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The Chaos Theory of Careers (CTC) was developed at the turn of the millennium to address complexity, change and chance in career development. Extant theories of careers had largely ignored these factors or merely acknowledged their presence with scant insight into their operation, organization and opportunities they present. Almost all other theories of career development start from the premise that we can in principle map out all of the systems of influence bearing upon an individual, and thus they emphasize predictability and stability. However, the CTC proceeds from the premise that stability and instability are inherent properties of the world and that emerging stable orders must be considered in relation to instability and uncertainty. The CTC employs the idea of attractors that provide a useful way for the counselor to conceptualize the career-related thoughts and behavior of their clients.
The Chaos Theory of Careers (CTC) derived initially from discontent with the types of career development theory that were extant at the end of the twentieth century (Pryor & Bright, 2004). Such theories although identifying useful aspects of career development had the deficiencies of being partial in explanation, narrow in focus as a general rule and were limited in their applicability to both research confirmation and even more importantly, counseling practice. We were seeking a new approach to theory and eventually it came to be appreciated that such an innovation could only occur with a change of paradigm about how science is undertaken, how concepts are formulated, how research is conducted and how theoretical ideas are translated into career counseling (Kellert, 1993; Laszlo, 1991).
It was obvious to many writers (e.g. Neault, 2002) that the nature, context and demands of working for the twenty-first century had changed substantively and irrevocably from older paradigms which focused predominantly on an upward trajectory single career for life. Some of the new realities for twenty-first century work are:
Speed of communication
Reshaping of organizations
Speed and extent of change
Need for lifelong learning
Globalization of both consumer markets and labor markets
Increasingly contractual nature of work
Rapidity of technological innovation and its adoption.
Such changes present new challenges to those entering the workforce, those in the workforce, and the counselors attempting to assist them. How can we understand such...