Chapter 3: The Role of Values in Career Choice and Development

From the beginning of career choice theory, attributed to Frank Parsons (1909), it has been assumed that there is an identifiable relationship between the attributes of individuals and the characteristics of occupations or jobs. Some theorists in the sequence of development of career theory have stressed the influence of needs (Roe, 1956), interests and personality traits (Briggs-Myers & Myers, 1980; Holland, 1973) values (Brown, 2002a; Katz, 1969), and still others the combination of all of these. Perhaps the most comprehensive picture of the combination and interaction of personal attributes and environmental influences on an individual’s career was proposed by Super (1992) in his Arch of Determinants.