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Importance of Assessment in Career Development
Career development professionals work with clients to manage a variety of factors so they might successfully navigate their career journeys. In addition to successfully obtaining a job, other common measures of career development interventions include a client's level of certainty in their choice, ability to generate new options, satisfaction with career outcomes, and level of satisfaction with the counseling process itself (Lamp, Telander, & Brown 2008). Counselors should be discerning when selecting appropriate interventions for each client and situation, and should be just as careful when selecting career assessments.
In the higher education setting, stakeholders are most often interested in the post-graduation "placement" numbers as a marker of career success. However, the emphasis on whether or not students are employed by the time they receive their diploma may overshadow other types of progress made towards their career goals. If college and university career centers choose assessments in both counseling and program evaluation that capture the various ways our services impact students, it may be easier to articulate the value of our services and garner buy-in from stakeholders.
This article will discuss the use of the Career Decision Self-Efficacy Scale (CDSE) to measure the impact of a career development course for a small sample of university students. It will provide a brief background of the tool, results and conclusions from the course, and implications of using the CDSE with various career development interventions.
Background on the Career Development Self-Efficacy Scale
Karen Taylor and Nancy Betz (1983) developed the Career Decision Self-Efficacy Scale to measure an individual's confidence about successfully managing the tasks of career decisionmaking. The following section provides a summary of the theoretical foundations of the scale, its structure, reliability and validity. The assessment manual (Betz & Taylor, 2012) provides a more in-depth review of these topics.
Theoretical Foundation
The CDSE is grounded in Albert Bandura's theory of self-efficacy expectations (1977) and John Crites' Career Maturity Inventory (1978). Taylor and Betz integrated these two theories to con struct a tool that measures self-efficacy as it relates to specific career choice tasks. According to Bandura (1977) self-efficacy may be understood as a person's psychological belief about their ability to master a task, and impacts both the initiation and persistence of...