UNIVERSITY OF MAKATI

J. P. Rizal Ext., West Rembo, Makati City

HIGHER SCHOOL NG UMAK
DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
Course Title Title
Career Theories: Super’s Development Self-Concept
Module 8 4.5
Theory
Career Advocacy

At the end of the module, the learner will be able to:

Learning Objectives 1. To be able to know the meaning of Development Self-Concept Theory
2. To motivate our-self and others to develop
3. To be able to know yourself and the things that you want

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C Donald Super's career model is based on the belief that self-concept changes over time and develops as a
result of experience. One of Donald Super's greatest contributions to career development has been his
T emphasis on the importance of the development of self-concept. As such, career development is lifelong. This
I something that this module wants to develop to the learner. It is expected that the learners would be able to
O develop a as they go along and learn the things that really matters by knowing themselves and learn from their
experience.
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Super began his career working as a YMCA employment counselor throughout the 1930s and 1940s. During his
career, Super was also founder and director of the Cleveland (Ohio) Guidance Services as well as director of
Clark University's Student Personnel Bureau.
Super's strong interest in compiling information led to integration of existing knowledge about vocational

PREPARED BY: KAREN VILLAMARTIN

guidance. During his affiliation with the YMCA, Super collected information about occupations in Cleveland,
resulting in his Compilation Project. Super published his first book about vocational guidance, Dynamics of
Vocational Adjustment in 1942, which presented evidence of occupational choice as a process rather than an
event in a person's life.
By the time Super's third publication in 1975, Appraising Vocational Fitness by Means of Psychological Fitness,
he had been promoted to the rank of Professor at Columbia Teacher's College where he had worked for 30
years.
Career highlights include serving as president of APA's Division of Counseling Psychology. In 1983, he received
the American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Applications of
Psychology. He is also the recipient of a Doctor of Science degree from Oxford University.
Super died on June 21, 1994 at the age of 83.
In his account of vocational behavior, Super incorporated in his developmental perspective the idea that
people base their career decision on beliefs about their own abilities and other self-attributes. He saw career
choice as the process of implementation of self-concepts, work role as a manifestation of selfhood, and career
development as an active process of improving the match between one’s self-concept and the occupational
environment. Self-concept can be defined as the way the person sees herself or himself. For example, a young
woman might believe that she is bright and creative, self-confident, spontaneous in behavior, and unwilling to
assume responsibility. This composite of her beliefs about her own abilities, traits, and values make up her self-
concept. Since the self-concept is a subjective phenomenon or an appearance in experience, this perspective is
often denoted as phenomenological.

Super accepted the view that self-concept is central for understanding a person’s behavior. It is the product of
the interaction of a person’s inherited characteristics, neural and endocrine makeup, opportunity to play
various roles, and resulting outcomes of role-playing success. Formation of self-concept begins in infancy when
a sense of identity is developed. As they grow, individuals develop a personal image of their own abilities,
personality traits, values, and roles. They then compare this subjective picture of themselves with what they
get to know about the world’s occupations, and they then try to translate their self-concept into an
occupational perspective. The outcome is the occupational self-concept, defined by Super as a constellation of
self-attributes that are vocationally relevant for the individual. The occupational self-concept eventually may
transform into a vocational preference. Super believed that the career development process can be guided,
among others, by aiding subjects to develop and accept their occupational self-concepts.

Thus the process of career choosing and development is basically that of developing and implementing a self-
concept. The degree of satisfaction people attain from the work role is, according to Super, proportional to the
degree to which they have been successful in their endeavor to implement self-concepts. This endeavor,
however, requires a continuous personal adjustment; self-concepts develop and change throughout people’s
lives as does also their living and working environments. This makes the career choice and adjustment a
continuous process.

PREPARED BY: KAREN VILLAMARTIN

Stages

Stage 1: The Exploratory Stage (Exploration)- is

the period of transition from college to work,
that is, the period immediately prior to
employment. It is usually the period of one’s
early 20 s and ends by mid-20 s. It is a stage of
self-exploration and making preliminary choices.

Stage 2: Establishment - this career stage begins

when one starts seeking for work. It includes
getting one’s first job. Hence, during this stage, one
is likely to commit mistakes; one has also the
opportunities to learn from such mistakes and may
also assume greater responsibilities. He/ she
accepts job challenges and develops competence in
a speculating area. He/she develops creativity and
rotates into a new area after three-five years.

Stage 3: Mid-Career - during this stage, the

performance may increase or decrease or may
remain constant. While some employees may reach
their goals at the early stage and may achieve
greater heights, some may be able just to maintain
their performance. While the former may be called
‘climbers’, the later ones are not very ambitious
though competent otherwise. During this stage, an
employee tries to update himself/herself technically
and develops skills in coaching others. He/she may
rotate into a new job requiring new skills.

Stage 4: Late Career – this stage is usually a pleasant

one because during this stage, the employee neither
tries to learn new things nor tries to improve his/her
performance over that of previous years. He/she takes
advantage of and depends on his/her reputation and
enjoys playing the role of an elderly statesperson.
He/she may shift from a power role to one of
consultation. He/she starts identifying and developing
successors and may also start activities outside the
organisation.

Stage 5: Decline - since it is the final stage of

one’s career, it ends in the retirement of the
employee after putting up decades of service full
of continuous achievements and success stories.
As such, it is viewed as a hard stage.

PREPARED BY: KAREN VILLAMARTIN

 Super’s five life and career development stages Super developed the theories and work of colleague
Eli Ginzberg. Super felt that Ginzberg’s work had weaknesses, which he wanted to address. Super
extended Ginzberg’s work on life and career development stages from three to five, and included
different sub-stages:

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PREPARED BY: KAREN VILLAMARTIN

Developmental tasks at the different stages

Super argues that occupational preferences and competencies, along with an individual’s life
situations all change with time and experience. Super developed the concept of vocational maturity,
which may or may not correspond to chronological age: people cycle through each of these stages
when they go through career transitions.

While traditional vocational guidance focused on occupational choice and the prediction of occupational
success at some later point in time, Super stressed the need to understand and predict a career. He defined a
career as a sequence of occupations, jobs, and positions held during the course of a lifetime, including also
prevocational and postvocational activities. Super asserted that what was actually needed in vocational
guidance was a career model, which takes into account the sequence of positions that an individual occupies
during her or his working life. Interest in understanding careers led Super to look into peoples’ career patterns,
which portray one aspect of vocational development—the sequence of changes in occupational level and field
over a period of time.

PREPARED BY: KAREN VILLAMARTIN

Growth (roughly age 4 to 13), the first life stage,
the period when children develop their
capacities, attitudes, interests, socialize their
needs, and form a general understanding of the
world of work. This stage includes four major
career developmental tasks: becoming
concerned about the future, increasing personal
control over one’s own life, convincing oneself
to achieve in school and at work, and acquiring
competent work habits and attitudes.
Exploration (Ages 14-24) is the period when
individuals attempt to understand themselves and
find their place in the world of work. Through classes,
work experience, and hobbies, they try to identify
their interests and capabilities and figure out how
they fit with various occupations. They make
tentative occupational choices and eventually obtain
an occupation. This stage involves three career
development tasks. The first one, the crystallization
of a career preference, is to develop and plan a
tentative vocational goal. The next task, the
specification of a career preference, is to convert
generalized preferences into a specific choice, a firm
vocational goal. The third vocational task is
implementation of a career preference by completing
appropriate training and securing a position in the
chosen occupation.

Establishment stage (25-44 years) is the period

when the individual, having gained an appropriate
position in the chosen field of work, strives to
secure the initial position and pursue chances for
further advancement. This stage involves three
developmental tasks. The first task is stabilizing or
securing one place in the organization by adapting
to the organization’s requirements and performing
job duties satisfactorily. The next task is the
consolidation of one’s position by manifesting
positive work attitudes and productive habits
along with building favorable coworker relations.
The third task is to obtain advancement to new
levels of responsibility.

Maintenance (45-65) is the period of continual

adjustment, which includes the career
development tasks of holding on, keeping up, and
innovating. The individuals strive to maintain what
they have achieved, and for this reason they update
their competencies and find innovative ways of
performing their job routines. They try also to find
new challenges, but usually little new ground is
broken in this period.

PREPARED BY: KAREN VILLAMARTIN

 Disengagement (over 65) is the final stage, the
period of transition out of the workforce. In this
stage, individuals encounter the developmental
tasks of deceleration, retirement planning, and
retirement living. With a declined energy and
interest in an occupation, people gradually
disengage from their occupational activities and
concentrate on retirement planning. In due course,
they make a transition to retirement living by
facing the challenges of organizing new life
patterns.

Super’s model demarcates the stages both with age bounds and task markers. Originally, Super viewed the
stages as chronological, but later he also acknowledged an age-independent, task-centered view of stages. For
example, individuals embarking on a new career in their middle adulthood might go through exploration and
establishment stages. Thus the five stages spreading across one’s entire life span, or the “maxicycle,” might
also be experienced as “minicycles” within each of the maxicycle stages. Individuals cycle and recycle
throughout their life span as they adapt to their own internal changes or to changed opportunities to which
they are exposed.

Super assumed that not everyone progresses through these stages at fixed ages or in the same manner. This
notion led him to develop and elaborate on the construct of career maturity (initially called vocational
maturity), which denotes the readiness of the individual to make career decisions. Operationally, it is defined
as the extent to which an individual has completed stage-appropriate career developmental tasks in
comparison with other people of the same age. Super and his colleagues devoted much effort to define this
construct and develop appropriate measures. They identified five primary dimensions of vocational maturity:
“planfulness” or awareness of the need to plan ahead, readiness for exploration, informational competence
(comprising knowledge about work, occupations, and life career roles), decision-making skills, and reality
orientation. Super believed that a young person should be mature enough to benefit from career assessment
and counseling. In adults, where recycling through career stages is less dependent on age, Super suggested
that readiness for career decision making should be referred to as career adaptability.

In developing his theory, Super drew on the earlier work of Eli Ginzberg, Sol Ginsburg, Sidney Axelrad, and John
Herma, who presented a model of vocational choice as part of a developmental process and incorporated
Charlotte Beuheler’s concept of life stages. Therefore, at the core of Super’s theory has always existed the idea
of five predictable stages of vocational development that occur as part of a continuous process throughout the
life span. The theory was tested and refined based on results from the Career Pattern Study. This large-scale
longitudinal study followed the career development of a large group of boys from Middletown, New York, who
were in the eighth and ninth grades in 1951. Although the culturally homogenous nature of this sample has led
to concerns about the cultural validity of Super’s theory, the Career Pattern Study remains one of the most
ambitious studies of vocational development.

PREPARED BY: KAREN VILLAMARTIN

 Career Development is a “continuous lifelong process of developmental experiences that focuses on
seeking, obtaining and processing information about self, occupational and educational alternatives,
life styles and role options” (Hansen, 1976). Put another way, career development is the process
through which people come to understand them as they relate to the world of work and their role in
it.

Career Maturity is the similarity between one’s actual vocational behavior and what is expected for
that stage of development. Career maturity includes readiness to cope with developmental tasks at a
given stage. It is both affective and cognitive.

Most career education programs have been affected by Super’s ideas. They provide gradual exposure
to self-concepts and work concepts in curriculum that represents Super’s ideas of career
development/vocational maturity. (National Career Development Guideline Standards).

Developmental Task

 Crystallization - forming a general vocational goal

 Specification - move from tentative to specific preference
 Implementation - complete training, enter employment
 Stabilization - confirm choice through work experience
 Consolidation - advance in career

A In a long bond paper, fold it in 3 folds, and then create your own developmental task. First column should be
S the age, 2nd column will be the tasked and 3rd column shall be your explanation why and why not you were able
S to perform such tasked.

E Criteria:
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S Accuracy – 50%
Explanation – 30%
M Meeting the Deadline – 2-%
E Total – 100%
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PREPARED BY: KAREN VILLAMARTIN
A
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G In ½ CW Explain the importance of performing your tasked on time. What are the consequences if those tasked
N were not performed?
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E educ.sites.olt.ubc.ca
F snaccooperative.org/ark
E www.careers.govt.nz
R Stages of Career Development | Human Resource Managementwww.businessmanagementideas.com
E
https://www.education.pa.gov/Documents/K-
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C 12/Career%20and%20Technical%20Education/CEWStandards/Resources/Pedagogy/Overview%20of%20Hollan
E d%20Bandura%20and%20Super.pdf
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PREPARED BY: KAREN VILLAMARTIN