Decision-Making Models and Career Guidance

Career choices are among the most important decisions people make during their lifetime. However, many individuals experience difficulty in making such decisions, and changes in the world of work in the twenty-first century have only increased the complexity involved in exploring career alternatives and choice. The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate and analyse procedures for making career decisions using the concepts of decision theory. In the proposed approach, the goal of career guidance and counselling is helping clients make better career decisions. The first section of this chapter focusses on the unique features of career decisions. The second section briefly describes three major types of decision models. To highlight the advantages of the using decision theory, the third section demonstrates the utility of prescriptive decision-making models as a way to facilitate career-decision-making. In the fourth section, the applicability and potential benefits of prescriptive models are illustrated by the PIC model (Prescreening, In-depth exploration, and Choice; Gati I, Asher I: The PIC model for career decision making: prescreening, in-depth exploration, and choice. In: Leong FTL, Barak A (eds) Contemporary models in vocational psychology, Erlbaum, Mahwah, pp 7-54, 2001a. Mahwah: Erlbaum.). The fifth section addresses the often-heard criticism that decision theories are “too cognitive” by discussing how non-cognitive factors have been integrated into the career-decision-making approach and applied to career guidance and counselling. The chapter concludes by exploring the implications of decision theories for career guidance and counselling.