Abstract
Career adaptability encompasses the attitudes, behaviors, and competencies that people use “in fitting themselves into work that suits them” (Savickas, Career development and counseling: Putting theory and research to work, Hoboken, Wiley, p. 45, 2005) . Savickas (The Career Development Quarterly, 45:247–259, 1997) proposed adaptability as a unifying concept to Super’s (The psychology of careers. New York: Harper & Row, 1957; Career development in the 1980s: Theory and practice, pp. 28–42, Springfield: Thomas, 1981; Career choice and development, pp. 197–261 San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990) life-span, life-space theory, essentially integrating the three major perspectives that Super elaborated: development, self, and context. Career adaptability includes four specific dimensions: concern, control, curiosity, and confidence. Career counselors can use these four dimensions dynamically within the counseling process to help clients better adapt their needs and capacities to different constraints imposed by the work environment (Savickas et al., Journal of Vocational Behavior, 75:239–250, 2009) .
In this global, postmodern economy, people currently face a growing number of transitions, wherein they must manage several internal and external challenges of change (Ashford and Taylor, Research in personnel and human resources management, pp. 1–39, Greenwich: JAI Press, 1990) . The use of a vocational battery that includes personality, interest, intelligence or aptitude, and values instruments in career counseling may help clients to identify their strengths and weaknesses, their emotional skill level, and increase their self-knowledge and career decision-making abilities (Rossier, International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance, 5:175–188, 2005) in order to use this knowledge and these skills more appropriately and effectively in the future. Sharing results from clients’ personality, interests, and values inventories with them and showing them how their individual profiles have helped and hindered their career performance in the past helps them to build further strengths. Additionally, career counselors can use this data to help clients improve upon their social, emotional, and cognitive meta-capacities in order to become more adaptable individuals, capable of altering their cognitions, behaviors, and affect (Fugate et al., Journal of Vocational Behavior, 65:14–38, 2004) to more easily enter—or reenter—the job market.
In this chapter, we will apply theoretical constructs to a case study from our consultation service. We aim to highlight, through the exploration of theory and practice, how career counselors can help clients become more adaptable and build their social, emotional, and cognitive meta-capacities through a brief career counseling intervention.
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Acknowledgement
Contributions from Christian Maggiori and Jérôme Rossier were conducted within the framework of the National Competence Center in Research LIVES, Project 7, entitled Professional trajectories: Impact of individual characteristics and resources, and cultural background led by Jérôme Rossier and financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
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Stauffer, S., Maggiori, C., Froidevaux, A., Rossier, J. (2014). Adaptability in Action: Using Personality, Interest, and Values Data to Help Clients Increase Their Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Career Meta-capacities. In: Coetzee, M. (eds) Psycho-social Career Meta-capacities. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00645-1_4
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