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Weekly UpdatesToday, young adults are expected to decide between educational, vocational, and job options and to make the best choice possible. Career literatures emphasize the importance of young adults' career decision making but also acknowledge the problems related to making these decisions. The authors argue that career counselors could support clients' intuitive processing of career information and help their clients to develop a positive and flexible view of the self and the environment while diminishing concerns about accountability for and irreversibility of career decisions. The authors argue that career adaptability rather than decision making should become the focal concept of career theory and practice.
Most people struggle with making career decisions, for example, when they have to choose between available educational, vocational, and job options. Especially young people who face the transition from school to work may experience indecision, often feeling unable to decide what career they wish to pursue. Career indecision is prevalent among college students and is frequently experienced as a burden and associated with feelings of anxiety and lowered self-esteem (Betz & Serling, 1993). Generally, humans find it difficult to use rational strategies when making decisions (e.g., Anderson, 2003). Moreover, they are sometimes unhappy with their decisions once they are finally made. Yet, many career theories emphasize conscious decision making as a necessity for healthy career development. This pressure on career decision making as reflected in daily practices together with the difficulties that young people experience with making career decisions may cause them to feel insecure and unhappy.
In this article, we question the need for younger people to in fact decide about their careers, given the traditional definition of the career concept. Using the literature on decision making and cognitive processing as a basis, we argue that conscious decision making is a less optimal strategy for making career decisions than is often thought. In addition, taking a perspective on the concept of careers that is focused on the future, we argue that traditional career theories are no longer adequate and should be replaced by new concepts that emphasize career adaptability, such as malleable selves, mastery of different roles, and short-term decision making.
Decision Making: Rationality and Intution
Each day, people have to make many choices and decisions. The moment they enter a shop, they start the process of choosing and deciding: What do I eat today, what brand of a product should I buy? Today, people live in a world with numerous choices. The economic prosperity of Western society has provided them with this choice luxury. Moreover, modern societies emphasize people's self-determination and freedom of choice (Schwartz, 2000). Many aspects of human life have become self-determined: People can choose whether they will marry or whether they will have children, and they have the freedom to choose their career. Young adults have more freedom in fashioning their career than their parents did at the time they were young. Although social mobility is often difficult (e.g., Leong, 1995), children are not necessarily bound to the economic class of their parents that dictated the educational level they could reach. Young adults arc often not constrained to do the type of work their parents did. Instead, they have the opportunity to choose from a long list of vocational and career options. This seems like a luxury but may not be experienced as such.
Decision making is difficult. It involves a complex process of cognitive reasoning and, therefore, it costs time and effort. Moreover, decisions regarding one's vocation and career usually have to be made under conditions of great uncertainty. Decision making generally encompasses five stages: defining the problem, understanding the underlying mechanisms, formulating plausible alternatives, prioritizing alternatives, and evaluating the outcomes (Peterson, Sampson, Lenz, & Reardon, 2002).
Defining the decision problem is the very first obstacle with which young people are confronted. They struggle with questions such as What are the specific goals I strive for in my future career? Should I focus on a short-term or a long-term perspective? Should I go for what I prefer right now or for more realistic opportunities, eventually at the expense of my actual preferences? In addition, the overall picture of the decision-making task is often unclear. A good overview of plausible alternatives is usually missing (i.e., the options in the labor market and exactly what these options include), as is a clear idea of one's self-concept (i.e., knowledge regarding who one is and of one's capacities and interests). It seems almost impossible to make a conscientious choice when the two components of that choice, the self and the environment, are highly ambiguous. Moreover, if all choice options are listed, it yet remains difficult to rank-order them because it is uncertain which decision strategy may lead to a good decision. Also, there may be no single correct or best option, so there is no guarantee that the decision will ensure success (Germeijs & De Boeck, 2002).
Although young adults face these uncertainties, they nevertheless should come to a decision. How do they do that? Researchers (Singh & Greenhaus, 2004; Spicer & Sadler-Smith, 2005) have recognized individual differences in decision-making behavior and have identified five decision-making styles: (a) a logical and structured approach to decision making (rational style), (b) reliance on feelings and impressions (intuitive style), (c) reliance on the support of others (dependent style), (d) postponing or avoiding making decisions (avoidant style), and (e) impulsive decision making (spontaneous style).
Which style people use may depend on their unique cognitive style, but it also depends on the circumstances in which decisions have to be made. A rational strategy, for example, cannot be used if a person is under time pressure and if the decision problem is highly complex. Thus, although a rational style has been conceived of as being beneficial for good decision making (Singh & Greenhaus, 2004), this decision strategy is not always an option. In fact, most studies that examined decision making have shown that decisions are seldom made in a rational way (e.g., Payne, Bettman, & Johnson, 1993). This is not surprising because people seldom have complete information about all possible choice alternatives. But what is more important is that if they did have this information they would not be capable of adequately dealing with it. Nevertheless, individuals often do their best to approach decision making in a rational way, for example, by thorough thinking, simplifying the decision task, or developing straightforward decision-making rules (e.g., Tindale, 1993).
Career researchers have studied people's job decision-making strategies and which of these strategies result in a suitable job. Singh and Greenhaus (2004) found that a rational strategy was valuable for finding a good job fit, but mostly this occurred when this strategy was combined with intuitive decision making. People who relied on both rational and intuitive thinking reported having a higher awareness of the self and the environment, which helped them to make a better choice. Hence, rationality requires intuition to gain awareness of possible options.
Recently, cognitive social psychologists (e.g., Dijksterhuis, 2004) have studied the role of unconscious thought in decision making. They examined whether cognitive and affective decision-making processes also take place outside conscious awareness and found that unconscious processes occur and influence individuals' decisions. For instance, individuals often decide to postpone a difficult decision for a while. Then, after a period of what seems to be cognitive inactivity regarding the decision problem, an individual may suddenly have a feeling about what to decide. This transition from indecision to a felt preference is the result of unconscious thought. What is most interesting is that research (e.g., Dijksterhuis, 2004) has shown that this unconscious processing led to better and more coherent decisions than did rational thinking alone. Unconscious thought seems to be a rather intelligent way of decision making. This notion is not new, because Gelatt (1989) had already advocated using the nonrational and intuitive side of thinking and choosing. Yet, current scientific knowledge about human decision making has confirmed that Gelatt was right with his early view.
This fundamental research on unconscious processes has some implications for young adults' career decision making. First, rational thinking is useful if individuals have information that enhances their awareness of self and environment. Second, too much emphasis on rational thinking may block rather than encourage decision making. Instead, after acquiring the necessary informational input, unconscious processes may do their job, which will result in vague feelings rather than explicit thoughts about the direction the decision will take. This suggests that the combination of rational thinking and "gut feeling" may ultimately lead to making optimal decisions. Thus, self-efficacy in career decision making may take the form of having confidence in one's gut feelings.
Indecision
The dependent, avoidant, and spontaneous styles of decision making are all expressions of indecision. Extant research on career indecision has mostly addressed individual determinants of career indecision, such as people's career maturity (attitudes regarding planning and exploration), career competencies (knowledge of careers and decision-making strategies), and decision-making self-efficacy (e.g., Creed, Prideaux, & Patton, 2005; Gordon, 1998). Yet, there are other important mechanisms that cause indecision. In general, people make a decision when two conditions are fulfilled. First, a chosen option must be at least minimally attractive. Second, the chosen option must be relatively better than other options. Indecision is more likely to occur when these conditions are not fulfilled (Anderson, 2003; Nijstad, 2004). People themselves set the norm for what is minimally attractive to them, and this norm depends on the type of aspects to which individuals attend. Individuals tend to set higher norms if they focus on the negative rather than on the positive aspects of alternatives. Consequently, individuals who focus on the negative aspects of possible job options will have more difficulty making a job choice than will individuals who focus on the positive aspects of job options.
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