ABSTRACT
Summary. As a young adult, choice of an appropriate career can be one of life’s most stressful decisions. Changing careers as an older adult may also be a very difficult transition. As previous chapters have articulated, much career choice difficulty stems from many complex and rapidly changing factors of the world of work, including the development of artificial intelligence and robotic technology (Hirschhorn, 1984; Hunt & Hunt, 1983; Majchrzak, 1988), globally driven markets (Halberstam, 1986; Hoerr, 1988; Scheuerman, 1986) where oil production decisions in Saudia Arabia quickly affect job markets in Texas, paperless information and communication systems where office employees can be separated by an office partition or by 3000 miles, and mergers, acquisitions, and other corporate restructuring (Blueston & Harrison, 1982; DeLuca, 1988; London, 1988; McCann & Gilkey, 1988; Woodard & Buchholz, 1987) that have stimulated the development of free agent and disposable managers (Hirsch, 1987).
This chapter describes how this stress and difficulty may be minimized through career planning. Accordingly, the sections that follow (1) contain definitions of career planning and career management, (2) offer an integrated, career-focused model providing multiple linkages for the individual to job, occupation, organization, and industry, (3) describe a career planning course that addresses many features of the integrative model, and (4) review the individual-organizational relationship in the context of career planning for job, occupation, and industry.
