Careers choices in conversations: beyond development and career maturity

Theories of career choice development portray the process as one of increasing maturity involving the ability to make a realistic and rational decision. Several theories have been proposed over the years in terms of a normative psychological process involving a self-reflexive process that can be aided through career counselling support. While arriving at a career choice can at first sight appear the outcome of individuals’ increasing career awareness and maturity it is also possible to take an alternative view of how people talk about career decisions based on looking at how they discursively construct those choices within conversational exchanges in response to the demands of specific questions and actions being performed as a result. Nursing students and engineering students on vocational degree programmes were interviewed about their career choice as part of a larger study examining career decision-making discourse amongst vocational students. The analysis of the resulting transcript material reveals how their decisions are embedded within conversational sequences that co-construct accounts involving justifying courses of action as well as displaying vocational commitment. It is argued that rather than treating such answers as representing vocational maturity, they can be viewed as the justification and clarification of career-related courses of action in the course of talking these through as intelligible answers to questions that seek normatively credible responses.