and Vocational Education Career Exploration by Adults

Dressing up for Halloween is increasingly popular among adults. Bergamo (2000) sees this as a sign of the continuing need to explore work and personal identity. Make-believe is just a gentler word for career exploration. At some point we decide what were going to be when we grow up and stop pretendingor exploringotherwise (online, n.p.). Career exploration is a process undertaken by chil-dren and adolescents to test ideas about what I want to be when I grow up. In the contemporary environment, career exploration is also an essential part of a lifelong process of adaptation, growth, and change. The capacity to explore the environment and ones inter-nal psychological resources is an important adaptive response to an era of rapid social and economic changes (Blustein 1997). Thus, the demand for adult career exploration services is growing in ca-reer-tech and one-stop centers and community college and univer-sity reentry programs (Husain 1999). This Brief examines why an