A Decision-Making Model Applied to Career Counseling

Abstract

The literatures of decision-making and career counseling are vast and variable. They range in complexity from heady expositions of arcane mathematical formulae to relatively noncerebral elementary school exercises involving, for example, placement of the red poker chip on the blue alternative. Our challenge in this article is to explore further the reciprocal relevancies of these overlapping literatures.We begin with an historical perspective of classical decision theory followed by a discussion of pertinent problem-solving concepts. A generic decision-making model of counseling is offered, incorporating assessment and intervention strategies from the career development literature.

Annual Review: Practice and Research in Career Counseling and Development, 1989

“…In a special issue of the Journal of Career Development Neimeyer (1989) reviewed studies using personal construct theory to assess the personal meanings of work. Wolleat (1989) argued that gender is part of most information schemata and should be a fundamental part of, rather than a moderator of, career information processing, and Olson, McWhirter and Horan (1989) elaborated a four-stage model of decision making during career counseling (conceptualization, enlargement of response repertoire, identification of discriminative stimuli, response selection). Bloch (1989b) asked two fundamental questions about the nature of information search and retrieval: How do people acquire and use information?…”