Where do clients get stuck? Theories of career decision making difficulties

I spend much of my working life thinking about the training of professional career practitioners.  I base the content of my sessions, books or articles on the things that I think career practitioners will find useful, but as someone who claims to be fully committed to strengthening the evidence base underpinning our work, I wonder if I need a stronger theoretical basis to help me work out what topics to cover?

One useful starting point would be to find out what career dilemmas clients face. If we have a clear understanding of the career decision making difficulties career clients bring to their careers interviews, then we can start to ensure that the practitioners are equipped with the right range of techniques to help them. 

This field is fairly under-researched (Kelly & Lee, 2002), with no real agreed definition of career decision making difficulties, and limited inclusion of the construct in career theories. The literature is also a bit confusing (ha! there's a surprise) but are a few different models I have come across.  

Broadly speaking, it seems that there are two categories of career decision making difficulties: cognitive issues and affect issues (ie what is going wrong, and how people are feeling) (Chartrand, Robbins, Morrill, & Boggs, 1990). The bulk of the literature seems to focus on the cognitive issues, and aims to find scales which practitioners can use to help work out where their clients are struggling. This all feels very positivist to me and I think that perhaps career issues are a bit too complex to narrow down in this way. But I can see that it might form a useful start to a conversation.

1. Career Decision Making Difficulties (Gati et al., 1996)

One of the most widely cited (cognitive) frameworks of Career Decision Making Difficulties was written by Gati et al., in 1996. (Gati's name is all over the place within the career decision making difficulties literature). Gati identified three overarching difficulties, and separated that into 10 different strands:

Most of the factors are fairly self-explanatory, but 'dsyfunctional myths' refers to an incorrect understanding of the process of either choosing or getting a job - the clients who think that you can tell them what to do, for example, or who think that making a living from writing novels is easy. 

2. Career Thought Index (Sampson et al., 1996)

Gati's framework overlaps a fair bit with another one called the Career Thought Index (Sampson et al., 1998) which is linked to the Career Information Processing theory which you may have come across before. This one is also divided into three areas:

• Decision-making Confusion (thoughts and emotions which make it impossible to make career decisions)
• Commitment Anxiety (an inability to commit to one choice through anxiety)
• External conflicts (usually a conflict between what the client wants and what their loved ones want for them).

These two approaches (Gati's taxonomy and Sampson's Career Thought Index) were compared and Kleinman et al. (2004) found that they basically measured the same thing, and suggested that it didn't much matter which one people chose either for research or for practice. 

3. Emotional and Personality Related Aspects of Career decision making difficulties (Saka, Gati & Kelly, 2008)

This framework was developed by Saka, Gati and Kelly (2008) and focuses on the person rather than the content, suggesting that the personality and emotional state of the individual has a significant impact on their career decision making process. Their framework has three overarching factors: pessimism, anxiety and self-concept and identity, made up of 11 separate aspects.

I really like that this one focuses on the individual and their subjective experience - that seems important and is an obvious gap in Gati's taxonomy. But on its own, without the more objective, cognitive aspects of Gati's taxonomy, it seems equally limited.


4. Cluster Analysis of Career Decision Making Difficulties (Kelly & Lee, 2002)

Some other academics have had a go at looking at the similarities between some of the different career decision making frameworks. Kelly and Lee (2002) looked at the Career Decision Scale, the Career Decision Difficulties Questionnaire and the Career Factors Inventory, and identified six different factors: lack of information; need for information, trait indecision, disagreement with others, identity diffusion and choice anxiety. 

There are a few interesting things to note about this framework. First that there is a distinction between lack of information and the need for information. It seems that, for some people, knowing that they have a gap in their knowledge isn't the same as wanting to find things out. The second thing is that the students in question didn't really focus on the lack of information about themselves. I wonder if this is a result of students who are not self-aware not realising that they aren't self-aware? This highlights that you might get different answers to these questions, depending on who you ask. A career counsellor might see clearly that an individual needs information and lacks self-awareness, but this view may not be consistent with the person's own analysis.

I like that this one brings in both affect factors (anxiety and identity) and cognitive factors, but it seems to miss some of Gati's useful things such as lack of motivation, lack of information about the self, dysfunctional myths and internal conflicts, and also only considers choice anxiety - Saka's model acknowledges other types of anxiety. 

4. Combining Cognitive and Affective Models

Having had a look at all these different models, I wonder if I am most drawn to a combination of numbers 1 (Gati's cognitive taxonomy) and 3 (Saka's emotional and personality factors). This would give us a six factor model that looks like this:




To me this seem to provide a pretty comprehensive account of the difficulties that I see in my clients, and seems to cover everything that I have read in the literature. Its comprehensive nature means that we are left with 21 different aspects, which seems quite a lot, but then career decisions are complex, so they can only be simplified to a certain degree.

One point to note is that Gati's notion of 'dysfunctional beliefs' is not correlated with any other measures of career decision making difficulties. This is an interesting one because I think it implies that clients who have an unrealistic understanding of the career choice process actually feel fine. That makes sense, doesn't it? But I wonder how career practitioners should best deal with this one? 

And so what?

Well, my starting point is about the training of career practitioners. I think this list of career decision making difficulties could be used as a sort of check list for practitioner training. We should be making sure that our practitioners are equipped with range of skills and techniques which are needed to help clients to deal with these kinds of scenarios. And I'm not sure that at the moment, we are.

References

Chartrand, J. M., Robbins, S. B., Morrill, W. H., & Boggs, K. (1990). Development and validation of the Career Factors Inventory. Journal of counseling Psychology, 37(4), 491.

Gati, I., Krausz, M., & Osipow, S. H. (1996). A taxonomy of difficulties in career decision making. Journal of counseling psychology, 43(4), 510.

Kelly, K. R., & Lee, W. C. (2002). Mapping the domain of career decision problems. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 61(2), 302-326.

Kleiman, T., Gati, I., Peterson, G., Sampson, J., Reardon, R., & Lenz, J. (2004). Dysfunctional thinking and difficulties in career decision making. Journal of Career assessment, 12(3), 312-331.

Saka, N., Gati, I., & Kelly, K. R. (2008). Emotional and personality-related aspects of career-decision-making difficulties. Journal of Career Assessment, 16(4), 403-424.

Sampson, J. P., Jr., Peterson, G. W., Lenz, J. G., Reardon, R. C., & Saunders, D. E. (1998). The design and use of a measure of dysfunctional career thoughts among adults, college students, and high school students: The Career Thoughts Inventory. Journal of Career Assessment, 6, 115-134