Career Design Guide

History of the Guide

The Career Design Guide was created by two career development professionals -- Joyce Beckett, M.A., Career Development, and the late Marjorie Sywak, Ph.D., Teacher Education. The creation of the Guide began in 1986 and took over five years to complete. The development phase included extensive field testing of the content and processes with a variety of adult populations.

Since the early 1990's, over 10,000 working adults have used the Guide in corporate, university and counseling settings to help them make effective career and development plans and decisions.

The Guide was produced to address a gap in the career development field. Although many quality career assessment and planning instruments exist, none was available for adults that met the following objectives:

	It contained the core components of career assessment -- skills, interests, and values -- integrated into one theoretically sound framework.
	It led from self-assessment work to greater self-understanding that users could apply to relevant career and development choices.

The Guide is updated on a periodic basis to ensure its continued usefulness for adult populations.

The Theoretical Foundation

The creators relied on various career theories to provide a basis and define the design for the Guide's three core inventories -- interests, values and motivated skills -- as well as the Seven Pattern Framework. The most influential theories were:

	Trait and Factor: This theory matches interests and abilities to work environments and occupational personality traits. Most occupational classification systems use this career approach.
	Psychodynamics: This theory suggests that people have a psychological predisposition that is either genetic or formed in childhood that provides motivation for certain kinds of values, skills and interests.
	Development: This theory defines a process of coming to career maturity that evolves through the development of a self-concept, exposure to a broader occupational perspective, clarification of values, a development plan for chosen skills, and a plan for both work and life satisfaction through a variety of life roles.

These and other career theories have been in existence for many years. In choosing the methodology and content for the Career Design Guide, the advantages of each of these approaches were considered, along with finding a way to connect the strengths of each in an integrated way. A good example of this is the creation of the Seven Pattern Framework.

Many attempts have been made in the last fifty years to cluster work preferences into global descriptions of occupational personalities through Trait and Factor theory. These connections between personal qualities and occupations have been useful for correlating assessment information to personality characteristics, preferred environments, occupational choices, courses of study, and leisure activities.

The Guide's Seven Patterns build on this fifty year history. A Pattern is a summary of the optimal interaction between certain personal qualities and specific interests, skills and values as well as the work environment where that type of person will do their best work.

The Seven Pattern Framework counters the deficits of Trait and Factor theory. It encourages subjective analysis by the user at several points, which allows the process to reflect more of psychodynamic theory. Each user's framework is built from subjective methods, using personal experiences that reflect inner motivations, in combination with objective methods. This process leads both to an investigation of occupational information and the creation of a personal decision making model.

Further information on the content development, field testing and Seven Pattern Framework is available in the Training Manual.