage.

It is significant that this opportunity is provided in the transition year between the Growth stage, which we addressed in the last blog, and the Exploration stage which involves trying out occupational possibilities through school classes, work and hobbies, and in the later part of the stage, involves tentative choices and skill development.  The Growth stage focused on the tasks of developing personal concepts and behaviors that will enhance future job exploration and job choosing skills.  The Exploration stage begins process of actually attempting some tasks and jobs, but unfortunately high school students typically have limited access to workplaces, other than those of their part time jobs.  The Learning Partnership website (http://www.thelearningpartnership.ca/page.aspx?pid=250) states that the TOKW program “was created through the philosophy that awareness leads to knowledge”.  The belief espoused is that the knowledge necessary to future decision-making is fostered through awareness of the many facets of the world-of-work and that that awareness is best experienced first hand.  Vicarious learning through the observation and imitation of role models is a good starting point as young people benefit from seeing the significant adults in their lives contributing to their workplace, families and society as a whole through their daily actions on the job.

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From a developmental perspective, the tasks involved in growth as a person and as a future employee greatly overlap. In our last blog we described the phases and tasks involved in human development between the ages of 4 and 13 according to Erik Erikson and explored how these relate to career development and the growth of a self-system that is characterized by a sense of trust, personal autonomy, the ability to take initiative, and personal competency. The resulting resolution of each of Erikson’s stages is a particular character trait.  Career guidance and education is often focused on the provision of information – about occupations and about self – and over time the emphasis evident in the information changes.

It is not uncommon to have a student engage educators at the post-secondary level in discussion on the importance of their final grades because of their belief that their grades will play a pivotal role in the realization of a satisfying career.  Our response as educators is often that students should look past the grades attained and consider what they have learned and how they have grown as a result of the learning experience. Often this advice falls on deaf ears, however, as the myth of achievement as the defining indicator of potential success in their future endeavors is too firmly ensconced after years of pursuing good grades and being evaluated by such.

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