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Decision Making

Decision making refers to the process by which an individual comes to choose between two (or more) alternative courses of action. For career decisions, this process might lead to the choice of a major, a more general occupational direction, or a particular job. Decision making might also lead individuals to explore some career directions and not others or to abandon choices previously made. Regardless of the specific context, career decision making reflects the process through which individuals take in, weigh, and make judgments about themselves in relation to the world of work.

Decision making has been studied both as a process and as a source of individual variation. In turn, the process of decision making has been framed in both descriptive and prescriptive ways, and models of individual variation have been advanced that reflect both individual styles and the context of the decision-making environment. Each of these major perspectives is described here.

Decision-Making Process

Tracing back to the earliest study of human cognition, theorists have sought to describe how it is that people arrive at a single course of action as well as how decisions should be made optimally.

Descriptive Models of Decision Making

Descriptive models of decision making are those that simply describe or detail the steps involved in the process of making a decision without advocating for how the process should proceed. In one of the first efforts to describe career decision making, David V. Tiedeman provided a comprehensive model that portrayed the process as a sequence of stages leading up to and following the point of choice. Prior to choice is a stage of anticipation in which individuals explore, crystallize alternatives, make a choice, and clarify how the choice will be put into action. Following this is a stage involving implementation in which the individual adjusts after the chosen alternative is enacted. Tiedeman also noted that the process was not necessarily linear and irreversible, arguing that one might recycle through these stages at any point. Such recycling might occur when, for instance, alternatives failed to crystallize (leading one back to exploration) or the selected alternative failed to lead to a satisfactorily implementation plan (leading one back to choice making or exploration). Vincent A. Harren further expanded this model to focus specifically on the decision making of college students and to include attention to elements of individual and contextual variability in the decision-making process. His model included four phases of awareness: needing to decide, planning, making a commitment to a particular course of action, and implementation of the chosen alternative.

Other descriptive models of decision making have focused on selected segments of the decision-making process. Seeking to understand what starts the decision-making process, one model suggested that discrepancy between one's beliefs about the world and one's plans for entering it leads to a dissonance that is reduced by initiating a decision-making process. Focusing on how individuals weigh and evaluate assembled information and alternatives, other theorists offered mathematical models in which alternatives are weighted by combinations of valence, expected outcome, and probability.

Prescriptive Models of Decision Making

In contrast to the models of decision making that simply detail how a decision is made, there has been considerable effort directed to understanding how decisions should be made. In one of the earliest prescriptive models in the vocational domain, Frank Parsons argued in 1909 that the central task of career decision making was one of assembling information about oneself and about the world of work and using true reasoning to arrive at a match between the two sets of information. This model of a scientific, methodical, rational approach to decision making has been echoed and elaborated in a variety of prescriptive models of decision making.

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