CAREER MATURITY AND CAREER DECISION-MAKING - A REVIEW

The construct of career maturity or vocational maturity as he called it, was introduced by Super (1957). He claimed that career maturity represented “the place reached on the continuum of vocational development from exploration to decline “Super, 1957, p.186). He also gave birth to the “vocational maturity quotient” which was defined as the ration of vocational to chronological age. His operationalization of career maturity was implemented and made commercially available in the Career Development Inventory (CDI) (Super, Thompson, Lindeman, Jordaan & Myers, 1981). The inventory was designed to tap the first four dimensions in his model, and is divided into two parts: Part one includes four scales which measure Career Planning, Career Exploration, Career Decision Making, and World-of- Work Information. Part two is comprised of a scale measuring Knowledge of Preferred Occupational Group. Crites (1965) theorized that career maturity consists of two major dimensions: carer choice content and career choice process. In 1978 he published his Career Maturity Inventory (CMI) (Crites, 1978). The CMI consists of two parts, a set of competence tests and a set attitudinal scales. The competency tests assess a person's knowledge of his or her resources, occupational knowledge, the person's ability to match personal resources to attributes of the job, and planning ability. The attitudinal scales measure decisiveness in career decision making, involvement in career decision making, independence in career decision making, orientation to career decision making, and compromise in career decision making.