اکتشاف شغلی از طریق آموزش مشارکتی و انتخاب شغلی دائمی

Career exploration by Antioch College students who graduated between 1946 and 1955 (N=73) was studied to determine relationships between the occupational categories of cooperative education jobs taken in college (obtained from a campus archive) and subsequent work histories (obtained from surveying the graduates at about 70 years). Five hypotheses were tested. Results supported four of the hypotheses, with partial support for the fifth. Co-op jobs taken by the sample represented each of 23 occupational classifications, and most graduates took post-graduate jobs in occupational functions and contexts they had explored as co-op students. High levels of individuality in use of the co-op program and in career paths were found. Four co-op-to-career patterns were described, based on the degree to which functions and contexts were explored during college and career; a case study was included to exemplify each pattern. Gender differences were revealed in the patterns, but not the group data. Job context was particularly important in defining these patterns. Implications for research and practice were discussed tentatively, however given the lack of a control group, characteristics of the study sample, and particularities of the historical era studied, the ability to generalize beyond the study sample is limited.

Career exploration is an important kind of vocational behavior that includes learning about the self and from the environment to help decide about a career direction, to ease adjustment to work, and to enhance performance (Blustein, 1992; Jordaan, 1963; Strumpf, Colarelli, & Hartman, 1983). Two factors identified as important to career exploration include its developmental timing and the quality of interventions designed to enhance it. Although career exploration may occur throughout life ( Super, 1990), adolescence is a particularly important stage for career exploration, because many individuals in the US are choosing vocations and making various levels of commitment to those choices at that time ( Blustein, 1989; Jepsen & Dickson, 2003). In terms of interventions in support of career exploration, one important aspect is how comprehensive the intervention is. Phillips (1992) reviewed career counseling research and concluded that when career exploration interventions include self-assessment, feedback, specific and general information about work, and advice on career decision making, more significant gains are achieved than when interventions are more narrowly focused. Blustein (1997) advocated recently for even more comprehensive interventions. He encouraged counselors to help clients develop an exploratory attitude: “an open and nonrigid way of relating to the world such that one is able to approach the vast number of new situations and changes that individuals face in a manner that encourages growth and further self-definition” (p. 270). Given the importance of career exploration to career decision making, and the interest in late adolescent timing and comprehensiveness of interventions, it is surprising that undergraduate cooperative education programs have not been studied by vocational psychologists as career exploration interventions. Colleges and universities that offer cooperative education programs allow or require students to work off-campus, either concurrently with their classes or in alternating terms. Late adolescence is the development period when many students enroll in post-secondary cooperative education programs. In general, studies of the outcomes of career exploration have been disappointing, other than predictable increases in ego-identity development (Blustein, Devenis, & Kidney, 1989). In a recent review, Blustein (1997) implicated narrow definitions of both career exploration and relevant outcome variables in the lack of significant findings. Studying cooperative education could broaden our ideas about what career exploration means, because cooperative education programs are broadly comprehensive. They require multiple work terms with faculty and employer support to help the student self-assess, develop work skills, reflect on work experiences, integrate work experiences with classroom study, and identify career preferences, pathways, and goals. For example, one set of published criteria prescribe the scope of cooperative education work terms (at least 30 weeks of work), credentialing (faculty award academic credit for the work and it should appear on the transcript), and evaluation of work performance (employers should evaluate performance), among other attributes (Accreditation Council for Cooperative Education, 2003). The behaviors required to complete a cooperative education (co-op) program go beyond the information-seeking behaviors, such as talking to knowledgeable others about a particular career, measured in the Career Exploration Survey (CES; Strumpf et al., 1983). Co-op students work full time for several months in various jobs and, therefore, learn first-hand about careers. Broad career exploration is particularly likely in co-op programs that ascribe to an environmental model rather than a vocational one. In environmental co-op programs, students are encouraged to take jobs to meet a variety of personal and professional development goals, i.e., some co-op jobs are major-related but jobs are chosen for other reasons as well, such as exploring urban living or to take on a physical challenge. In a vocational co-op program, all jobs taken are closely related to the student’s major. A recent qualitative study showed that learning in one environmental co-op program is both broad and deep, as students are repeatedly challenged to build a life for themselves across multiple work terms in a variety of new locations, as well as adapt to a succession of different work roles ( Linn, 2004). Career exploration studies of cooperative education could also reduce the biases associated with self-report: rather than asking respondents to report their own exploratory behavior with instruments such as the CES, cooperative education students’ environmental- and self-exploratory behaviors are documented, credited, and assessed by faculty and employers. Cooperative education has been shown to enhance career identity (Weston, 1986), career planning (Mueller, 1992), and career decisions (Hackett, Croissant, & Schneider, 1992), all outcome variables relevant to the study of career exploration. Most career exploration and cooperative education researchers have limited their investigations to a short developmental span from the point of career exploration to the assessment of outcomes. For example, Stumpf and Lockhart (1987) used the CES to measure beliefs about the effectiveness of self- and environmental-exploration at one point for business students, and self- and environmental-exploratory behaviors 4–6 months later. They found that the beliefs predicted the respective behaviors. A focus on short-term follow up from exploratory behavior to outcome may also be responsible for the absence of more clear outcome effects. Neither is the literature on cooperative education rife with long-term follow up studies. Philip Gardner’s work is one exception. Gardner and his colleagues followed graduates of Michigan State’s engineering cooperative education program to show higher starting salaries (Gardner, Nixon, & Motschenbacher, 1992) and quicker socialization to the first job (Gardner & Koslowski, 1993) for those who participated in cooperative education than those who did not. A follow-up a decade or two after graduation showed that some of those advantages for co-op students diminished as careers progressed (Gardner & Motschenbacher, 1997). An exception to the dearth of long-term follow-up from career exploration in adolescence is the work of Jepsen and Dickson (2003). They measured the frequency of career exploration behaviors in the 9th and 12th grades for a high school graduating class in rural Wisconsin, and categorized how clear occupational choice was in 12th grade. Twenty-five years later, they looked for correlations between the high school measures and career establishment, defined by such behaviors as earning degrees, job achievement, and fitting in with co-workers. Career exploration did not predict career establishment; occupational choice clarity predicted it only weakly. For correlations to be significant, all respondents’ scores have to follow a similar pattern of variable interrelationships. Vondracek and Kawasaki (1995) argued that “… in order to have broad applicability, conceptualizations of adult career development must reflect the almost staggering variety of paths that may be chosen and pursued in the course of any individual work life” (p.111). They offered a developmental-contextual model that incorporates a wide array of human functions (cognitive, sensory-perceptual, and emotional) plus the constraints and facilitations of the environment on behavior. Qualitative methodology like case studies, autobiography, and interviewing allow a full picture of an individual’s career choices and achievements to be understood ( Young & Borgen, 1990). In this study we chose one outcome measure of career exploration: the subsequent taking of a job in an occupational category that had been explored via a cooperative education work experience. This outcome is relevant to educators in co-op programs, because a common goal of such programs is to help students identify a kind of work that suits them as individuals. Later work in an occupation that was explored on co-op is one measure of program success. In order to allow a long-term follow up of exploratory behavior, we asked graduates of one private liberal arts college with mandatory cooperative education who were at or near retirement to provide detailed work histories of every job taken across their careers. For our definition of “career” we borrowed from Hall (1976): “the individually perceived sequence of attitudes and behaviors associated with work-related experiences and activities over the span of the person’s life” (p. 4). A campus archive provided details of the career explorations, i.e., all cooperative education jobs taken during the respondents’ college years. The results reported here are part of a larger project designed to describe processes and outcomes of cooperative education learning, especially learning that seems important to graduates years after graduation (Linn, 1999; Linn & Ferguson, 1999). Several hypotheses were tested:

Results of descriptive analyses are presented in order to characterize the study sample further and summarize the central tendencies of their co-op and career job-taking.