Career education and career guidance: Strategies for implementing career development

Dedmond is Supervisor, Career Education and Career Guidance, Virginia Department of Education.     

Emotional intelligence, personality traits and career decision difficulties

This study aims to take an in-depth look at the role of emotional intelligence and personality traits in relation to career decision difficulties. The Italian version of the Career Decision Difficulties Questionnaire (CDDQ), the Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory: Short (Bar-On EQ-i: S), and the Big Five Questionnaire (BFQ) were administered to 296 interns of the tertiary sector. The emotional intelligence dimensions add a significant percentage of incremental variance compared to variances due to personality traits with respect to career decision difficulties. The results highlight the role of emotional intelligence and its relationship with career decision difficulties.     

Perception of career barriers: The importance of gender and ethnic variables

Differences of gender and ethnicity were examined in terms of the perception of barriers to career development. The Perception of Career Barriers Inventory (IPBC) was administered to a sample of 457 ninth grade students in Portuguese state schools. Gender differences were found, with girls generally scoring higher and in particular on some specific scales. African ethnic participants score higher than Portuguese participants across all the IPBC scales. These findings are more obvious with African participants born in Africa than with those born in Portugal. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.     

The importance of being literate: Reading development in primary school and its consequences for the school career in secondary education

From 1979 till 1987 the Department of Education of the University of Nijmegen carried out a longitudinal reading research project. In this article some of the main research results are presented and discussed. Two research questions are in the focus of interest. The first question deals with the concept of reading development. Here reading development is defined in the way interrelations between latent reading variables — i.e. decoding, reading comprehension and spelling — change during the years of primary education in school. In the second research question we examine the relation between reading ability in primary school and the school career in secondary education. Besides giving answers to these specific research questions, some benefits and shortcomings of longitudinal reading research are discussed. The results indicate that, by conducting longitudinal reading research, it is possible to get a better and more detailed picture of the changing relationships between reading variables. And the somewhat obvious and trivial notion that reading and spelling ability in primary school affects the school career in secondary education has become more specific and clear.     

Relational aspects in career and life-designing of young people

Relational aspects in the life-designing of young people are the focus of this article. These aspects consist of the involvement and use of one’s relational network in life-designing. The data consists of 146 narratives of young people, 111 ninth graders in comprehensive school and 35 students in upper secondary school. The research question centres around how young people narrate the ways in which their significant others engage, or are invoked in their life-designing. The results suggest that career and life-designing entails both relatedness and self-regulation.     

Soft skills assessment: theory development and the research agenda

Soft skills have become a subject of increasing interest in lifelong learning. Soft skills development is intended to enable and enhance personal development, participation in learning and success in employment. The assessment of soft skill is therefore widely practised, but there is little in the way of research or evidence on how well this assessment is done. Critically reviewing soft skills assessment requires both theory development and establishing a research agenda. Theory development can draw on a number of established theories which help to explain how the cognitive, emotional and social dimensions interact to shape learner behaviour around getting feedback. These include control theory, goal theory and attribution theory. Theory development following an assimilative integration approach based on attribution theory, which combines both ‘self-regulation’ and ‘socially situated’ aspects, is suggested as the most fruitful. Three areas of research can be associated with this; researching the context, the content and the consequences of soft skill assessment. The challenges of this research agenda are outlined and explored. Dealing with these challenges will enable a more robust and critical review of the assessment of soft skill, and the impact of that on both life chances and employment opportunities.     

Planning and presenting career development seminars

Summary An overview of the seminar planning process that includes needs assessment, program planning, implementation and evaluation has been presented. In addition, necessary platform skills have been identified to help staff members move from the role of planner to that of presentor. With training, either in counselor education programs or as a part of staff development, career counselors can provide a higher quality service to a larger number of students by learning more about the science and art of seminar planning and presentation.     

Emotional regulation and emotional development

Current neofunctionalist views of emotion underscore the biologically adaptive and psychologically constructive contributions of emotion to organized behavior, but little is known of the development of the emotional regulatory processes by which this is fostered. Emotional regulation refers to the extrinsic and intrinsic processes responsible for monitoring, evaluating, and modifying emotional reactions. This review provides a developmental outline of emotional regulation and its relation to emotional development throughout the life-span. The biological foundations of emotional self-regulation and individual differences in regulatory tendencies are summarized. Extrinsic influences on the early regulation of a child's emotion and their long-term significance are then discussed, including a parent's direct intervention strategies, selective reinforcement and modeling processes, affective induction, and the caregiver's ecological control of opportunity for heightened emotion and its management. Intrinsic contributors to the growth of emotional self-regulatory capacities include the emergence of language and cognitive skills, the child's growing emotional and self-understanding (and cognized strategies of emotional self-control), and the emergence of a theory of personal emotion in adolescence.     

Career plateauing: Implications for career development specialists

Conclusion While career plateauing is a major challenge facing contemporary organizations, possible solutions are available. The career development specialist possessing a variety of skills geared toward both proaction and reaction can be instrumental in designing interventions which minimize the negative impact of plateauing. While career plateauing can be a devastating problem for many high achieving, self-sacrificing baby boomers, for others it may present an opportunity to escape the internal pressures for success. Much of what happens to a plateaued employee is determined by the resources possessed by the employee as well as the organization's response to the employee. The activities of the career development specialist constitute much of what is considered the organization's response. A career plateau may mark the beginning of a period characterized by frustration and depression or it may present the opportunity for a new challenge or reappraisal of life direction and goals.