Career adaptability in childhood.

Childhood marks the dawn of vocational development, involving developmental tasks, transitions, and change. Children must acquire the rudiments of career adaptability to envision a future, make educational and vocational decisions, explore self and occupations, and problem solve. The authors situate child vocational development within human life span and life course development paradigms and career development theory. They then consider the theoretical origins of career adaptability and examine it as a critical construct for construing vocational development. Two models derived from career construction theory offer guides for research and counseling practice designed to foster development through work and other social roles.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in

--Graham Greene (1940, p. 15)

Childhood signifies the threshold of vocational development and involves an active period of preliminary self-engagement in the world of work (Hartung, Porfeli, & Vondracek, 2005). The opportunities and experiences of childhood typically serve to arouse curiosities, fantasies, interests, and capacities as children playfully construct future possible selves to be realized in work and other social roles (Ginzberg, Ginsburg, Axelrad, & Herma, 1951; Mead, 1932; Super, 1990). Although play has long been characterized as a childhood activity, children in today's increasingly complex world often find less time for unstructured play because of escalating pressures to engage in organized and routinized school, extracurricular, and other activities that make childhood less and less a period of cultural moratorium involving freedom from work and responsibility (Zinnceker, 1995). Children must learn to imagine, explore, and problem solve in order to construct a viable work future consistent with cultural imperatives reflected in family and community contexts.

Career counselors who take a developmental perspective realize that children must accrue an array of experiences that promote foundational attitudes, beliefs, and competencies for envisioning a future, making career decisions, exploring self and occupations, and shaping their life careers. These attitudes, beliefs, and competencies represent core dimensions of career adaptability as it has evolved as an important construct in the theory and practice of career construction (Savickas, 2002a).

Adaptability has become an essential characteristic of workers in the modern world. Serial careers are becoming the norm in today's rapidly changing workforce, necessitating ongoing career transitions across the life span (Porfeli & Vondracek, in press). Recognizing childhood as the dawn of vocational development and the centrality of career adaptability across the life span in the modern world, we assert that the antecedents of career adaptability are established during the childhood period. We begin by situating child vocational development within the human life span and life course development paradigms and career development theory. Subsequently, we consider the theoretical origins of the career adaptability construct and demonstrate how it has become a critical construct for construing vocational development within career construction theory (Savickas, 2002a, 2005b). We conclude this article by asserting that career construction theory provides a guide for research and counseling practice that is designed to promote individual development across the life span through work and other social roles.

Child Vocational Development in Context

Childhood has long been considered within the frameworks of developmental psychology, developmental sociology, and life span vocational psychology. These frameworks offer distinct yet interrelated perspectives on childhood that are useful for comprehending the structure, function, and process of career development in childhood and across the life span. Each of these perspectives contributes to an understanding of career adaptability as it is rooted in development during childhood.

Life Span Development

Contemporary life span developmental psychology conceptualizes human psychosocial development, or ontogenesis, as a lifelong process extending from infancy through childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and older adulthood (Baltes, Lindenberger, & Staudinger, 1998). Human development, including vocational development, proceeds continuously and in historical and cultural contexts across these age periods in dynamic, multidimensional, multifunctional, and nonlinear ways (Baltes, Staudinger, & Lindenberger, 1999). The life span perspective casts human development as a fluid, seamless phenomenon rather than one characterized by relatively discrete age periods or stages. Although a prototypical chronology of development can be identified, the interaction of personal and contextual factors yields significant individual variability within this chronology. Taking into account this perspective, career adaptability develops at varying rates beginning in childhood and continuing across the life span.

Humans must adapt to survive, and when they fail to adapt they decline and die (Ford & Lerner, 1992). The Selective Optimization With Compensation (Baltes, 1997; Baltes & Baltes, 1990) model of human development suggests that behavioral selection and optimization from infancy through the early to midadult years gives way to behavioral compensation in biological decline in the latter years of life. This model suggests that optimization and compensation are manifestations of adaptability. Optimization is used to adaptively elaborate capabilities in order to maximize success in the context of changing opportunities and constraints, whereas compensation is used to adaptively abate the loss of capabilities in biopsychosocial decline. Humans adapt across the life span, but the nature of their adaptation changes from optimization to compensation as they age and eventually decline. Likewise, workers must continue to adapt to the changing demands and opportunities in the workforce in order to remain productive and gainfully employed. Younger workers generally adapt by elaborating their behavioral repertoire, whereas older workers tend to compensate for their declining capabilities (Porfeli & Vondracek, in press). On both sides of the life span, adaptability is a critical element of work success and will become even more important in an increasingly changing and competitive workforce.

Life Course Development

Life course developmental sociology (Elder, 1998) contributes the notion of individualized trajectories or pathways of development to an evolving interdisciplinary model of human development. These trajectories or pathways are both the cause and outcome of human development, which is broadly defined as a series of age-graded roles (Shanahan, 2000). Social roles can be defined with respect to time (e.g., the age of the person or historical eras) and sequence (e.g., normatively as school-work-marriage-parenthood, or nonnormatively as school-parenthood-work-marriage). The developing person makes choices and acts within the constraints of social, cultural, and historical circumstances to construct and edit an individual life course trajectory.

Theories from the early to middle part of the 20th century have suggested that an increasingly stable self was functional given the predictable role sequence across the life span (e.g., Super, 1957). Rapid changes to the social structure during the 20th century have led to the pluralization of the life course and career (Arthur & Rousseau, 1996; Littleton, Arthur, & Rousseau, 2000). The timing of roles and the normative role sequence from child to spouse to parent to grandparent and from student to worker to retiree has given way to a wide variety of life and career pathways. The increasing variability in role sequence and timing suggests that a stable vocational identity may hinder favorable functioning; hence, theory has begun to embrace adaptability as a favorable career-long characteristic in ongoing career change and transformation (Riverin-Simard, 2000).

Developmental Systems Theory

Consistent with life span theory, life course theory shares common ground with the developmental systems perspective (Elder, 1998), which offers an overarching conceptual framework that comprehends human development "as a property of systemic change in the multiple and integrated levels of organization (ranging from biology to culture and history) comprising human life and its ecology" (Lerner, 1998, p. 2). Developmental systems theory suggests that individuals are both the product and producer of their own development. In other words, elements of life span and life course theory meet when intentional action and self-regulation interact with the social structure to yield person-context relations and propel humans along a developmental trajectory.

Developmental Career Psychology

Consistent with contemporary life span psychology (Baltes et al., 1998), life course sociology (Elder, 1998), and developmental systems theory (Ford & Lerner, 1992; Lerner, Dowling, & Roth, 2003), researchers, in their developmental perspectives on career, have recognized that vocational development constitutes a lifelong process of adaptation and change beginning in childhood and affected by both personal and contextual factors (Gottfredson, 2002; Savickas, 2002a; Super, 1957; Super, Savickas, & Super, 1996; Tiedeman & O'Hara, 1963; Vondracek, Lerner, & Schulenberg, 1986). People develop through social roles in work and other domains during the course of their lives as they interact with myriad environments in unique familial, cultural, historical, and socioeconomic circumstances (Super, 1957; Super et al., 1996; Vondracek et al., 1986). Vocational development is inextricably woven into the fabric of human development in all its forms, including physical, cognitive, and psychosocial dimensions (Vondracek & Porfeli, 2002). Recognizing this fact, many career theories have incorporated childhood as a significant age period of vocational development.

Career Theory and Child Development

Original statements about child vocational development as human development date to the early 1950s and are found most notably in the work of Ginzberg et al. (1951), Havighurst (1951), and Super (1957). Additionally, Roe (1956) postulated a central role for parent-child relationship dynamics in vocational choice, and Erikson (1959) described the imperative virtue of industry in child psychosocial development, which involves attaining a sense of being useful and capable in relation to work. The later developmental career theory of Gottfredson (2002) concentrates specifically on childhood in enumerating social/structural factors that narrow occupational aspirations and influence the processes of vocational development.

Super (1957), more than any other theorist, elaborated on developmental conceptualizations of career, in part by merging the stage model of Ginzberg et al. (1951) and Havighurst's (1951) notion of developmental tasks in a subsequent life span model of vocational development. Super (1957) also positioned childhood at the onset of this process and denoted it as the Growth stage, with its concomitant developmental tasks (substages) of fantasy, interest, and capacity. These developmental tasks encompass childhood and the years of birth to age 14 and essentially mirror the stages of child vocational development delineated by Ginzberg et al.

The seeds of the career adaptability construct are found in Super's (1957) original model, with early childhood fantasy--involving role play to explore the meanings and possibilities of work--eventually giving way in later childhood to interests and capacities that guide aspirations, activity selection, and career planning. Always innovative, Super and his colleagues (Super et al., 1996) updated the Growth stage to comprise a period spanning ages 4 to 13 years, typified by four revised substages named Concern (developing a future orientation), Control (gaining mastery over one's life), Conviction (believing in one's ability to achieve), and Competence (acquiring proficient work habits and attitudes). These substages form the basis of career adaptability, which extends Super's (1974) structural model of career maturity and incorporates. Erikson's (1959) developmental stages (Savickas, 2002a). The update included future orientation, autonomy, and self-esteem elements from Super's (1957) original model of child vocational development to transform it from a "structural model into a truly developmental one characterized by a sequence of tasks" (Super et al., 1996, p. 132).

Although the developmental perspective most deliberately and clearly sets childhood as the onset of vocational development, practically all other established and emerging career theories, to some extent, consider at least mentioning the formative nature of the childhood period relative to vocational choice, development, and adjustment. For example, Dawis (1996), in his theory of work adjustment, describes career development as "the unfolding of capabilities and requirements in the course of a person's interaction with environments of various kinds (home, school, play, work) across the life span" (p. 94). Similarly, the theory of vocational personalities and work environments asserts the importance of childhood experiences and that "a person's career or development over the life span can be visualized as the long series of person-environment interactions and their outcomes that all people experience as they grow-up and age" (Holland, 1997, p. 55).

Despite the seemingly ubiquitous attention career choice and development theories have paid to childhood processes, researchers and practitioners have been rightly criticized for their relative disregard of this developmental age period. Accordingly, one group of scholars asserted that "the serious business of career development ... is often characterized, at least tacitly by neglecting the first 12 years of life, as beginning after childhood" (Trice, Hughes, Odom, Woods, & McClellan, 1995, p. 308). Nevertheless, empirical research, scattered across many decades and multiple disciplines, has produced an impressive body of research that sheds light on children's developing vocational exploration, awareness, aspirations, interests, and maturity/adaptability (Hartung et al., 2005; Watson & McMahon, 2005). This body of literature clearly indicates that vocational development begins during childhood. The construct of career adaptability, to which we now attend in full, provides a useful lens and conceptual framework for the systematic study and advancement of child vocational development, which in turn has implications for vocational development across the life span and over the life course.

Career Adaptability

From Maturity to Adaptability

As the principal element of child and adolescent vocational development and forerunner of career adaptability, career maturity refers to possessing the attitudinal and cognitive readiness to make educational and vocational choices. Career maturity results from a dynamic interaction between person and environment. The attitudinal dimension of career maturity relates to the child's and adolescent's development of an appropriate repertoire of planning and exploratory behaviors that promote effective career decision making (Crites, 1971). Cognitive career maturity involves acquiring knowledge about the content and process of career decision making and about the world of work (Westbrook, Elrod, & Wynne, 1996).

Recent renovation of the life span, life space perspective on careers has reemphasized childhood as a critical period of career maturity / adaptability development, and distinct lines of research have investigated these factors in childhood (Savickas, 2002a; Savickas & Super, 1993; Super et al., 1996). Theory refinement has also led to the replacement of the biologically derived construct of career maturity with the more psychosocially derived construct of career adaptability, which specifically denotes the person's "readiness to cope with the predictable tasks of preparing for and participating in the work role and with the unpredictable adjustments prompted by changes in work and working conditions" (Savickas, 1997, p. 254).

As initially defined (Super & Knasel, 1981) and more recently articulated (Savickas, 1997, 2001), career adaptability attends to developmental tasks and role transitions that individuals confront and the coping strategies that they use to deal with these changes. Developmental career stages and tasks constitute societal expectations that individuals experience as career concerns about growing self-awareness, exploring occupations and making decisions, establishing stable commitments, managing roles, and disengaging from roles (Savickas, 2005a).

Degree and Rate of Adaptability

As career maturity has evolved and been replaced by career adaptability, it becomes useful to consider career maturity/adaptability in terms of degree and rate of development. Crites (1961) and Savickas (1984) made conceptual distinctions between degree and rate of career development to indicate, respectively,the number of developmental tasks completed and the extent to which a person has satisfactorily completed or coped with those tasks. Location along the vocational development task continuum, marked by the tasks an individual has completed and those now faced, characterizes degree of vocational development. How an individual's coping behavior compares over time with that of others in a reference group (such as a childhood age cohort) dealing with the same developmental tasks defines rate of vocational development.

Adaptability can be defined both in terms of degree and rate of change. Degree of change suggests the boundary of adaptability, whereas rate of change reflects the responsiveness of adaptability. As indicated in Figure 1, we propose that rate and degree dimensions lead to four potential adaptability categories: advancing, constricting, delaying, and thwarting. Advancing adaptability denotes completion of a broad range of developmental tasks and at a rate higher than that of a reference group. Constricting adaptability indicates a narrow range of developmental tasks completed but, for those tasks, at a rate higher than that of a reference group. Delaying adaptability denotes completion of a broad range of developmental tasks but at a rate slower than that of a reference group. Thwarting adaptability indicates a narrow range of tasks completed and at a rate slower than that of a reference group.

Extensive literature has accumulated to advance knowledge about individual differences in and correlates of career maturity/adaptability.

Configurations of Rate and Degree of Adaptability

Virtually all extant studies have addressed degree of development rather than rate of development over time. Research has also concentrated mostly on studying career maturity/adaptability in adolescent samples because the construct emerged from Super's (1974) structural model of adolescent vocational development, which includes five dimensions: planfulness, exploration, information, decision-making knowledge, and realism. However, critical antecedents of career maturity / adaptability, such as autonomy, self-esteem, and future time orientation, are thought to develop in childhood and consolidate in adolescence (Savickas, 1996). In sum, whereas degree of development has been studied widely, research using longitudinal designs is needed to examine the rate of development (Hartung, 1997; Savickas, 2002b). Such research could use the adaptability model outlined earlier to identify patterns of development and factors associated with these patterns that either promote or thwart progress in adapting to changes in self and environment and to the attendant developmental task demands of childhood and subsequent career development periods.

Developmental Lines and Career Stages

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Career construction, which offers a contemporary advancement of the developmental perspective on vocational behavior and a comprehensive career assessment and counseling approach, identifies four basic dimensions of career adaptability. This conceptual refinement indicates developmental lines rooted in childhood wherein children must establish a foundation of (a) concern about the future, (b) control over their lives, (c) curiosity about occupational careers, and (d) confidence to construct a future and deal with career barriers (Savickas, 2002a, 2005b). The rudiments of looking ahead to envision the future, taking authorship of one's own life career decisions to construct the future, looking around to explore opportunities, and building self-efficacy to solve problems form critical dimensions of life span vocational development that normatively first emerge during childhood.

The four developmental lines of career adaptability (i.e., concern, control, curiosity, and confidence) extend through the traditional developmental career stages of Growth, Exploration, Establishment, Management (formerly Maintenance; see Savickas, 2002a), and Disengagement and the tasks associated with these stages. Development of career adaptability across these stages entails forming distinct attitudes, beliefs, and competencies (referred to as the ABCs of career construction) related to career planning, choice, and adjustment. These ABCs influence the strategies individuals use to solve problems and the behaviors they use to align their vocational self-concepts with work roles over the life course (Savickas, 2005a).

Fostering Career Adaptability

Table 1 delineates a model of career adaptability along its four dimensions or developmental lines (Savickas, 2005a). The model explicates these lines in terms of (a) overarching career question to answer, (b) attitude and belief to acquire, (c) competency to acquire, (d) potential career problem to resolve, (e) coping behavior to use, (f) relationship perspective to adopt, and (g) career intervention to foster development. The Career Adaptability Model described herein and detailed elsewhere by its originator (Savickas, 2002a) offers vocational researchers and career counselors a blueprint for investigating, comprehending, and intervening to promote career adaptability beginning in childhood and throughout the life course. Each developmental line and its attendant characteristics are considered in turn.

Career concern. Career concern deals with issues of orienting to the future and feeling optimistic about it. Experiences, opportunities, and activities afford children a growing sense of hopefulness and a planful attitude about the future. Children must initially develop a dependence on parents, caretakers, teachers, and others for support as they develop the ability to chart and prepare for the future. The lack of career concern leads to a problem of indifference toward and pessimism about the future. Insufficient attention to or hope for the future often precipitates negative emotions and troublesome behaviors. Career counselors in schools and other settings use time perspective interventions to increase career concern by heightening awareness, fostering optimism, and increasing future planning orientation and behaviors (Savickas, 1991).

Career control. Career control involves increasing self-regulation through career decision making and taking responsibility for the future. The security of a child's relationship with responsible adults permits a growing sense of self-direction and personal ownership of the future along with a decisive attitude and an ability to make decisions about educational and vocational pursuits. Assertive behavior and willful acts nurture the child's autonomy and self-reliance. Underdeveloped career control creates a problem of indecision, wavering, and uncertainty about the future. Career counselors use decision-making interventions to increase career control by clarifying self-concept, decreasing anxiety, and empowering clients to deal with opposition from parents and significant others (e.g., Brown & Brooks, 1991; Savickas, 1995).

Career curiosity. Career curiosity reflects an inquisitive attitude that leads to productive career exploration, which permits an adolescent to realistically explore educational and vocational options and approach the future realistically (Blustein, 1992; Flum & Blustein, 2000; Patton & Porfeli, 2007). Risk-taking and inquiring behaviors foster the child's development of a foundational sense of inquisitiveness and interest in the world of work. Lack of career curiosity limits exploration and prompts unrealism and unrealistic aspirations and expectations about the future. Career counselors use reality testing and information-based interventions to prompt and reinforce exploration and ultimately increase knowledge about the world of work and foster exploratory behavior.

Career confidence. Career confidence deals with acquiring problem-solving ability and self-efficacy beliefs. The child develops an efficacious attitude and an ability to solve problems and effectively navigate obstacles to constructing the future. Persistence and industrious behavior nurture the child's sense of self-assurance and equality in relation to others. The lack of career confidence leads to inhibition, self-consciousness, and timidity in approaching the future. Career counselors use role play, social modeling, and cognitive-behavioral interventions to increase self-efficacy beliefs and foster self-esteem.

TABLE 1
Developmental Lines of Career Adaptability

Adaptability        Career        Attitude and
 Dimension         Question          Belief         Competency

Concern           Do I have         Planful          Planning
                  a future?

Control          Who owns my        Decisive      Decision making
                   future?

Curiosity     What do I want to    Inquisitive        Exploring
             do with my future?

Confidence       Can I do it?      Efficacious     Problem solving

   Career         Coping       Relationship            Career
  Problem        Behavior       Perspective         Intervention

Indifference      Aware:        Dependent           Orientation
                 involved                            exercises
               Preparatory

Indecision      Assertive:      Independent     Decisional training
               Disciplined
                 Willful

Unrealism      Experimenting:  Interdependent   Information-seeking
                Risk-taking                         activities
                Inquiring

Inhibition      Persistent:         Equal       Self-esteem building
                 Striving
               Industrious

Note. From Savickas (2005a).

Conclusion

Curiosity fuels the exploration of possible selves and occupations, career concern prompts the establishment of possible futures, confidence empowers individuals to construct a preferred future and overcome obstacles, and career control affords individuals ownership of their chosen future. Career construction counseling has as a primary aim to increase an individual's level of career adaptability so that they can more effectively produce their own development in changing opportunities and constraints (Savickas, 2002a). The Career Adaptability Model (Savickas, 2002a) offers a solid conceptual framework for conducting career interventions and investigating their effectiveness. Additionally, the four adaptability dimensions provide a guide for scale construction and development that could equip counselors and researchers with a ready aid for appraising both rate and degree of adaptability. Measurement development could not only focus on the manifestations of career adaptability (e.g., career optimization and compensation) but also seek to identify the core features of adaptability that underlie the various manifestations across the life span. Such scales could serve to identify the nature, timing, rate, and degree of adaptability and inform developmentally sensitive career interventions.

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Paul J. Hartung, Department of Behavioral Sciences, Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine and Pharmacy; Erik J. Porfeli, Department of Educational Leadership, University of North Carolina-Charlotte; Fred W. Vondracek, College of Health and Human Development, The Pennsylvania State University. Erik J. Porfeli is now at Department of Behavioral Sciences, Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine and Pharmacy. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Paul J. Hartung, Department of Behavioral Sciences, Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine and Pharmacy, 4209 S.R. 44, Rootstown, OH 44272-0095 (e-mail: [e-mail].)