ABSTRACT
Samuel Osipow anticipated and helped to create several trends in our field, including the convergence of vocational theories, the expanded study of women’s career development and the measurement of career decision making, occupational stress, and task-specific occupational selfefficacy. Founding the Journal of Vocational Behavior is further evidence of his penchant for establishing the cutting edge of our field. On several occasions, he has been asked to speculate and write about trends in our field, and his predictions have been quite accurate (see e.g., Osipow 1980; 1991). Osipow’s (1980) approach to forecasting the future was “to review the data and try to extrapolate” (p. 18) and to ground himself with empirical evidence. In this chapter, Bruce Walsh and I pay homage to the vision and spirit of Osipow’s work by reviewing the data and by trying to extrapolate changes and trends in career assessment. To determine our chapter focus we looked at the impact of demographic shifts, the global economy, and technological advances. Both work and the workforce are being transformed and, as a result, both the content and the delivery of career assessment services are changing and evolving.
