Career Choice and Development

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that is both very consistent (CR-RC) and somewhat differentiated
(46th percentile for male high school students and 40th percentile
for male college students; Holland, Powell, & Fritzsche, 1997, Ap-
pendix B1). He also has a fairly coherent set of occupational day-
dreams. Most important, K has developed a strong interest in
skateboarding, which is represented among his occupational day-
dreams and is his first choice of occupations. It is also an activity in
which he appears to invest a great deal of time (perhaps to the
detriment of his schoolwork), and professional skateboarders repre-
sent people whom he admires.
In terms of areas of concern, we note that K has apparently not
performed as well in school as his SAT scores would predict (al-
though we have no hard data on this). We would not, however, be
overly concerned about this until we had data to suggest that it
might interfere with his career choices, successes, or satisfaction.
Two other areas might be of more concern to us. First, although
his personality profile is consistent, the CR or RC profile is rare
among male college students. RC and CR profiles were obtained,
respectively, by only 1.3 percent and 0.3 percent of male college
students in the 1994 normative sample of the SDS (Holland et al.,
1997, Appendix A21). Thus we are not overly surprised that apply-
ing to and completing college may be low priorities for him. Sec-
ond, and perhaps more important, although K has a somewhat
coherent set of occupational daydreams, the high point code of
most of these daydreams, as well as his most-liked job as a library
assistant (Artistic), is quite inconsistent with the profile (CR-RC)
that he obtained on the Self-Directed Search (SDS).
Finally, we should comment on K’s tendency to procrastinate.
Although it may be tempting to assume that K’s pattern of procras-
tination requires specific intervention or is indicative of deeper
affective problems, we would be cautious in making assumptions
about his underlying psychological dynamics, based only on the evi-
dence that is presented. It seems to us that K’s procrastination
occurs when he undertakes tasks for which he has little interest or
passion (applying to college) rather than when he is engaged in
activities for which he feels excitement (skateboarding). Thus,


SOCIAL COGNITIVE CAREER THEORY 297
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