Issues and Direction of Career Development on Human Resource Development

Abstract

This study concerned recent changes in career development, and had an aim to indicate some future issues about it. Reviewing many previous studies and author's researches, we showed a new wave in it. Until recently, a focus of career development was to make definitely one's own career anchor and to chose an appropriate occupation. But the career did not develop fully if only identifying one's own career anchor. Because there were various constrains and obstacles in reality on social and organizations. In order to describe one's realistic career anchor and put it into practice, it was needed to negotiate with situation. Vocational identity means a status as some results of negotiations between the career anchor and situation. I argued using the metaphor of Social Learning theory by Bandura that a career anchor was compared to "outcome expectancy" and vocational identity was done to "efficacy expectation". And vocational identity was useful to achieve a high performance demanded from an organization and to advance toward the career anchor surely. I suggested that developing one's career in Japan was especially needed following; 1) Creating self-concept or one' s own career anchor, 2) Positively acceptance constrains, obstacles and changes, 3) Selection and finding out better ways to develop vocational identity between the ideal and reality, 4) Repeat continuously to consider these steps. Therefore developing careers should be examined as continuous interaction process rather than the Determinism such as a selection of occupational categories.