Gottfredson's Theory Of Career Counseling

Adolescents often have their first experience with career counseling in their high school guidance counselor’s office (Scharf, 2013). Often times adolescents are bombarded their junior and senior years with career inventories like Meyers Briggs or other trait and factor assessments. These assessments provide an opportunity for students to identify different types of career clusters they are interested in in order to develop their vocational identity. The adolescents who often fall behind are the ones that have a difficult time seeing past tomorrow or next week. This may be due to stressful family situations, mental health conditions, or other psychosocial factors. In theories like Super’s Life-span Theory, he says to evaluate a student’s career

Scharf (2013) indicates that Howard and Walsh (2010, 2011) make use of the idea of prestige in the Gottfredson’s theory. Another large part of Super’s (1955) theory is the conception of career maturity, the theory does not assume that the adolescent is ready for career choices in the ninth grade but to evaluate their readiness to make good choices during high school years. As their vocational readiness and career maturity continue to develop during this time. Scharf (2013) explains that in order to understand Super’s (1955) model it is important to use the Career Development

The Values Scale and Salience Inventory can measure an adolescent’s interests and values that may lead to career exploration, which will be discussed later in this section. The Career Development Inventory measures maturity and development. The Career Development Inventory has five subscales; Career Planning, Career Exploration, Decision-Making and World-of-Work information and Knowledge of the preferred Occupational Group (Scharf, 2013). This instrument focuses on measuring what the adolescent has done to help make their career decision, it also emphasizes not just what they have actually done but what they think they have done (Scharf, 2013). This is important in measuring their career maturity, the more thought given is reflective of high level of maturity (Scharf, 2013). The Career Maturity Inventory (CMI) developed from Super’s (1955) earlier theory mentioned above, provides a total score for career choice readiness, three scale scores reflecting career adaptability dimensions of concern, curiosity, and confidence, and a score reflecting relational style in forming occupational choices (Savickas and Porfeli, 2011).
In career exploration, an adolescent’s willingness to explore information on a specific occupation is measured. This scale measures an adolescent’s ability to reach out to resources such as parents, teachers, counselors,