What Influences Your Career Choices?

A handful of things jump to mind the moment we start thinking about what work to do: the training involved, the education it demands, the day-to-day description of the job, the pay, and where the field seems headed. Plenty of other forces shape the decision too, and most of them operate quietly. Career development is still a young area of study, and it has produced a number of theories worth weighing. Each one gives us a frame for understanding how and why people land on the work they pursue.

You'll notice as you read that the same themes keep surfacing across different theories. No single theory accounts for everything, so the smarter move is to look at your situation through several of them at once rather than committing to one explanation.

Start with abilities and skills. One of the oldest approaches, Trait Factor theory, asks you to size up what you can actually do and how well those capacities fit a given occupation. The method behind it is straightforward: build profiles of what specific jobs require, note the differences between individuals, then match people to the work that suits them. It's still in use. There are formal assessments you can take online, among them the Skills Provider tool at CareerOneStop, which helps you pin down the activities you're both competent at and genuinely enjoy.

Personality and interest form another thread. Holland's Career Typology is one of the more widely applied theories here, and it works by classifying people according to their preferences and traits, then lining those up against the characteristics of different jobs. The six Holland Codes cover a broad spread of personality and career types. You can find your own Code, along with a list of occupations tied to it, by working through the questionnaire from the O*Net Interest Profiler.

Then there's the matter of life roles. A job is only one of the parts you play. You might also be a parent, a child, a student. Super's Lifespan Theory speaks directly to this, acknowledging that our various roles shift as the years pass. The way we picture ourselves inside each role, what each one asks of us, and the outside pressures acting on them can all color how we think about careers and the specific choices we make.

Past experience matters as well. Planned Happenstance and Krumboltz's Social Learning theories both deal with how our earlier encounters with others in work settings shape us. Good role models and positive experiences in a particular field tend to pull that field into the set of options you'll seriously consider. Social Cognitive Career theory adds a related point: we're inclined to keep doing tasks that went well for us before. That's useful, because it steers you toward areas where you already have a track record and some confidence.

Culture carries weight too. The ethnic, racial, and regional background a person comes from, along with their extended family and the community around them, can press on career decisions in ways that aren't always obvious. Our values and expectations often take their shape from culture, and that holds for how we think about work as much as anything else. A whole specialty, multicultural career counseling, has grown up around factoring these influences in when advising students and clients. Being aware of your culture's expectations can shed light on your own choices, though it would be a mistake to assume any one person carries the dominant traits of their culture.

Gender sits alongside culture. Men and women both run into career-related stereotypes. Social Learning theory and multicultural career counseling each take gender into account. The way you see yourself can set both the limits and the openings you think you have when choosing a field. As the roles of women and men in the workplace keep changing, researchers are still studying the connection between gender and career development.

Economic and social conditions frame all of it. Nobody chooses a career in a vacuum; the economy and the broader society are always part of the equation. Social Learning and Social Cognitive Career Theory both address this backdrop among their other factors. Events that occur across your lifetime can narrow or widen what's available, and in some cases nearly decide for you. Shifts in the job market and the wider economy feed into the process too.

Don't discount childhood fantasies either. What did you want to be when you grew up? Most people remember being asked that, and the answers may have shaped how you thought about work then and still do now. Career counseling theories keep expanding, with programs now built for people of every age, including the very young. Ginzberg proposed a model with three life stages tied to career development. The first, which he called fantasy, can begin as early as age 11, when the earliest ideas about work start to form.

The thing to hold onto is that no career decision rests on a single factor. Social, cultural, and environmental influences all feed in, and the particular mix is yours alone, specific to your circumstances. Conditions shift as you learn more and as outside forces like the economy move, so you'll keep adjusting and reconsidering your direction over time. There's a lot to take in, but you don't have to sort through it by yourself. A career services counselor can connect you with resources and assessments, and talk through how these various theories might apply to your own path. - Erin