Career Orientation

Definition

• Pattern of job related preferences that remains fairly stable over a person’s work life.

• The direction that an individual takes, career-wise, throughout his or her life.

Instrument

• The Occupational Check List (OCL;• Brooks, Holahan, & Galligan, 1985) • Traditional versus nontraditional occupations

for women. • Instrument includes lists of 25 occupations

considered traditional, nontraditional and neutral (30%-70% of employees are women).

Predictors

• Individual variables (i.e., academic• ability, agentic characteristics, gender role

attitudes) found to be predictive of career orientation (Fassinger, 1990) ; O'Brien and

Fassinger, 1993).

Importance of C.O

• A student's interest in a particular career can affect his approach toward his classwork and ultimately his academic achievement, but such career orientation can be either functional or dysfunctional.

Importance of C.O

• It can be functional if the student perceives the classwork as facilitating his entrance or performance in his chosen career.

• It can be dysfunctional if the student fails to see any real contribution of his academic pursuits to either assuming or performing the occupational role to which he is inclined.

Importance of C.O• It can also hinder the student's socialization into the role.

• Eg. In Becker’s medical school research (1961), many freshmen tried to "learn everything" so as to become the most knowledgeable doctors. This perspective blinded them to the expectations and evaluation procedures of their role complements, the medical school instructors.

• These instructors had their own ideas about what subject matter was most important both for learning and testing purposes.

• Freshmen who temporarily abandoned their dreams of future glory for a short-term perspective of "learn what will be tested" were more responsive to these cues, altered their study habits accordingly, and thus improved their performance.

Importance of C.O

• Another example…• Research by Reitz (1979) showed that

freshmen high in their orientation toward a teaching career underachieved in class performance.

• Upperclassmen highly oriented toward a teaching career overachieved relative to their less career-oriented classmates.

Possible Explanation….

• Might be the student's perception of the relevance of the course content to success in his chosen career.

• Might be the degree to which the student has already been socialized into the educational

institution.

• That is, to the extent that career orientation interferes with the student's socialization into the academic culture, it can be detrimental to his academic performance.