ABSTRACT
This chapter explores formative career in devotee work and serious leisure, stressing the rewards and self-fulfillment that spring from it and the person’s agency in making his or her career what it is. It discusses both formal and informal education and their relationships to adult education and to lifelong and self-directed learning. The chapter examines the role of the Internet as well as that of digital technology. It considers a second key component of personal development: achieving it through positive relationships and focuses on positive emotion and its role in the developmental process. A formative career is the individual’s sense of continuous, positive, personal development as it unfolds over the years. Formative careers rest on education, defined broadly for our purposes as developing mental or physical powers, if not both, as this process leads to formation of character or an aspect of it. Education, formal or informal, adult or self-directed, gives the background knowledge needed to pursue a formative career.
