Theory suggests that we start off with fantasy career aspirations that gradually become more realistic as we become increasingly aware of limitations both in ourselves and our environments. It is an issue I have been exploring with 45 Port Elizabeth children from their pre-school years through to matriculation last year.
I first spoke to these youngsters in the playgrounds of their pre-primary schools 12 years ago. One boy solemnly told me he wanted to become a snake and proceeded to provide me with a detailed job description. At the other end of these initial career stories was another who wanted to become a palaeontologist. Common to most of them was that choices they made by the time they reached grade 12 last year were based on limited self-exploration and career inquiry during their school years.
Popular career books may list the full alphabet of careers but most of the learners had apparently limited their career exploration to just one or two letters of that alphabet. In addition, there was evidence of stereo-typical perceptions of what careers involved and gender-stereotypical perceptions of what a man and a woman could become.
Other research findings tell us more about how early career thinking influences later career choice. Two studies, each conducted on samples of more than 500 upper primary school Port Elizabeth children, indicate that children are aware of high-status and low-status careers from an early age and that most consistently aspire to higher-status occupations that largely focus on people-related careers (for example, nursing and teaching).
More than a quarter of the children were unable to make any connection between careers that interested them and their formal school curriculum, and most children were more interested in the lifestyle that a career could provide than in knowing what the nature of the work was.
Research on primary and high schoolchildren in Port Elizabeth’s townships indicates similar findings. The children there had aspirations almost exclusively towards high-status careers requiring tertiary education and careers that are people-focused. There was limited aspiration towards careers in engineering, information technology and other skills-dependent vocations — indeed, towards any identified market needs.
Furthermore, a significant number of the adolescents showed limited awareness of the systemic barriers that may impact on their career aspirations and displayed low levels of career knowledge and self-knowledge. The latter is of critical concern when you consider the well-worn career psychology maxim that until you know who you are you won’t know what you can become.
What can we learn from the career stories of all these students? One is the challenge facing adolescents in establishing a balance between fantasy and reality without unduly constraining their career choice. Few of us can be as certain about our career choice as Andre Previn, the famous musician, who knew at five years that he wanted to be a musician and felt that the best gift was to “know exactly what you wanted to be from your earliest childhood”.
Alas, it is not like that for the vast majority of us. Neither can most of us live out the dictum of G Stanley Hall, an early pioneering psychologist, who stated that the greatest fortune that could happen was if we were able to do in our vocation that which we would do in our vacation.
For most of us reality bites — you cannot get into a medical school with an E aggregate in matric, for instance.
But the career choice process is a dynamic one. After all, change is the only certainty in the evolving nature of the world of work. We have moved from a world of work in which there was considerable stability in careers to an era of riding “white waters” when it comes to the career choice process. It’s pretty turbulent out there.
The emerging approach over the past two decades in career psychology has led to an emphasis on career adaptability. Proposed by an eminent career psychologist, Professor Mark Savickas, this idea suggests that we need to move from thinking how individuals must fit into a career towards thinking how careers fit into an individual’s life. It calls for a broader perspective that tries to balance the work role with other roles in one’s life.
With work constantly in a state of reinvention and the line between one’s professional and personal roles increasingly blurred, United States personal-growth writer Michelle Casto suggests that we will need to focus more on ourselves in the future, on developing our own “name brand” and on continually assessing and reassessing how work fits into our lives.
This calls not only for career adaptability, but also for personal resilience and a proactive approach towards career development. It also suggests that career counselling needs to be more than a set of test results, that it needs to consider the individual context within which a career choice is made and it needs to help an individual plan for a future in which initial career choices are likely to modify as that individual and the world of work changes.
Mark Watson is a professor in the psychology department at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, an honorary professor of The University of Queensland and a research fellow of the University of Warwick