MY SYSTEM of CAREER INFLUENCES MSCI (Adult): Facilitator’s Guide

Dr Mary McMahon is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at The University of Queensland, Australia. Her particular interests are the career development of children and adolescents, and the application of constructivist approaches to career counselling and assessment. She is especially interested in qualitative career assessment. Mary is the author of a number of books, book chapters, and refereed journal articles.

Mark Watson is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, South Africa. He specialises in career, school and adolescent psychology and researches lifespan career development, with a specific focus on assessment and cross-cultural issues. He publishes in international and national journals, is the author of book chapters and is co-editor of several books. He is currently on the editorial advisory boards of several international career development journals.

Professor Wendy Patton is Executive Dean of the Faculty of Education at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. She has published extensively in the area of career development, including articles, book chapters, conference papers, and a number of co-authored and co-edited books. She is currently on the editorial advisory boards of a number of national and international career development journals and the Series Editor of the Career Development Series with Sense Publishers.

Career development in the 21st century presents many challenges and opportunities to adults as they navigate a complex and rapidly changing world of work and make multiple decisions and transitions. Constructivist views of career development emphasise the personal and contextual nature of careers. Further, constructivism encourages narrative and storied approaches to career development that value individuals and the contextual location of their careers. In this regard, qualitative career assessment processes that foster the narration of individuals’ stories are highly relevant. The My System of Career Influences (MSCI) (Adult) is a qualitative career assessment reflection process that is responsive to the needs of clients and to recent developments in theory and practice. This book provides a theoretical background to the MSCI (Adult) as well as a step-by-step user guide to conducting the process using the  MSCI (Adult) Workbook sold separately from this guide. (Workbooks can be purchased from either the publisher or various other outlets. For further information go to www.aapbooks.com. )
Career development has long been recognised as a lifespan process (e.g., Super, 1990) with a specific focus on work in people’s lives. Super was one of the first theorists to realise that work does not happen in isolation from other life roles and responsibilities and he advanced his life span life space theory of career development, a significant milestone in the history of career development. Despite this, career development theory in general has been criticised for its lack of attention to forms of work other than paid employment, and for its noninclusive nature because of its predominant focus on western, male, middle class careers (Patton & McMahon, 2006a).
Super (1990) conceptualised career development as a series of life stages, most of which apply to adults. While Super acknowledged that individuals may recycle through stages, his stages are reflective of a stable and linear career path in which individuals worked for most of their lives in one organisation until retirement. His stages of exploration (ages 15–24), establishment (ages 25–44), maintenance (ages 45–64), and disengagement (originally termed decline; ages 65 and over) incorporate a sequence of developmental tasks undertaken by individuals in relation to choice about entering the workforce, consolidating one’s position in an organisation, contemplating and preparing for retirement, and finally retirement.
However, a feature of the 21st century world of work is rapid change, and linear career paths based on full-time employment such as that suggested by Super’s (1990) stages now represent only one of a myriad of forms of career constructions. Indeed, Super’s stages constitute what may be regarded as a ‘grand narrative’ of career development that portrays the societal expectations of life, especially male life, in the mid 20th century when it was first proposed (Savickas, 2002; Super, Savickas & Super, 1996). In the current world of work adults experience numerous new beginnings and career transitions (e.g., Riverin-Simard, 2000) including those related to employment, unemployment, and learning. Multiple, new and local narratives of career are replacing the grand narrative. Savickas suggested that such narratives are less likely to incorporate sequenced and predictable tasks, and are more likely to focus on ‘adaptability to transitions, especially coping with changes that are unexpected and traumatic’ (p. 182). Indeed, adaptability has emerged as a central career development construct in the 21st century (Leong & Walsh, 2012; Savickas, 2005). Career adaptability refers to how individuals respond to and deal with both anticipated and unanticipated events that influence their careers.
New narratives of adult career development are being constructed in a world of work that is rapidly changing in response to influences such as technology, globalisation and fluctuating economic conditions. It is timely, as Blustein (2006) suggested, that vocational psychology move towards more inclusive, socially just and multidisciplinary conceptualisations of work and career development. Niles, Herr and Hartung (2002) contended that career development interventions must evolve in order to respond effectively to the needs of adults. Thus, constructivist approaches such as those of Peavy (1997), Cochran (1997) and Amundson (2009), and more recently the life design paradigm (Savickas, 2012, 2013; Savickas, et al., 2011) that enable individuals’ narrative life stories to feature in the construction of contextually embedded career plans offer a way forward. In this regard, the Systems Theory Framework of career development (McMahon & Patton, 1995, Patton & McMahon, 1999, 2006a) and its qualitative career assessment tool, the My System of Career Influences (MSCI; McMahon, Patton, & Watson, 2005a, 2005b), with their emphasis on holistic and storied approaches to career intervention present as a viable, appropriate and useful approach to working with adults in the 21st century.