Post #6

The article this week was very refreshing to me. While it did still incorporate spirituality into the mix, it was much more comprehensible and concrete. I guess for me, I liked how complex the authors made this theory because life is complex and always changing. I don't believe it is as easy as just having an "aha" moment like some of the previous articles touched upon. I believe it takes much more than that to understand the multifaceted world that we call life.

I really enjoyed that the authors made the distinction that career development is nonlinear. I always knew that there was a lot that went into choosing a career, but because we are all humans we seek to simplify things and make sense of everything. My belief was always that I would go to college, then graduate school, do an internship, get a career from my internship site, and then after I had my career established I would find someone to share my life with. Well, that person came earlier than I had planned. Now my career path is looking a lot less linear. We are now looking at moving across country for his job, which means this opens up a whole new world of possibilities, but also opens up a lot more difficulties and more unknowns. This is why I really enjoyed the different elements that the authors discussed like self-regeneration, open-exchange, participating in networks etc. because no matter how individualistic our society becomes we all still operate together and work with each other while also constantly reinventing ourselves.

The case study of Marion really helped me to see the application of this theory. This situation is one I feel like happen to most people. They go into a profession and want to move up the career ladder, but when they get to the top they realize their career no longer includes what they first signed up for. While many people may decide that it is too late to change paths and they become "stuck", it was refreshing to see that Marion was willing to take on some risk so that she could become happy again. I think my favorite part of this article was that they laid out steps for applying this theory in practice. It was very informative in that it was concrete enough to actually be able to see how this theory could really help people who are at those transition points in life, need to rediscover there options, and decide how much they are willing to risk to become satisfied in their career once more.



Reference

Bloch, D. P. (2005). Complexity, chaos, and nonlinear dynamics: A new perspective on career development theory. The Career Development Quarterly, 53, 194-207.