Quest for Occupational Identity: Examining Career Resilience, Career-Related Adversity, and Career Decision Difficulty during Emerging Adulthood

2017Emerging adults often encounter obstacles and adversity in pursuit of occupational identity. College counselors are responsible for delivering mental health, wellness, and career services to distressed students facing unprecedented challenges to enter the workplace. The purpose of this study was to investigate how counselors can promote career resilience in emerging adults struggling to overcome career-related adversity. The first manuscript explored the aspects and impact of career-related adversity and how protective buffers already identified in psychosocial resilience relate to the construct of career resilience. A line of inquiry is proposed to promote career resilience in emerging adults facing career-related adversity. An argument is made to ground career resilience as a subdomain under the larger framework of psychosocial resilience. The second manuscript investigated the impact of a conflict resolution skills training intervention on the career decision self-efficacy of college students experiencing career decision difficulties due to conflict with parents. A non-concurrent multiple baseline across subjects single subject research design examined the impact of a conflict resolution skills intervention on college student career decision self-efficacy. The A-B design enabled the investigators to measure student career decision self-efficacy during and after a conflict resolution skills training evaluated against a baseline. The data collected showed steady increase in the career decision self-efficacy of three college students who engaged in five sessions of conflict resolution skills training. The career decision self-efficacy of two participants increased from moderate confidence with positive trends during intervention and both reached high confidence levels post-intervention. The third participant reported low confidence during baseline that increased to moderate confidence during intervention and continued to improve during follow-up