Child career development: present and future trends

Abstract

There has been an understanding for centuries that the foundations of adolescent and adult development lie in childhood. Thus, the seventeenth century poet, John Milton, stated (in the gender restricted language of those times) that ‘‘childhood shows the man, as morning shows the day’’ (Milton, 1671, lines 220–221 in Kerrigan, Rumrich, & Fallon, 2007). The discipline of career psychology has long recognised the importance of childhood in lifespan career development. Indeed, the more recent theoretical development of life design argues that ‘‘factors central to life design, such as career exploration, career awareness, occupational aspirations, and expectations, vocational interests, and career adaptability begin during the childhood years’’ (Hartung, 2015, p. 90). The theoretical recognition of career development beginning in childhood has not resulted, however, in a substantive and cohesive body of literature. True, the last decade has produced several reviews and a book, but a search of PsycINFO for the years 1995–2015 using the keywords of career development and children reveals the limited emphasis on this lifespan stage. For instance, while there have been 2662 articles on career development between 1995 and 2005, only 88 articles (representing three percent of the total) have specifically focused on children. In the following decade from 2006 to date only 124 articles (again representing three percent of the total) out of 3879 articles on career development focused on children.