Blog Post #4

            I was very happy to read an article on career indecision this week. Too often I find myself asking young students what they are interested in  studying when they get to college, knowing full well that the average college student changes their major five or six times during their tenure in undergraduate school. Personally, I feel that it should be a requirement for students to start college with no career direction. How do you know, at 17 years old, that you want to be a doctor if you have never spent time with an actual doctor? How do you know what they really do and are you sure you want to spend the next 12 years of your life in school? To this point, I appreciated reading that “constructivist counselors view career indecision as a sign of transformation in progress” (Savickas, p. 3). I also found it pertinent that that point was followed up with the idea that, “…indecision expresses hesitation before transformation. Individuals purposively pause in their line of movement…During this hesitation, clients review their lives and focus awareness in an effort to grasp the theme…they will eventually resume forward movement and use the newly clarified and refined life theme as a map with which to plot a new location for themselves” (Savickas, p. 3-4). It is so important, especially for today’s “Velcro parents”, to recognize that indecision is a step long the path to defining one’s life theme and not a sign of weakness or laziness. How do we know what we do want without first knowing what we do not want? Today’s students should be given time to explore careers, job shadow, and truly spend time investigating career paths. Without a true process of elimination, by which students can spend time being confused and in a state of indecision, career counselors will see more and more students stuck or lost versus students who are at a place where they are ready to discuss career paths and trajectories. I also made a connection with this article and important concepts from Super discussed in class. Students need to explore and try new things before they can reach Super’s idea of a personal construct or role-salience. I often find it hard to believe that students know exactly what they want to do when they have had no experience in that field of work. For example, a student who tells me they want to be a veterinarian should be strongly encouraged to volunteer in an animal hospital for a length of time before investing time and money in a veterinary degree. Applying these constructivist concepts to real world principles can only help to serve our future workers in a more applicable fashion as well as provide them with more job satisfaction over their working lives.

Savickas, M.L. (1995). Constructivist counseling for career indecision. The Career Development Quarterly, 43(4). 363-373.