vide an organizing structure for existing career interventions or to
develop novel intervention techniques. In this section, we review
some of SCCT’s basic implications for developmental and remedial
interventions (see Lent & Brown, 1996).
Expanding Interests and Facilitating Choice
As implied by SCCT’s interest and choice models, self-efficacy
beliefs and outcome expectations are central to the cultivation of
academic-career interests and to the range of occupational options
that people view as viable for themselves. Thus we believe that
many individuals prematurely foreclose on potentially rewarding
career pursuits either because their environments offer a restricted
range of efficacy-building experiences or because they develop inac-
curate self-efficacy beliefs or occupational outcome expectations.
Methods for fostering reliable self-efficacy and outcome expectations
and for maximizing development of abilities may be most useful dur-
ing the school years, when students’ self-percepts and occupational
beliefs are likely to be relatively malleable.
SCCT suggests that psychoeducational interventions designed
to promote optimum career development (or to prevent future
choice or adjustment problems) need to focus not only on students’
emergent interests, values, and talents but on the cognitive bases of
these characteristics. It is particularly important, from a social cog-
nitive perspective, to ensure that children’s and adolescents’ self-
efficacy beliefs are relatively consonant with their developing
abilities and that their career-related outcome expectations are based
on accurate information. Thus students’ zone of acceptable choice
alternatives (Gottfredson, 1996) is not constrained by mispercep-
tions of personal capabilities or work reinforcers (conditions).
In terms of remedial interventions for clients experiencing
problems with career choice or change, the SCCT perspective
shares a basic goal with most other approaches to career counseling:
to help clients choose from an array of occupations that correspond
well with important aspects of their work personalities. However,
SOCIAL COGNITIVE CAREER THEORY 287