Career Exploration

Brief History of the Exploration Concept

Donald Super cast the career exploration concept into life-span terms and identified adolescence as the period when a person begins to employ a dynamic form of exploration that involves aspects of the vocational self (e.g., emerging awareness of career interests, values, and related abilities) that guide a person's exploration of the world of work and aspects of the outer world (e.g., feedback on school and work performance) that guide self-exploration. Central to the issue of children's vocational development, Super and others suggested that most preadolescent children were preoccupied with career fantasies because they were incapable of career exploration that involves the integration of psychological, physical, and social structures into an understanding of how a person fits within the working world.

In an effort to expand a life-span theory of career development focused on adolescents and adulthood, Super employed the curiosity and exploratory behavior research on humans and animals to arrive at a developmental model with childhood curiosity being identified as the fundamental antecedent characteristic driving early career exploration. While the construct of curiosity has not received much attention in the career literature, career exploration has become a bedrock construct explored within several popular content domains including work values, self-concept, occupational learning, vocational aspirations, interests, and identity.

A Conceptual and Propositional Model of Career Exploration

Career exploration involves the dynamic interplay between self-exploration and exploration of the world of work that yields a relatively stable sense of the occupational self-identity and with it a suitable and satisfying occupational choice. Jean Pierre Jordaan, working with Super during the 1960s and 1970s, defined vocational exploration as conscious and unconscious activities conducted with an aim toward learning about the self and the work context and how the two fit together. John Holland supported the position that occupational exploration is a fundamental aspect of career development and asserted that the development of occupational interests through exploration is a critical aspect of the process of moving from an undiffer-entiated sense of the world of work and toward an occupational choice. Hanoch Hum and David Blustein later extended the exploration construct to include exploratory competence, which presumably develops from the act of exploration over time and involves the belief that a person can effectively explore his or her environment (i.e., seek and gain information and insight that will be beneficial).

As career researchers and theorists employed the career exploration construct, they grew convinced that it was a critically important aspect of vocational development, but they also became relatively disconnected from the broader literature on human exploration. Super referred to this literature (e.g., D. E. Berlyne's work), but did not discuss it at length in later reviews of the exploration literature. Moreover, this broader exploration literature enjoyed a major resurgence during the 1980s that went relatively unreported in the career

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