Career Maturity: The Construct's Validity, Vitality, and Viability

Career maturity is a useful construct for studying adolescents, but it has limits. Professional counselors need to integrate personality and decision-making style into research on career maturity as well as give more than a passing nod to developmental theory. They cannot study career development at the individual level alone; context matters and is an integral part of career development. The amount of variance in individual career development accounted for by context and change may be so great that longitudinal research on individuals may not be worthwhile. The construct of career maturity has always struck me as somewhat problematic because, as Savickas (in press) described so nicely, as a developmental construct in adolescence, it clearly is about state; however, at some point in adulthood it becomes a trait, as do most early developmental processes. Furthermore, the notion of career maturity in adolescence is in some ways an oxymoron. Although the mature adolescent would clearly actively engage in exploration, a career choice per se might be immature or "foreclosed," as it were, in the language of Erikson ( 1968) and of researchers who employ the identity status paradigm (Marcia, Waterman, Matteson, Archer, & Orlofsky, 1993). A foreclosed choice is one that is made too early, without sufficient exploration or adequate differentiation from early role models. Given what we know about adolescent identity development (Blustein, Devenis, & Kidney, 1989; Fannin, 1979; Waterman, 1993), it is not clear that at least for a college-bound adolescent, one ought to be able to make occupational choices by one's sophomore year (Holland 1985). It certainly is reasonable to assume that by one's sophomore year, one ought to know one's interests and be able to narrow choices to two or three-indeed, the context demands it in most United States universities, which require individuals to choose a major by their junior year. Those two to three possibilities ought to be informed and seriously and thoughtfully considered. It is also true that some occupations must be chosen early, even before the age of 16, because of the extensive preparation required. Those early choices, however, are often made at considerable psychological cost, especially when the career ladder is short, as in dance or professional athletics. The evidence for the cost of such early decision making is abundant: Many of our adult clients find themselves floundering at the end of these first careers because they have not engaged in adequate exploration in adolescence. For non-college-bound adolescents, Holland is probably right: High school graduates do need to make earlier choices to make good use of training and entry-level career opportunities. These concepts seem relevant despite the career maturity construct's psychometric support (Crites, 1997), probably because, as Vondracek and Savickas have suggested, there is some quarrel to be had with its conceptual underpinnings rather than with its psychometric utility in career development research. (In the interest of parsimony, these observations are limited here because Savickas, in press, and Vondracek and Reitzle, 1998, have clearly delineated other conceptual difficulties with career maturity and its measurement.) Indeed, there is some empirical evidence for these collective observations (Chisholm & Hurrelmann, 1995), and it is described well by Savickas (1994, in press). Within the identity status research paradigm, there is considerable support for the notion that subjects who are in moratorium as well as those who are in the achievement status are more mature than those who are foreclosed or in the diffusion status. SchmittRodermund and Silbereisen ( 1998) have noted that both in 1991 and in 1996, foreclosed and achieved subjects were more career mature than moratorium or diffuse adolescents in their sample. This finding is of course tautological, because commitment is a prerequisite for membership in the foreclosed and achieved statuses. …