Systemic influences on career development: assisting clients to tell their career stories.(Global Visions)(Usage of My System of Career Influences)

In recent years, constructivism has begun to assume a more central role in career theory and career counseling (Amundson, 2003; Peavy, 1997, 2004; Savickas, 2002). Inherent to constructivism is the recognition that individuals are active agents in the production of their careers. This fundamental theoretical underpinning has witnessed the client-counselor relationship becoming a more collaborative process, with the client taking a more active role in the process and the counselor facilitating narrative, storytelling, and discursive processes.

A major challenge for theory informed by constructivism is how to apply it in practice (Patton & McMahon, 2006b; Reid, 2006). The Systems Theory Framework (STF) of career development (McMahon & Patton, 1995; Patton & McMahon, 1999, 2006a) is a metatheoretical account informed by the constructivist worldview that meets the challenge of bridging theory and practice through the development of a qualitative career assessment instrument, the My System of Career Influences (MSCI; McMahon, Patton, & Watson, 2005a, 2005b; McMahon, Watson, & Patton, 2005). In this regard, Savickas (2005) is of the opinion that the authors of the MSCI have "translated their sophisticated theoretical model into a straightforward counselling method accompanied by coherent counselling materials" (p. iii). The MSCI is a reflection process, which assists adolescents to explore the systemic influences on their careers and, in so doing, to tell their career stories. This article describes a career counseling intervention based on the STF of career development using the MSCI reflection process. The article provides an overview of the STF, describes the MSCI, and illustrates the application of the MSCI with an adolescent.

STF of Career Development

In its brief history, the STF has proved applicable across countries, across cultures, and for career counselor training (Arthur & McMahon, 2005; Patton, McMahon, & Watson, 2006). Indeed, Amundson (2005) described the STF as one of four significant innovations in career theory. The STF is a holistic metatheoretical framework that accommodates both the content influences and the process influences on an individual's career development. This is illustrated in Figure 1. Content influences include the personal qualities and characteristics intrinsic to individuals, as well as the influences of the context in which they live, such as the people and organizations with whom they interact and the society and environment in which they live. These influences are organized in the STF as a series of interconnecting systems of influence on career development, specifically the individual system, the social system, and the environmental-societal system. The STF recognizes the changing nature and interaction of these influences (i.e., the process of career development) and is therefore conceptualized as a dynamic open system. The process influences include recursiveness (the interaction between influences), change over time, and chance. All influences are set within the context of past, present, and future.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The individual system is central to the STF, as shown in Figure 1, and includes a range of intrapersonal influences, such as gender, interests, age, abilities, personality, and sexual orientation. The intrapersonal influences represent the subsystems of the individual system. Individuals are both a system and a subsystem. As subsystems, they do not live in isolation, but rather as part of a much larger contextual system, which comprises the social system and the environmental-societal system. The social system (see Figure 1) refers to the other people systems with which individuals interact (e.g., family, educational institutions, peers, the media). The individual and the social systems occur within the broader system of society and the environment, the environmental-societal system (see Figure 1). The subsystems of the environmental-societal system, such as political decisions or globalization, may seem less directly related to individuals but nonetheless have influence on their career development.

The STF also depicts the process influences of recursiveness, change over time, and chance (see Figure 1). These influences are illustrative of the dynamic nature of career development and the interaction that occurs within and between systems. Recursiveness is the multidirectional and nonlinear interaction between influences. Thus, a change in one part of the system will result in a change in another part of the system. Furthermore, the nature of the influences and the degree of influence change over time. In addition, individuals' career development will not always be planned, predictable, or logical. Unexpected or chance events, such as accidents, illness, organizational restructuring, or natural disasters, may profoundly influence career development. All of the process and content influences are set within the broader system of time. The past influences the present, and, together, past and present influence the future. Readers wanting more extensive descriptions of the STF are referred to the literature (e.g., McMahon & Patton, 1995; Patton & McMahon, 1999, 2006a; Patton et al., 2006).