Career adaptability: A meta-analysis of relationships with measures of adaptivity,adapting responses,and adaptation results

Career adaptability, a psychosocial resource for managing career-related tasks, transitions, and traumas, is a central construct in career construction theory and the field of vocational psychology. Based on the career construction model of adaptation, we conducted a meta-analysis to examine relationships of career adaptability with measures of adaptivity, adapting responses, adaptation results, and demographic covariates. Results based on a total of 90 studies show that career adaptability is significantly associated with measures of adaptivity (i.e., cognitive ability, big five traits, self-esteem, core self-evaluations, proactive personality, future orientation, hope, and optimism), adapting responses (i.e., career planning, career exploration, occupational self-efficacy, and career decision-making self-efficacy), adaptation results (i.e., career identity, calling, career/job/school satisfaction, affective organizational commitment, job stress, employability, promotability, turnover intentions, income, engagement, self-reported work performance, entrepreneurial outcomes, life satisfaction, and positive and negative affect), as well as certain demographic characteristics (i.e., age, education). Multiple regression analyses based on meta-analytic correlations demonstrated the incremental predictive validity of career adaptability, above and beyond other individual difference characteristics, for a variety of career, work, and subjective well-being outcomes. Overall, the findings from this meta-analysis support the career construction model of adaptation.     

Profiles of career adaptivity and their relations with adaptability,adapting, and adaptation

Career adaptivity is the first factor in a chain of putative effects posited in the career construction theory (CCT): Adaptivity → Adaptability → Adapting → Adaptation. Hitherto, research on adaptivity has chiefly used variable-centered strategies to investigate the independent effects of adaptivity-related traits on adaptability, adapting, and adaptation averaged over all individuals constituting a sample. The present research, comprising two studies, seeks to extend this work by using person-centered analytic strategies to identify distinct profiles of adaptivity based on combinations of the Big-Five personality dimensions. We also examine the associations of profile membership with adaptability, adapting, and adaptation from the CCT perspective. Latent profile analyses revealed that a comparable 3-profile solution, comprising so-called “adaptive ready”, “ordinary”, and “rigid” adaptivity profiles, fit best in both studies using distinct measures of the Big-Five. Furthermore, across both studies, the latent subgroups were found to differ on levels of adaptability measured using two distinct instruments. Adaptability was highest in the “adaptive ready” subgroup followed by the “ordinary” and “rigid” subgroups, respectively. Finally, Study 2 showed that the adaptivity profiles differed with respect to indices of adapting (viz., organized study behaviors) and adaptation (viz., academic and career-choice satisfaction) in line with expectations from the CCT. The present findings constitute the first evidence showing that career adaptivity can be adequately represented via trait interactions. The findings also add to the empirical literature underpinning the CCT. Furthermore, this research is an informative demonstration of the utility of finite mixture analyses.     

Two sides of the career resources coin: Career adaptability resources and the impostor phenomenon

Considering the impostor phenomenon (IP) as an important psychological construct in the context of career development requires a theoretical grounding. Using the career construction model of adaptation as a guiding framework, we investigated how the IP is related to adaptive readiness (represented by core self-evaluations), career adaptability resources, and adapting responses, namely, career planning, career decision-making difficulties, career exploration, and occupational self-efficacy. We used parallel multiple mediation modeling to investigate specific indirect effects through concern, control, curiosity, confidence, and the IP. We conducted an online study with 289 university students. Results indicated a positive effect of core self-evaluations on career planning, career exploration, and occupational self-efficacy and a negative effect on career decision-making difficulties through adaptability resources. The IP emerged as a “maladaptability” resource: That is, it might be a hindrance to adaptive coping and behavior and consequently promote maladaptive coping and behavior by decreasing career planning and occupational self-efficacy and increasing career decision-making difficulties. Supplementary negative effects of the IP on adaptability resources are discussed.     

TRANSFERENCE BEFORE TRANSFERENCE

This paper is predominantly a clinical presentation that describes the transmigration of one patient's transference to another, with the analyst functioning as a sort of transponder. It involves an apparently accidental episode in which there was an unconscious intersection between two patients. The author's aim is to show how transference from one case may affect transference in another, a phenomenon the author calls transference before transference. The author believes that this idea may serve as a tool for understanding the unconscious work that takes place in the clinical situation. In a clinical example, the analyst finds himself caught up in an enactment involving two patients in which he becomes the medium of what happens in session.     

Understanding the ‘blind spot’ when children move from foster care into adoption‡

Current social work practice in the UK dictates that when children move from foster care into adoption, the transition takes place within 7 and 14 days, and usually there is no contact between the child and their former carer for several months after the move, if at all. Very little attention or research has been aimed at understanding the rationale for these procedures, or their impact on the children. Joining forces with social work colleagues in a Looked After Children’s team, two child psychotherapists carried out a piece of qualitative research to look at these moves in more detail, and try to tease out how and why these key decisions are made. Analysing data from interviews with foster carers, adopters and social workers, the researchers found that the emotional experience of the child, particularly their experience of losing their foster carer, loses centre stage in people’s minds during this transition, leading to what is described as a ‘blind spot’ across the network. A significant reason for this emerged, in that the children tended to be very compliant both during and after the move and lacking in any obvious distress at losing their former carers, despite having previously been described as passionately attached to them. The research showed that adults across the network, all struggling with intense anxieties of their own, tended to interpret this as evidence that the children were ‘fine’ rather than questioning what might be going on at a deeper level. These research findings are explored in the light of a knowledge base accumulated from a working understanding of attachment and loss in early childhood, and of the psychoanalytical phenomena of individual and organisational defences against loss. Implications for future practice are suggested.     

The Impact of Life Transition on Emerging Adult Attachment,Social Support,and Well‐Being: A Multiple‐Group Comparison

Life transitions can induce distress for emerging adults. This study compared a model of the attachment, social support, and well‐being of emerging adults in transition with a model of those not in transition (N = 378). The transition sample reported less life satisfaction and environmental mastery and higher attachment avoidance than the nontransition sample. The transition sample showed weaker mediating effects of social support, suggesting that attachment accounted for additional unique variance for this group. Counseling implications are provided.     

Magnetic properties of Mn-doped armchair ZnO nanotubes: a Monte Carlo study

The magnetic properties of a Mn-doped armchair ZnO nanotube have been studied using Monte Carlo simulation. The variation of zero-field-cooled and field-cooled magnetisation with reduced temperatures for different values of the dilution x (where x is the Mn concentration: Zn_1?xMn_xO) are given. The freezing temperatures and magnetisation vs. crystal field are calculated for different dilutions x. Finally, the hysteresis loops for different dilutions and temperatures are given for a fixed reduced temperature and crystal field. Superparamagnetic behaviour is observed for small values of x and low temperatures.     

Career guidance in multicultural societies: identity,alterity, epiphanies and pitfalls

This paper provides a scoping approach to the issue of career guidance in multicultural societies. It starts off by exploring the meaning of ‘culture’, moving away from ‘back-pack’ approaches that consider culture as a set of worldviews and dispositions that are readily shed or put on, to anthropological understandings of culture as deeply held ways of meaning making that permeate all levels of one’s life and one’s relationship with others. Such complex approaches to culture challenge career guidance workers to problematise notions they hold of themselves and of others, and to face up to the challenge of alterity. In effecting this troubling reaching inwards and reaching outwards, and in striving for the epiphany of ‘knowing’, a number of pitfalls need to be acknowledged and overcome. These include our own incipient monoculturalism, the romanticisation, essentialisation and exoticisation of culture, as well as restricted notions of equality.     

Educating career guidance practitioners in the twenty-first century

ABSTRACT

Rapidly changing policy contexts in England have dramatically affected the provision of career guidance, and the training and development of its practitioners. This paper takes an autoethnographic and self-reflexive approach to exploring the experience of a Senior Lecturer in Career Guidance who manages a centre that offers the Qualification in Career Guidance (QCG), and the Level 6 Diploma in Career Guidance and Development. Key questions are considered, such as: the effects of policy context on the type of qualification and curriculum offered, and their differences; the challenges of engaging learners in theoretical concepts and reflective approaches; and the tensions between ‘training’ practitioners and ‘educating’ them to develop a strong core of professionalism. The paper also considers the extent to which the learners develop as ‘knowledgeable social actors’.