Journal of Career Assessment

This study reports the development and initial validation of the Career Futures Inventory–Revised (CFI-R) in two large samples of university students. The 28-item CFI-R assesses aspects of career adaptability, including positive career planning attitudes, general outcome expectations, and components of Parsons’ tripartite model and Bandura’s personal agency. Results revealed five internally consistent subscales: career agency, occupational awareness, support, work–life balance, and negative career outlook. Changes from the original CFI include a measure of career agency, including content addressing self-awareness, control, and self-efficacy for managing career transitions; and measures of relational components. Convergent and discriminant validity of the CFI-R subscales were examined related to measures of career decision status, difficulties, and self-efficacy, as well as dispositional optimism and coping styles. The CFI-R can aid in the understanding of current attitudes toward a variety of career transitions and enhance the effectiveness of career counseling by addressing clients’ concerns in a changing occupational world.

This longitudinal study examines the effects of Israeli counselors’ and clients’ ratings of their working alliance on clients’ career exploration (CE), using a sample of 94 three-session career counseling processes. Results reveal that both clients’ and counselors’ working alliance ratings increased over time; yet, clients’ ratings remained constantly above counselors’ ratings. Results also suggest that clients’ working alliance ratings are a better predictor of clients’ CE than counselors’ ratings. Implications for career counseling are discussed.

The present study examined the relation of work volition to career decision self-efficacy (CDSE) and academic satisfaction in a diverse sample of 447 undergraduate college students. Work volition was found to be moderately correlated with academic satisfaction and strongly correlated with CDSE. Potential mediators and moderators in the link of work volition to CDSE and academic satisfaction were also examined. Work locus of control (WLOC) was found to partially mediate these relations, and bootstrapping techniques confirmed the significance of indirect effects. Additionally, the moderating effects of gender and ethnicity in these relations were examined. Although gender was not a significant moderator in either relation, ethnicity was found to moderate the relation between work volition and academic satisfaction, such that work volition related more strongly to academic satisfaction for those who self-identified as White, relative to those who did not. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Career indecision is a complex phenomenon and an increasing number of authors have proposed that undecided individuals do not form a group with homogeneous characteristics. This study examines career decision statuses among a sample of 362 12th-grade Portuguese students. A cluster-analytical procedure, based on a battery of instruments designed to assess career and personality dimensions, was employed to understand the heterogeneous groupings that underlie the concept of career indecision. Three groups of career decision statuses were identified and their characteristics described. Finally, implications for career counseling interventions are discussed.

The authors examined the psychometric properties of the Research Motivation Scale (RMS) in a sample of faculty members (N = 337) in university science departments. It was hypothesized that the RMS would evidence partial measurement invariance across tenure status and noninvariance across gender, given the different sociocultural factors (e.g., gender role bias) that regulate the research behavior of men and women. Gender was thus predicted to moderate the relations between the latent RMS factors and their defining items. Results of confirmatory factor analytic testing yielded support for the hypotheses, while post hoc probing of sources of noninvariance indicated that men and women differed mostly on measures of extrinsic reward and failure avoidance. Implications for motivation measurement and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) career development are discussed.

We examined whether the Cross-Cultural (Chinese) Personality Assessment Inventory-2 (CPAI-2), developed by the combined emic–etic approach, could provide useful information for us to understand the relations between personality and the key academic major groups in the Chinese context. Participants in this study included 989 university students from 9 universities in Hong Kong. Discriminant analysis showed that the personality traits measured by the CPAI-2 could significantly differentiate among six academic major groups, confirming the utility of personality variables as predictors of career-relevant choice in non-Western cultures. Among the 28 CPAI-2 personality scales, 7 significantly differentiated the 6 major groups in our multivariate analysis of variance. Two of these scales reflect universal intellectual styles while the other five were relational in natural. Among these five relationship-oriented scales, Extraversion versus Introversion and Leadership correspond to similar etic constructs in Western measures while the other three (i.e., Renqing, Social Sensitivity, and Face) are emic constructs. The information provided by these emic constructs can assist career counselors to be more sensitive to the cultural context of career choice of Chinese young people.

The purpose of the study was to better understand how students at the beginning of a premed curriculum are different from their science peers on career-related variables. A total of 165 undergraduates were classified into three groups; these were premed students, students with the intent to pursue a graduate degree, and students with the intent to pursue a bachelor’s degree. Both distal (e.g., prior achievement) and proximal (e.g., mathematics and science self-efficacy and interest) social cognitive constructs were measured. Based on social cognitive career theory (SCCT), the authors predicted that the three groups would not differ on the distal variables. In contrast, the authors expected systematic group differences on the proximal variables. The hypothesis was supported; no significant group differences were found for the distal variables, but the premed group scored significantly higher than the bachelor’s degree group on almost all proximal SCCT variables. Implications for career counseling are discussed.

The current study applied Holland’s RIASEC typology to develop a Physician Skills Inventory. We identified the transferable skills and abilities that are critical to effective performance in medicine and had 140 physicians in 25 different specialties rate the importance of those skills. Principal component analysis of their responses produced three major components that aligned with the RIASEC code of Investigative-Realistic-Social (IRS) for physicians. The investigative type fit with problem-solving skills, the realistic type fit with psychomotor skills, and the social type fit with counseling skills. The Physician Skills Inventory may be used in helping medical students profile their skills for further development or remediation and for matching their skills to the requirements of different specialties.