Savickas’s career construction theory is a social constructivist theory that looks at how individuals make meaning of their world and how they construct social and psychological worlds through cognitive processes. That is, how individuals use and choose work. Savickas developed his theory from Super’s career development theory. The underlying premise of the career construction theory is that people reflect on their career behaviour before they make choices (Moodaley, 2014). The theory looks at how people change jobs without losing their sense of self and their social identity. Savickas claimed that the process of career construction involves developing and implementing vocational self-concepts in work roles (Savickas, 2002).
Career construction theory responds to the needs of today’s workers who may feel disjointed and confused as they face restructured occupations and labour force transformation. Even though people no longer commit to a lifelong career, but prefer to offer their service and skills to various employers throughout life, they still seek to make their work experience meaningful, maintain a work-life balance and train for their next job (Savickas, careerconstruction.pdf).
The theory combines both trait notions and constructivist methodology through emphasis upon subjective experience of the individual. By focusing on individual stories, career construction theory is concerned with how individuals adapt to job changes over their lifetime.
Components of Career Construction Theory
The theory entails three components, which are vocational personality, life themes, and career adaptability.
Vocational personality. This refers to an individual’s career related abilities, needs, values and interests, that is, the “what” of career construction. It indicates what a person possesses (Patton & McMahon, 2006). Before these characteristics are expressed as occupations, they are practiced in other activities such as games and hobbies. This component is similar to Holland’s RIASEC typology of interests, although career construction theory views types as socially constructed and dynamic and not stable traits. According to Savickas, these types have no reality or truth value outside themselves because they depend on the social constructions of time, place, and culture that support them. They simply reflect emergent and socially constructed meanings (Savickas, careerconstruction.pdf). This is why career construction theory views vocational personality as an individual’s reputation among a group of people. Work is seen as part of human development and a bridge between the public and the private.
Savickas believed that personality type indicates an individual’s resemblance and similarity to a trait and can be used to generate possibilities rather than predict the future (McIlveen, & Patton, 2007; Patton & McMahon, 2006). This is why the theory focuses on what individuals can become in doing work, and not what they are before they go to work (Savickas, careerconstruction.pdf). From this perspective, individuals can implement or ditch selected strategies depending on the situation, although. Strategies that are used for a long time might fuse into a tested style.
Life themes. The life theme component helps the counsellor get more information about the individual; it helps make meaning of vocational personality and career adaptability (Patton & McMahon, 2006). The story is a unique description of the individual. Themes indicate why the qualities an individual possesses are important. Because personality types only focus on what people do and how they do it, and overlook the “why” of what people do, underlying factors, such as values, that guide career choices are unknown. Thus, career construction theory emphasizes interpretive and interpersonal processes that individuals use to make meaning and impose direction on their vocational behaviour (McMahon, 2014). Life themes address the “why” of career construction. From this perspective, a career implies a moving perspective that imposes personal meaning on past memories, present experiences, and future aspirations, which portray a life (Barclay, 2012; Savickas, careerconstruction.pdf). This component addresses the why of vocational behaviour through individually constructed career stories, which reveal the themes that individuals use to make meaningful choices and adjust to work roles. The meanings an individual attaches to his or her career are seen through self-constructed stories about occupational transitions and work traumas the individual has faced. The life theme component highlights the thought that careers are about mattering – work provides an opportunity for the individual to matter to someone or something in some way. The theme of a life story explains choices and the meanings that guide the choices, that is, it explains why he or she cares about what he or she does (McIlveen, & Patton, 2007; Patton & McMahon, 2006; Savickas, careerconstruction.pdf). In addition, what the individual does and what he or she contributes to society matters to other people in the society. This sharpens individual’s identity and fosters a sense of social meaning. The individual does not just focus on the question of what he/she wants, but makes a career decision in the social context. Individual identity is no longer thought to be fixed, but as being constructed because, it is a project that they develop. One’s sense of identity involves how people think of themselves in their social roles. Cultural, societal, and familial expectations play a huge part in career making decisions. In some Asian and African cultures, people choose a career path based on family needs, wants and expectations (Moodaley, 2014).
Career adaptability. This incorporates the attitudes, competencies and behaviours used by individuals to fit into the work that suits them. People do this by testing occupational settings or duties (McIlveen, & Patton, 2007). Career adaptability refers to the “how” of career construction, that is, how people go about choosing a career. Savickas emphasised that career construction does not focus specifically on the person or the environment, as regards person-environment fit, rather, it focuses on the dash (-). This position points to the theory’s assumptions that the construction of a career is a psychosocial the coping process through which individuals connect to their communities and construct their careers (McIlveen, & Patton, 2007; McMahon, 2014).
Five types of coping behaviour foster adaptions to transitions from school to work, job to job, and occupation to occupation. They are orientation, exploration, establishment, management, and disengagement. As each transition approaches, individuals can adapt more effectively if they meet the change with growing awareness, make an informed decision after exploring and looking for information, engage in trial behaviours that will lead to a stable commitment for a certain amount of time, actively manage their role, and eventually disengage from that role to another role. This ability to adapt to transitions is necessary because new technology, globalization, and job redesign in the post-industrial world require individuals to actively construct their careers (Savickas, careerconstruction.pdf). People no longer stay at one job for over thirty years. They change jobs often and make transitions which means that they have to constantly engage in the cycle of orientation, exploration, stabilization, management, and disengagement.
There are four dimensions to career adaptability and they are concern, control, curiosity, and confidence. Concern involves having a future orientation, and planning and preparing for a vocational future. Control relates to owning a career or making a personal career decision and taking responsibility for constructing it. Curiosity involves being inquisitive, wanting to learn, having an exploratory attitude towards options and possibilities, Confidence refers to the ability to face and overcome difficulties by developing problem solving skills and self-efficacy (Barclay, 2012; McMahon, 2014).
Career Counselling with Savickas’s Career Construction Theory
This theory looks at three perspectives concerning vocational behaviour of individuals: differential perspective, developmental perspective and dynamic perspective. These are the what, how, and why of vocational behaviour.
Differential perspective. This refers to the individual differences in traits. It involves examining vocational personality types and what different people prefer to do.
Developmental perspective. This focuses on developmental psychology and involves exploring the process of psychosocial adaption and how individuals cope with occupational transitions and work disturbances.
Dynamic perspective. This is interested in the psychodynamic motivations of the individual. This involves narrative psychology, examining the dynamics through which life themes impose meaning on vocational behaviour, and why individuals fit work into their lives (Savickas, careerconstruction.pdf).
Using these three perspectives, career counsellors can explore how individuals construct their careers without losing their sense of self and social identity as they adapt to economic and work life changes (Busacca, 2007). These perspectives allow both the counsellor and clients become more aware of what the clients prefer to do, how clients cope with occupational transitions, and why clients fit their work into their life the way they do. Counsellors use a constructivist perspective to try to understand clients’ career problems and move the client towards meaning making by reflecting on their own subjective views and experiences. Thus, career counselling is concerned with helping the individual make vocational choices and maintain satisfying work lives. There is collaborative relationship between the client and the counsellor and the client plays a more active role (McIlveen, & Patton, 2007).
In narrative career counselling, the client is the storyteller and the agent, his environment is the setting, his experiences make up the action, his abilities, friends, families and/or employers comprise instruments, and his changing mind about career paths indicates wavering. The goal of assessment in this case is to identify a pattern of the individual’s life and find out about the client’s future goals.
There are four phases that help the counsellor construct the individual’s story: construction, deconstruct, reconstruct, and co-construction. Construction involves using small stories, known as micronarratives, to examine how a person has constructed their career. Deconstruct involves the counsellor listening to the problems in the micronarratives, which include personal limitations and cultural barriers. Reconstruct involves reconstructing the micronarratives, reassembling the past to suit present needs and support future goals, building on client strengths and values, resulting in enhanced self-efficacy and a positive identity narrative. Finally, co-construction results in the development of a new narrative (a combination of micronarratives, a macronarrative) with options and plans that open up fresh possibilities and can lead to action, prompting further self-making, identity shaping, and career constructing (Savickas, 2012).
In using career construction theory, counsellors conduct interviews using semi-structured career style interview questions, which are aimed at eliciting life goals that can be related to career; and are supposed to guide the client in self-exploration. Some of the questions include questions about role models, magazines/TV shows, hobbies, and early recollections, which represent and reveal ego ideals, preferred work environments, self-expression/manifest interests, and preoccupations that guide personal strivings respectively. Techniques include meaning making, narratives, metaphors, critical reflection, story telling, lifelines, card sorts and life-role mapping (Mahuron, n.d.). The client narrates the story of their life, and creates the story in the way that they want to tell it (Anderson, 2013; Barclay, 2012). The task here is to build the “self”, enabling the client to construct a story based on who he or she is. Cultural and societal context are important in career counselling because, as discussed earlier, they play a role in career choices. The counsellor’s aim, then, is to remove barriers to the individual’s development and support their enablement in society (McIlveen, & Patton, 2007).
Comparing Savickas’s Theory to Other Career Theories
Savickas initially worked under Super and developed his career construction theory from Super’s theory (Staunton, 2015). Super’s theory is based on the premise that people stay in one career path and follow it all through their live, using their middle to late adulthood to maintain their status and relevance in that career. Super hypothesises that individuals put their idea about who they are using occupational terms and that they want to implement their self-concept by entering an occupation, after which they want to realize their potential and preserve their self-esteem by stabilizing themselves in an occupation. According to Savickas’s theory, a career involves selling services and skills to a series of employers who need jobs completed, rather than a lifetime commitment to one employer (Moodaley, 2014). With technological advancements, and the changing world of work, individual approach to work has changed. Both theories follow a lifespan approach.
In comparison to Holland RIASEC model, which takes a logical positivism view, which means that knowledge is viewed through rational investigation to arrive at a fixed result, Savickas focuses on a postmodern view of reality, which is that reality is subjective (Staunton, 2015). Holland’s theory, an objective career counselling method, uses three letter representations to sum up individuals to compare them with other individuals and to place them in a potential career field. In the case of a counsellor using Holland’s theory, he or she will just have to find the right code that describes the individual via a series of tests. Savickas theory on the other hand, focuses on what the individual sees for themselves and about themselves. He uses the three letter codes to understand the client’s story – to see how individuals have created their own careers and how they have constructed themselves. This is because, Savickas believed that measuring client’s indecision using only psychological tests, decontextualizes indecisions, and in doing so, ignores the individual’s subjective experience (Busacca, 2007).
Trait factor approaches, such as Holland’s theory, provide a standpoint for objectively comparing an individual against others as a way of objectively clustering occupations; nonetheless, these approaches will not tell anything about how the individual might actively engage in meaningfully expressing his or her type. This is why Savickas believes that incorporating these approaches, which are highly focused on objective career assessments and counselling, with constructivism results in a more holistic approach to working with clients (Busacca, 2007; Patton & McMahon, 2006).
Strengths and Limitations of Savickas’s Theory
A major strength of the career construction theory is that it is holistic and works across cultures (Mahuron, n.d.). Counselling focuses on the individual’s work-life story, values, and beliefs that influence career choices, including the cultural/social context to fully understand the individual. There is a greater sense of self-awareness. In addition, career construction helps individuals to identify important life themes, identify work activities that would allow them to play out those themes and identify steps that they need to take in order to make career choices or changes (Staunton, 2015). Individuals also begin to understand that they do not have to stay in one career forever and that they can adapt to different careers.
One limitation of this theory is that it requires accurate recollection of past experiences for the individual to engage in self-reflection. Another limitation is that it is highly subjective, thus, it relies on the counsellor to be able to accurately identify thought patterns, and belief and value systems (Mahuron, n.d.).