4 CAREER CHOICE AND DEVELOPMENT
advanced the three-step “formula” quoted at the beginning of the
chapter. Parsons’s schema for successfully choosing a career cannot
be called a theory in the strict sense, but it was the first conceptual
framework for career decision making and became the first guide for
career counselors.
Psychologically Based Theories
Parsons (1909) believed that if people actively engage in choosing
their vocations rather than allow chance to operate in the hunt for
a job, they are more satisfied with their careers, employers’ costs
decrease, and employees’ efficiency increases. These rather simple
ideas are still at the core of most modern theories of career choice
and development. Holland (1985, 1997) and, to an even greater
degree, Dawis and Lofquist (1984) have made them the corner-
stones of their theories.
During the first part of the twentieth century, career counsel-
ing practitioners focused on step two of Parsons’s tripartite model:
increasing people’s understanding of the workplace. However, World
War I, the Great Depression of the thirties, and World War II pro-
duced a great need to classify people in some meaningful way and
place them into occupations in which they could perform satisfac-
torily. The use of tests to measure intellectual functioning began dur-
ing World War I, accelerated and expanded to include interests,
specific aptitudes, and personality in the twenties; it continues to
this day. This explosion of technology also provided a new name for
Parsons’s model: trait-and-factor theory. Trait-and-factor theory
dominated the twenties and thirties and went unchallenged until
Carl Rogers (1942, 1951) published his books on client-centered
counseling and therapy, in which he questioned the directive
approaches advocated by E. G. Williamson (1939). Rogers’s chal-
lenge turned out to be a modest one and did little to lessen the grip
of trait-and-factor thinking on the practice of career counseling.
In 1951, Ginzberg, Ginsburg, Axelrad, and Herma set forth a
radically new, psychologically based theory of career development