SOCIAL COGNITIVE CAREER THEORY
SCCT

Strengths

• Domain-specific measures of self-efficacy are predictive of career-related interests, choice, achievement, persistence, indecision, and career exploratory behavior
• Intervention, experimental, and path-analytic studies have supported certain hypothesized casual relations between measures of self-efficacy, performance, and interests
• Gender differences in academic and career self-efficacy frequently help explain male-female differences in occupational consideration

Strengths cont...

• Addresses both intra-individual and contextual variables in career development.
• Translating theory into practice.

wEAKNESSES (BUT NOT NECESSARY RE: THEORY)

• When individuals prematurely foreclose on occupational options due to inaccurate self-efficacy beliefs, outcome expectations, or both.
• When individuals forego further consideration of occupational options due to barriers they perceive as insurmountable.

SCCT:

• Closely linked to Krumboltz’s learning theory of career counseling (LTCC)
• The first part of LTCC is to explain career choice and the second part is career counseling.
• SCCT provides framework for understanding how people develop career related interest, make or remake occupational choices and achieve career success and stability.
• SCCT is concerned with the cognitive factors and the role it plays in career development and career decision making.
• SCCT draws from Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory.
• It incorporates Bandura’s triadic reciprocal model of causality. (Personal attributes, the environment and how overt behaviors affect one another.
• SCCT highlights self-efficacy beliefs, outcome expectations and personal goals.
• SCCT incorporates research, applying self-efficacy theory to the career domain.
• Self-efficacy provides answers to questions pertaining to whether we can perform specific tasks.
• Our beliefs about our abilities play a central role in career decision making.
• ?’s Can I pass this exam? Can I decide my career path?
• We move toward occupations requiring capabilities we think we have and move away from occupations requiring capabilities we think we do not have.

HOw it can be applied

In SCCT, career interests are regulated by self-efficacy and an outcome expectation, which means people, will form lasting interests in activities when they experience personal competency and positive outcomes. On the contrary, a belief of low personal competency will lead people to avoid activities. Perceived barriers such as those related to gender, ethnicity, age, socioeconomic status, or family constraints may create negative outcome expectations, even when people have had previous success in the given area. School counselors can help students who will be first-generation college students to reconsider some of their perceptions of college and of career, by providing activities and interventions to increase these students’ options and their success upon entry into college.

Key Components of Social Cognitive Theory

Self-Efficacy Expectations: Beliefs in one’s capability to organize and execute the courses of action required to manage prospective situations (Bandura, 1986)

Cognitive appraisals of one’s capacity to perform specific behaviors (future directed)

Can you do this? How confident are you that you can do this?

Efficacy beliefs influence initiation/choice of activities, effort expended, persistence in the face of obstacles, and ultimately success

NOT self-esteem or other trait construct

SUMMARY

SCCT's model of career choice holds that interests are typically related to the choices that people make and to the actions they take to implement their choices. In other words, all else people will choose occupations in which they are interested. The model also states, however, that choices are affected as well by contextual influences and by other person variables. For example, people will be more likely to have to compromise their interests in making career choices if they perceive that their environment is not supportive of their choice or if they perceive significant barriers to entering and prospering in careers that most interest them.

CONT...
When people perceive a need to compromise their interest because of limited opportunities , insurmountable barriers, or non-supportive environment, their choices will be made primarily on the basis of job availability, self-efficacy beliefs, and outcome expectations. In other words, when people cannot implement their interests, they will choose less interesting occupational paths that are available to them, that provide adequate outcomes, and in which they feel they can perform adequately.

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