The Stages of Career Development

The Stages of Career Development

The Cambridge Online dictionary defines career development as the process of learning and improving your skills so that you can perform your job better and progress to better jobs (Cambridge, 2011). However, my articles on career development have a slightly different view. My article states that career development happens in stages, and it has influencing factors (Gohdes, 1997-2000). Therefore, I will discuss these elements along with its main points. After that, I will give a short autobiography on how these steps apply to me. Before I do that, I will introduce my article.

The name of my article is Theories of Career Development. It was a subtitle under Career Development: Issues of Gender, Race and Class. This article discusses theories of career development according to Ginzberg, Ginsburg, Axelrad, and Herma who I will refer to as GGAH for brevity. They believed that four factors influenced vocational choices, and GGAH theory also believes that set stages are followed (Gohdes, 1997-2000). These influences and stage combination together make up the development of an individual career. If this is true, finding out more about these influences and stages may be helpful. Therefore, I will talk about GGAH four factors in the next paragraph as well as the stages.

The four factors that GGAH mentions are reality, influence in the educational process, emotional factor, and individual values. All of the above are self-explanatory, but the stages might need some clarification. The stages according to GGAH are fantasy, tentative, and realistic. In the fantasy stage, which occurs in childhood, a child can pretend that he has any job he wants without restrictions. Thus his preferred activities may provid...

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...ut I did inherit my fathers’ determination.

So far we have looked at career development according to the theory of Ginzberg, Ginsburg, Axelrad, and Herma (Gohdes, 1997-2000). We also see how factors and stages are elements of career development. I then talked a little about my past, present and future career plans and how some of GGAH’s theories played a part in my decisions. While I continue my journey through seeking the experiences that I need in order to teach, I am making focused and realistic steps toward my future. I am making steps towards my career development.

References

Cambridge University Press (2011). Cambridge Dictionary Online. Retrieved March 4, 2012, from http://dictionary.cambridge.org

Gohdes, W.L. (1997-2000). ERIC: Education Resources Information Center. Retrieved March 4, 2012, from Education resource Information Center: www.eric.ed.gov