مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

In adolescence, career choice and the resulting pursuit of a professional role is deeply related to the accomplishment of developmental tasks such as independence from family, the conquest of a professional role, and, eventually, the formation of one’s own family (Santos & Coimbra, 2000). According to Erickson (1968), exploration and commitment are the core components of social identity: career decisional processes become crucial in adolescent years because they make possible future professional roles (e.g. Creed, Prideaux, & Patton, 2005). However, current studies have found that the time frames for accomplishing tasks have been expanded between adolescents and young adult period (Seiffge-Krenke & Gelhaar, 2008), and there is a slight longitudinal decrease in career concern, control, and confidence in middle-to-late adolescence (Negru-Subtirica, Pop, & Crocetti, 2015).

Meanwhile, in relation to the current socioeconomic contingencies, Italian adolescents find the process of making decisions regarding their career either especially difficult, or at worst, entirely useless. For example, Carr et al. (2014) found that Italian adolescents had higher indecisiveness scores than US adolescents; Laghi (2009) evidenced that most adolescents from 17 to 18 years had yet to decide about their professional future.

In relation to this, Life Design approach suggests that the career counselors who work with adolescents should both confront these decision-making difficulties and inquire how to help adolescents to develop a decision-making process on their professional future, regardless of their bleak perspectives (Savickas et al., 2009). Specifically, while at the beginning of the 20th century vocational counselors emphasized the importance of finding a job suitable to one’s own abilities, at present they should focus on improving the adolescent adaptation to the unpredictable environment, rather than the maturation of the inner structure. These days, the more significant ability that is worthwhile to develop in young people is the ability to adapt to the unpredictability and discontinuity of the labor marker (Savickas et al., 2009), because adolescents are not as free as they once were to make self-determined choices about their career directions (Blustein, 2011).