Theories of Career Development by Samuel H. Osipow
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This textbook provides a summary of the field of career development theories in psychological and occupational practice. I read it because I am working with a career-development group in my work, and I wanted a summary of where the field has been in the past.
This book’s primary audience is twofold: career counselors and researchers. As such, it summarizes the progression of the field from very trait-oriented (think What Color is Your Parachute?) to a much more complex and intricate story involving gender, socioeconomic factors, and personality.
This summary of the field – current to the 1990s – raises as many questions as it answers. In particular, each theory seems to suffer from similar problems of not enough empirical research to verify or dispute its claims or being too abstract to determine which variable is the true cause.
What else seems sad is that career counselors still use predominantly trait-oriented tests to drive their counseling. While these are somewhat fun (I’ve taken a few in my life), they do not dive deeply into more complex questions of what a person ought to devote years of her/his life to. How to discern this devotion is not a simple question as it involves, ultimately, the meaning of life and the concept of what a good life consists of.
For career counselors, this book deserves a good reading as it opens up the field in a way that no other book I could find does. Other works and more recent leaders deserve attention as well in planning how to counsel students and workers.