A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts in fulfilment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy in Community Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Zululand, 2019. / The study is a career assessment and counselling programme for disadvantaged high schools in the Eastern Cape Province, in South Africa. The specific aim was to guide learners through a process of career exploration in order to make appropriate career choices and plans. The sample consisted of 90 blacks, 1 coloured and 2 Indians from selected schools in the Eastern Cape Province. The main objectives were to formulate a career assessment and counselling programme, as an ongoing process of change, and not as an event, to empower disadvantaged students through their participation in the process; to nurture learning through engendering a tolerance of mistakes and differences in ideas, and to provide opportunities for the development of all. Using a qualitative research design, self-administered questionnaires were distributed to respondents. A convenient/purposive, non-probability sampling procedure was utilised. Descriptive statistics were used to to analyse demographic data, including frequencies and percentages. Qualitative data, obtained from open-ended questions of the survey questionnaire, were content analysed to identify the main themes. Nine themes were identified. The results showed that many disadvantaged high schools did not have educators who were qualified in career guidance issues. Furthermore, there was a lack of governmental support in career guidance in disadvantaged schools. Additionally, there was a lack of equipment and funding required in career guidance. It has been indicated that the use of psychologists and x psychometric assessment in career assessment will improve the quality of career guidance. It can be concluded that many disadvantaged and poor schools do not have educators who are qualified in career guidance issues. Disadvantaged schools do not have adequate resources such as money to pay qualified professionals to help learners in making optimised and better career decisions. The South African government is not supportive of these disadvantaged schools. Learners continue to be ignorant as far as career guidance issues are concerned. Many students are not aware of the benefits of counselling.

D. Litt et Phil.

In understanding the importance of career adaptability in an individual‟s career development, career counsellors require a valid assessment technique for measuring career adaptability. The Career Adapt-Abilities Inventory (CAI) was originally developed by Mark Savickas (2008) as a measure of career adapt-abilities. The present study forms part of an international collaboration investigating the psychometric properties and construct validity of the CAI. The aims of the present study involved the following: conducting exploratory factor analysis in order to determine whether interrelationships within the items of the CAI can be explained by the presence of unobserved variables; conducting confirmatory factor analysis in an attempt to confirm the hypothesised factor structures of the CAI; and to explore and describe South African university students‟ perceptions of the underlying constructs of the CAI in terms of the language usage and comprehension of the inventory‟s item content. A sample of South African first-year university students were employed in this current study. In an exploratory factor analysis of the CAI, preference was given to the a priori criterion forcing the extraction of five factors. The oblique rotation method was employed using the OBLIMIN method provided by the statistical package in order to derive the simplest and most interpretable factor structure. Exploratory factor analysis supported a five factor solution after the fourth iteration, reflecting the underlying dimensions of Curiosity, Concern, Confidence, Cooperation and Control. These factors support the five scales presented by Savickas (2008). Confirmatory factor analyses were subsequently performed in order to test both the original CAI factor model as well as the factor model that emerged through exploratory factor analysis. After using several goodness-of-fit indices, it can be concluded that the inventory items adequately represent the five CAI scales based on the value obtained using the Root Mean Square Error of Approximation index. The factor model derived through EFA demonstrated a slightly better fit when compared to the original CAI factor model using other fit indices. In terms of the qualitative findings of this current study, participants indicated that the meaning of several items were unclear to them causing comprehension difficulty. Items 8 and 50 were marked by participants several times and can be viewed as the items causing most difficulty with regard to comprehension, with participants pointing out the words „keeping upbeat‟ (item 8) and „conscientious‟ (item 50). Participants were also asked to provide additional comments with regard to the readability, comprehension and applicability of the CAI. On investigation of these comments, three main themes were generated relating to: the comprehension and clarity of the CAI; the CAI enhancing participants‟ understanding of themselves; and the structure, length and general layout of the CAI. In essence, the current study provided useful information regarding the psychometric properties of the CAI using a sample of South African first-year university students. Factor analyses provided some support for the validity of the CAI while the qualitative results provided aspects for consideration in making the CAI more applicable for South African usage. Moreover, a foundation has been laid for further research to be conducted in South Africa regarding the validity and applicability of the CAI for South African populations.

Interests are often considered a key element in vocational choices and are often used in both structured and free forms of career assessment. This master level thesis seeks to view the interest inventory Self-Directed Search as a process of learning and competence development. Four psychologists at the Swedish Public Employment Service were interviewed in an open fashion about how they integrate interest inventories in the career counselling and assessment process. The collected data were then analysed according to thematic analysis in relation tocompetence. Systems theory was used to understand relations between parts and whole in aprocess of mutual meaning and sense-making between psychologist and client. Interest inventories can in this way show characteristics of competence development when conducted ina process over time and being facilitated by a psychologist. Some elements of competence were represented to a greater extent than others. The study raises questions about how interest inventories can be developed and used in career intervention in order to manifest different aspects of competence and facilitate competence development.

<p>Although ABET has outlined educational outcomes to help prepare students with the necessary competencies to succeed in professional engineering practice, it is unclear how confident students are in their professional engineering skills. <i>Competency</i> refers to the<i>“generic, integrated and internalized capability to deliver sustainable effective performance in a certain professional domain, job, role, organizational context, and task situation.” </i>Understanding their competency provides students with a bridge to connect their academic experiences with their ability to perform their workplace duties. To help students assess their competency, I developed the Self-efficacy Inventory for Professional Engineering Competency (SEIPEC), an inventory that aims to measure engineering students’ self-efficacy for professional engineering competencies. Unlike other inventories in engineering that measure the academic experience or other self-efficacy inventories that do not focus on the engineering population, this career assessment is designed for college-level engineering students to evaluate their subjective readiness for successful performance in the workplace. </p> <p>SEIPEC is a tool for students to self-assess their professional competencies, aiming to empower students to become reflective about their learning and increase awareness of workplace competencies. SEIPEC was developed based on the American Association of Engineering Societies’ Engineering Competency Model (ECM). The ECM identifies factors that contribute to self-efficacy for professional engineering competency. ECM was developed using the Delphi method and encompasses a comprehensive list of competency statements that were approved by industry leaders and engineering educators to encapsulate the competencies needed for a professional engineer.</p> <p>The data include 434 complete responses from bachelor’s and master’s students at a Midwest research-intensive university. The sample represents 13 engineering disciplines, such as electrical and computer engineering and mechanical engineering, and includes 282 male and 146 female students, 48 first-generation students, and 63 international students. After the exploratory factor analysis and the confirmatory factor analysis, a four-factor model with 20 competency statements was validated as the measurement for self-efficacy for professional engineering competency. The four factors that contribute to the self-efficacy of professional engineering competency include (a) sustainability and societal impact, (b) health and safety, (c) application of tools and technologies, and (d) engineering economics. </p> <p>The SEIPEC tool has the potential to empower engineering students to reflect upon and connect their academic experience with professional competencies. SEIPEC would provide students with a method to self-evaluate their skills in addition to other assessment methods such as course grades and traditional engineering exams. <a>The results of self-assessment for professional engineering competencies could increase students’ awareness of professional competencies, thus helping students to become more intentional in connecting learning with their professional preparation. </a>Career advisors and counselors can also use this tool to guide career advising conversations revolving around students’ choice to pursue and prepare for engineering as a career path. </p>

This dissertation is a report on research into the development and evaluation of a career assessment and counselling procedure that falls under the aegis of the constructivist, narrative approach: My Career Chapter: A Dialogical Autobiography. My Career Chapter enables an individual to construct a holistic understanding of his or her career. The procedure facilitates an individual writing and reflecting on an autobiographical account of his or her career that is contextualised amidst systems of career influences. The resulting autobiographical text can be used in career counselling, including co-constructive dialogue between client and counsellor. The literature underpinning the research project is described with a wide-ranging discussion of issues that critically pertain to the research endeavour and essentially provide a primary base for the work. Two theoretical frameworks that exemplify constructivism in vocational psychology underpin the research: the Systems Theory Framework and the Theory of Career Construction. From the base of those two theoretical frameworks, narrative career counselling is explicated and exemplars are described. The Theory of Dialogical Self is introduced to inform the design of My Career Chapter and, ultimately, the theory and practice of narrative career counselling. The research is predominantly positioned within a paradigm of constructivism/interpretivism and the results of the studies are collectively interpreted accordingly; but postpositivism and critical ideological paradigms are present in a secondary form due to the mixture of research methods used in the project as a whole. Six empirical studies investigate the experience of My Career Chapter from the perspective of the developer, the counsellor-user, and the client-user; each explicated with two studies respectively. Research methods include autoethnography for the developer's experience, interpretative phenomenological analysis and focus group for the counsellor-users' experience, and quasi-experiment and interpretative phenomenological analysis for the client-users' experience. The studies of the developer's experience of My Career Chapter comprehensively explicate how and why the procedure was developed and emphasise the importance of reflexive science and practice. Crucially, the autoethnographies revealed a nexus of theory-practice-person which underpins the production of My Career Chapter, and critically influences the entire research project. The studies involving counsellor-users affirmed My Career Chapter's alignment with recommendations for the development and application of qualitative career assessment and counselling procedures. These studies also raised questions pertaining to the characteristics of client-users that may mediate the efficacy of the procedure (e.g., age, language ability). Studies of client-users firstly support the conclusion that My Career Chapter is a safe career assessment and counselling procedure, with minimal attendant risk of inducing psychological harm or distress. The procedure was experienced as being helpful as a tool for personal reflection, through its theoretically-derived processes of facilitating clients writing, reading, and hearing and talking their autobiographical manuscripts through in the interpretation phase. There are four dimensions of significance associated with this research project. Firstly, the divide between theory and practice has indeed been much lamented in vocational psychology and counselling psychology. Thus, the overall significance of the research reported upon in this dissertation is significant because it attempts to bring theory and practice together through a reflexive and theoretically informed research process into a career assessment and counselling procedure. Secondly, the research and development process produced a new career assessment and counselling product which will add to the limited range of techniques that fall under the aegis of constructivist career assessment and counselling broadly, and the narrative approach specifically. My Career Chapter complements other procedures. Thirdly, two of the research methods used in the project (viz., autoethnography and interpretative phenomenological analysis) demonstrated their potential as additional qualitative methods for research within vocational psychology. Finally, the research process has enabled the articulation of the Theory of Dialogical Self—from another branch of psychology—into the extant corpus of literature on career development theory and practice.