same time that workers will need to view their careers as dynamic
processes requiring active management, employers will need to be
concerned with maintaining a sufficient cadre of workers who can
adapt flexibly to changing organizational demands. These presses
may, ironically, offer increased rather than lessened opportunities
for career development, particularly to the extent that (1) workers
take an agentic approach to their career progress and (2) employers
and policymakers see the value of promoting workers’ career growth
and periodic retooling.
In sum, we believe the applications described in this section
convey SCCT’s potential utility in studying and facilitating the
career development of a diverse range of persons and in changing
economic times. Although such applications are exciting in their
promise, there is also a need for far more research that clarifies how
various social cognitive variables (for example, contextual supports
and barriers and self-efficacy at managing the multiple demands of
career and family roles), interface with culture, ethnicity, socioeco-
nomic status, sexual orientation, and disability or health status to
shape the career development trajectories of new cohorts of stu-
dents and workers. Despite the clear need for additional research,
currently available findings may offer valuable implications for
career counseling practice—a topic to which we next turn.
SCCT-Derived Interventions
We believe that SCCT holds a number of implications for devel-
opmental, preventive, and remedial interventions, that is, for opti-
mizing the development of students’ academic and career interests
and competencies, for preventing career-related difficulties prior to
work entry, and for counseling individuals who manifest problems
with career choice or adjustment. Ideas for developmental and pre-
ventive applications may be readily derived from hypotheses about
how the social cognitive variables such as self-efficacy develop and
from SCCT’s basic interest, choice, and performance models. In
terms of remedial counseling, the theory may be used either to pro-
286 CAREER CHOICE AND DEVELOPMENT