Measuring Career Development: Current Status and Future Directions

Donald E. Super's work to linguistically explicate and operationally define career development and its central processes has strongly influenced how counselors throughout the world comprehend and guide their clients' vocational behavior. Starting at midcentury, Super conceptualized career development in terms of life stages and developmental tasks. He proposed that counselors measure career maturity, globally, by comparing chronological age with developmental task being encountered, and that they measure career maturity, specifically, by identifying the coping methods used in facing a task. Super advanced counselors' abilities to understand and counsel adolescents who are trying to specify educational and vocational choices by explaining the importance of career choice readiness and by devising measures of career maturity. To complement the construct of maturation as the central process in adolescent career development, Super proffered the construct of adaptability as the central process in adult career development and also devised a measure of this process.