به حاشیه راندن روانشناسی حرفه ای

I identify strengths and weaknesses of vocational psychology and opportunities confronting vocational psychology. Strengths of vocational psychology include its rich diversity of theoretical models and the energetic tradition of empirical investigation. Troublesome weaknesses include the tendency of some to adopt a dabbler, pundit, or booster approach to the issues confronting vocational psychology and the marginalization of vocational psychology in its intellectual home. Technological advances that will occur within the next 3 decades present the field with tremendous opportunities and significant challenges.

The 30th anniversary of the Journal of Vocational Behavior is an auspicious time to reflect on the many contributions of vocational psychology to the study of human behavior. Scientific progress often appears to be slow or even nonexistent when viewed from the perspective of the present and near past, but the 20-year retrospectives that appeared in the Journal of Vocational Behavior in 1991 revealed both impressive advances and important problems requiring further research. Thus, it is helpful to consider what vocational psychology was like in 1971 to provide a context within which to evaluate the advances made in understanding vocational behavior and the challenges confronting our discipline. Vocational psychologywas the core of counseling psychology when the Journal of Vocational Behavior was established in 1971. The preeminent graduate training programs were staffed by internationally acclaimed vocational psychologists, many of the most illustrious graduates of those programs routinely established themselves as world renowned vocational psychologists, and students in those programs received a thorough grounding in the science and practice of vocational psychology. The person–environment fit model was dominant but Super’s (1953) developmental model was attracting ever larger groups of enthusiastic followers. The classifications systems of the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (1965) and Anne Roe (1956) provided the organizational structure for much of the conceptual and empiricalwork. The Theory ofWork Adjustment (Dawis, England,&Lofquist, 1964) provided the predominant blueprint for vocational rehabilitation counselingand Holland’s (1966) model was gaining increasingly favorable attention from vocational psychologists working with college students. In this article I identify what I believe to be the greatest strengths of vocational psychology, the weaknesses that vitiate vocational psychology, and the opportunities confronting vocational psychology.

Social change. The next 30 years will provide amazing opportunities for vocational psychologists. Space permits only a brief statement of these opportunities; a more detailed discussion of these possibilities appears in Tinsley (2000c).The development of nanobots and amazingly inexpensive nanocomputers that are a hundred billion times faster than today’s most powerful personal computers will have profound effects on modern life and vocational psychology. Likewise, advances in computer software will enable individuals to have a conversation with their computer about their goals and aspirations via the Internet using wireless interfaces. Career counseling software will accept continuous voice input, search for the themes that are present in the client’s comments, ask the client to elaborate on these themes and thereby determine the importance of each theme and their interrelations. The computer will determine the client’s goals and aspirations and simultaneously assess the client on theoretically relevant constructs using procedures based on item response theory. Finally, the computer will help the client integrate this information, arrive at decisions, and make plans using complex decision-making models that far surpass human reasoning abilities. In short, I predict that by the year 2030, highly skilled computer counseling programs will be available. Human resources. Despite this optimistic assessment I see important barriers standing in the way of achieving this potential. I have commented elsewhere on counseling psychologists’ resistance to technological advances and empirical findings (Tinsley, 2000c). Yet an even greater threat is the marginalization of vocational psychology. As vocational psychology becomes more and more a fringe interest of counseling psychologists, the number of students entering counseling psychology graduate programs who want to become skilled vocational scientists will dwindle. This is a threat to vocational psychology because the principles of intrinsic motivation and tractability explain scholars’ choices of issues to examine Tinsley, 1994, 1995). First, vocational psychologists tend to focus on that which is intrinsically interesting to them. Without exception all of the active vocational psychologists I know have chosen to examine issues that are consistent with their intrinsic interests. Second, vocational psychologists do what they know how to do. In the final analysis, therefore, the greatest challenge confronting vocational psychology may well be the necessity to find a new intellectual home. The only way for vocational psychology to maintain its traditions of theoretical diversity and empirical vigor is for it to educate a diverse array of psychologists who are interested in vocational psychology and to socialize them in the importance of contributing to the theories and research of the discipline. It is not clear to me that we can accomplish that objective as a fringe group of counseling psychology. We may need to find a new intellectual home where we can matriculate students who are interested in vocational psychology and provide them with a comprehensive grounding in vocational psychology theory and research. Otherwise, there will be ever fewer vocational psychologists.